"The Last of the Gunfighters" Topic
3 Posts
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Tango01 | 23 Jul 2015 10:44 p.m. PST |
"I read MP Dennis Jensen's article ‘Time to remember the Vietnam air war lesson' in yesterday'sWest Australian with interest. In essence, Dr Jensen paraphrases the US Air Force experience in Vietnam as placing too high an emphasis on the technological promise of air-to-air missiles in the early stages, only to be brutally dragged back to the ‘fundamentals' of close-in air combat in the form of manoeuvrability and bringing a gun to the fight. Taken at face value, that narrative seems to suggest that the design of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is badly conceived, and that it ignores a vital lesson from history. If that analysis were true, it would indeed be a damning indictment on an aircraft Australia is about to spend well over $10 USD billion on. But there are two reasons to doubt Dr Jensen's conclusion. The first is that it's not at all clear why a technological lesson from over 40 years ago tells us what to expect today. A look at pretty much any other modern electronics-based system compared to its ancestor from that time shows why. It's a bit like studying copper wire telephony and drawing conclusions about the capabilities of smart phones. The early air-to-air missiles were crude forerunners of today's, were much more limited in their ability to lock onto a target anywhere but straight ahead, and were more prone to losing contact after launch. That might seem to suggest that a gun might be just as good, since you had to manoeuvre around to get a lock on in any case. But even so the missiles did pretty well, and they were progressively improved as the war went on. When they were introduced in 1972, later G-model Sidewinder heat seeking missiles substantially improved the ability to target off-axis and increased the hit rate compared to the ones first deployed into theatre in the 1960s…" Full article here link Amicalement Armand |
Outlaw Tor | 24 Jul 2015 9:23 a.m. PST |
More sources and further reading here in the original article: link |
John Treadaway | 06 Aug 2015 1:42 p.m. PST |
Yes – a very interesting article. John T |
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