Hacker News Reader

Comment by slavboj | Hacker News Reader

The entire point of the airplane is to never get into close combat. It's like asking which navy has better bayonets.

F-4 Phantom was a great fighter serving US Navy, Marine and Air Force. It equipped with missiles to kill enemies in the beyond visual range, didn't equip internal guns in the first generation because "it shouldn't get into close combat" .....

And the F-15's design slogan was "Not a pound for air to ground". Guess what it's being used for now?

Quite amusingly, Su-27 was an air superiority fighter at it's infancy.

Same with the F-16, which started life as a skunkworks project that prioritized dogfighting but is today heavily used for close air support and bombing.

While the skunkworks project and even the initial government Lightweight Fighter project had an air-to-air dogfighting focus, the program under which the F-16 development was conpleted and it was eventually purchased was for a multirole fighter, that wasn't a post-purchase usage evolution.

The F-15E Strike Eagle is a different, significantly heavier and higher payload was produced by a separate, later project abd competition from the original air-to-air F-15 (its competitor was thr F-16XL, which would have been the F-16E/F if selected.)

And the F-15EX Eagle II is an even newer aircraft.

The F-15C/D are still air-to-air fighters.

The issue with the F4 wasn't the lack of a gun alone, and focusing on that aspect 50 years after the Vietnam war clouds the current state of things. The issue was that missile technology was in it's infancy and unreliable, coupled with US fighter pilot training focusing on interception of long-range Soviet nuclear bombers. The US never really envisioned a conventional war being possible in a post-nuclear world. Note that despite this, what the US deemed "inadequate" air dominance was still a roughly 4-1 air-to-air kill-ratio in their favour during the beginning-middle of the Vietnam War.

Once pilot training changed to focus on fighters, the kill-ratio shot up to 15-1 for the last half-year or so of the war. The number of these kills made by F4s with guns was small compared to F4s with missiles (even given the unreliable state of the technology at the time), as you can see for yourself: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_aerial...

(Note that this is the case even in the later years of the war, when F4 mounted gun-pods were more common)

The narrative of the Vietnam War that gun > long-range missile wasn't even true then. And certainly isn't so now that missile technology has matured. A quick glance over to modern air campaigns is proof. Beyond visual range missiles and long-range radar systems are king. There's nothing wrong with having a back-up close-range weapon (same reason why soldiers carry knives), but the use-case is niche, and we shouldn't be designing our fighters around this combat situation. The equivalent would be arguing that soldiers should carry broadswords, and using the handful of knife engagements as evidence to why edge-weapons are superior to guns.

An additional problem F4 pilots had early in the war was the horrible Rules of Engagement they had to follow in hostile airspace. They were forced to get close to migs for ID and observe hostile behavior.

Naturally, by the time they accomplished that, they had thrown away all their advantages and handed the migs their disadvantages on a silver platter.

A theory pushed constantly by the F-35 program, but quickly dismissed by the Ukrainian War.

"Dogfight Over Ukraine Shows The Air War Is Still Very Much Being Fought" - https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/dogfight-over-ukraine-...

This is a video of a fighter plane launching 2 missiles. It doesn't dismiss anything.

Just because the F-35 was designed to be a strike aircraft more than a dogfighter doesn't mean that it won't be put in those situations. We've been using butter knives as screwdrivers for as long as we've had a butter knife but no screwdriver.

That dogfight is newsworthy because it's exceptional, and even still it's not a turning duel by any stretch of the imagination. The real takeaway from the Ukrainian war is that stealth and engagement range are paramount.

…plus SEAD/DEAD are incredibly important and (AFAIK) there is only one air force on the planet that systematically develops and deploys tech and trains for it.

> theory pushed constantly by the F-35 program

Because F-35 operation manual, chapter 1, "Combat prerequisites":

Lob anti-SAM missiles till the enemy wouldn't have any operational SAM, then you can fly in on your fancy F-35.

/s but only slightly

Reply on news.ycombinator.com