Which is precisely why they're not worth buying. It's a dinosaur.

The basis for modern air combat up to about 15 years ago has been pretty much the same as it was in the 1920s. The first thing you have to do is gain and then maintain air superiority. After that, you turn your aircraft loose on anything that moves on the ground.

The canonical example is WWII over Germany. As long as the Luftwaffe managed to maintain air superiority over some patch of land, the effectiveness of the allied air campaign was very close to nil. The RAF pushed them out of much of western France and Belgium, but this had no real effect. It was not until the Mosquito Serrate flights started at night, and the Mustang arrived during the day, that the Luftwaffe strength was able to be challenged at any point on the map. The Luftwaffe collapsed in a matter of months, and from then on Germany became a shooting gallery. Trains, trucks, even men walking became targets and there was absolutely nothing they could do about it.

The lesson taken away from this was that you needed three types of aircraft; fighters to take on their own aircraft, tactical fighters (fighter-bombers, attack aircraft, what have you) to attack whatever you found of value, and finally large bombers to make strategic attacks. But technology blurred the lines. At the start of WWII you had light bombers (~4,000 lbs), medium bombers (~6-8,000 lbs) and heavy bombers (~12,000 lbs) but by the end of the war engine power increased so much (over doubling) that even fighters could carry light bomber loads. And that aircraft could ditch its bombs and turn back into a fighter at a moment's notice.

This process continued, and inevitably every super-specialized aircraft became more generalist. Size limitations were reduced from many shades of grey to "big and small", the difference being due to range requirements, not ordinance. Strategic bombers have been of little use for the last 40 years, there's nothing (really useful) they can do that the same amount of money invested in tactical fighters can't do better. The last dedicated AA fighter died in the 1980s when the Strike Eagle came out, and since then every new aircraft goes out of it's way to boast it's multi-mission capabilities.

Except for the F-22. This was a Pentagon beast at its worse. A Death Star superweapon that would wipe the Soviet Union's fighters from the sky and then... what exactly? Critics have been saying it should have been cancelled since the project started.

And then came the drones. For the same money as a single F-22, I can buy dozens of armed drones. They can loiter for hours at long distances, and are increasingly autonomous. They're moderately stealthy, enough to make them survivable from older AA anyway, and if they do get hit, who cares, the next ones nails the launcher with a Mav. Better yet, since you only need a man in the loop for limited periods of time, crew requirements are dramatically reduced, and now they're being devolved down to the Army level.

While this is happening, any reasonable threat to the USAF's dominance is rapidly disappearing. The Soviets would have been problematic, but that's all. They're out of the loop, and there's absolutely nothing to replace them. That era is over.

 Reply

Prosecutor: Over Macho Grande?

Witness: No. I don't think I'll ever get over Macho Grande.

 Reply

@portugue: @Ho0ber: Domo danko.

 Reply