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Oversimplified for sure, but I think "extremely wrong" is unfair. I think the jury is still out on whether or not a stealth-on-stealth fight (or a more conventional fight in an ECM-heavy environment) inevitably devolves into a WVR knife fight. There are a number of reasons why this doesn't have to be the case. You're absolutely correct that ROE can force a VID, but it'd be pretty dumb to box yourself into a corner that would force you into a neutral-ish WVR fight, yeah? I agree that supermaneuverability has the potential to be useful, but I think it's fair to say that it's very much an edge case, and even then more of an augment to missiles that already have HOBS capability than a replacement for them. It certainly isn't a game-changing capability the way HOBS was. Also, TWR only goes so far to help recover from an energy deficit, especially if you have to go into reheat to make it happen. Gas kills are a thing... Yes and no. Against a well-coordinated, larger force it's really difficult to win, and I very much wouldn't recommend adopting it as a primary tactic. If you had a fight that magically began at the furball phase (admittedly, this is one potential outcome of stealth-on-stealth engagements, although I imagine we'd need to develop better and different technology to make it a reality), that would be more likely to favor the individual, at least until they run out of missiles (it's difficult to over-emphasize how difficult guns kills are against maneuvering targets, even for a hypothetical magic robot with near-perfect aim). Old-school fights like Korea were much closer to the "immediate, chaotic furball" side of the spectrum than current fights, and there was a much less well-developed set of intra-and inter-flight tactics. A modern 2v1 (even heaters-only) is far more lopsided against the 1 than it was during Korea. With good coordination, this scales. (Aside: a really good book about the air war in Korea is The Hunters by James Salter. Highly recommended--it's fiction, but based on the author's own experiences as a pilot there.) For what it's worth, technology and tactics have improved in the last half decade (perhaps more than we can say about our judgement?)... The proliferation of certain technologies will force continual re-evaluation of tactics, but I think it's safe to say that BVR is reasonably mature and not going anywhere in the foreseeable future. (That said, reports of the death of the air-to-air gun will always be greatly exaggerated.) |