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Originally Posted by SUBMAN1
I hear ya to some degree. F-22 and F-35 I do not agree with you on. We need both of those for survival. The reason is not necessarily to take on China right now, but for survivability. The reason is not other aircraft per say, but new near impossible to evade Russian sams that are being sold the world over to anyone with money. SO you need a platform that can take on something akin to an SU-30 with thrust vectoring and forward canards (or possibly EF2000 since Europe wants to sell it to everybody lately) at the same time of being able to go into a hostile territory and come out again...Basically, we need both aircraft badly. Look at Bosnia - that didn't go over so well either, but for some reason, the press didn't pick up on that much. Today, the threat is much much much worse.
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Sorry I might have pasted the above together incorrectly. Had to do actual work and forgot where I was going to put the ... . But...see below regarding losses during Allied Force.
As for Su-30...today's 4-4.5 gen fighters are perfectly capable of dealing with these threats. Because thrust vectoring doesn't mean diddly in modern BVR. The F/A-18E/F, F-16, and F-15 all have a reach out and touch capability with AIM-120D (IOC by the end of the decade, IIRC) nearly equal to that of the Tomcat, except the AMRAAM was designed from get go to take on fighters. This is all assuming that Yemen, Syria or whoever the hell's 1-2 dozen Su-30s even manage to get into the air. Because any real war is going to start with a huge volley of cruise weapons that will SERIOUSLY degrade the enemy's anti air capability before an American fighter even enters their godforsaken airspace.
As for S-300/400 type systems, I agree. The future of SEAD will be interesting, even with F-35. Because with a VLO'd F-35 you are limited to two GPS guided PGMs on glide kits until JDRADM comes online. More with SDB I suppose. Which S-300/400 are certainly capable of shooting down. But again...this is all supposing the air defenses survive the initital volley of cruise weapons. Then our $70+ MILLION bomb trucks can carry external stores and fly airliner profiles to their targets
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PS. I read the article with a grain of salt too, but he does have valid points. Milnet however is not focused on this type of article for the most part, so its always a good read when its owners have an opinion or two. Most of milnet is based on equipment capabilities.
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He does. I agree there are people out there who don't understand just because we're only fighting trash wars today, things might change tomorrow.
It's also completely fake. Written by Russians who can't accept that their equipment is absolutely worthless for the most part. The guy who wrote this (Venik) is an absolute fraud. We lost all of two aircraft during Allied Force. An F-16 and F-117, IIRC.
PD