[strictnein]

Interesting how you heard about that one dogfight, but not its record since then. Again, places like The Drive have been pushing bad F-35 news because it draws lots of clicks.

The F-35's k/d ratio since that dogfight in 2015, when pilots were just figuring the plane out:

15-1

https://www.businessinsider.com/f-35-once-beaten-by-f-16s-sh...

> Since then, the F-35 has mopped up in simulated dogfights with a 15-1 kill ratio. According to retired Lt. Col. David Berke, who commanded a squadron of F-35s and flew an F-22 — the US's most agile, best dogfighter — the jet has undergone somewhat of a revolution.

[ultrasaurus]

I can't speak to what we should expect from a competition between planes with 30+ years of technology that cost 5x as much, but this sounds a lot like a demo for foreign buyers.

It could easily be something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002#Exer... where the contest was tweaked until the correct outcome happened.

[chipsa]

If you just read the wiki article, you get a distorted view of the exercise. Gen Van Riper was more interested in "winning" than he was in following the requirements to actually have the exercise result in usable data.

Examples: the wiki article mentions small boats. As in about the size of your average fishing boat. No, not your commercial fishing boat, your weekend fisherman fishing boat (Boston Whaler). And it would be carrying a conventional Soviet era anti-ship missile, weighing some 3 tons. This is not only enough to swamp the boat, but launching the missile would result in the boat turning into shrapnel. Or it mentions motorcycle couriers. But the sim wasn't setup to include the latency they involved, so he got effectively instant, unjammable comms.

There were simulation issues, like the Blue Force navy showed up teleported into being next to the coast, due to model limitations. Due to the fact that the real life location of this was in fact a very busy set of air and sea lanes, Blue Force navy also started with no defensive capabilities.

And of course, the whole point isn't for the red team to sink the blue force, but to see how the blue force can adapt to the red team during an amphibious/airborne invasion. It doesn't do much good to have tens of thousands of guys sitting around doing nothing because their ship got "blown up" or their landing zone got covered in "chemical weapons". MC2002 wasn't just a couple guys in a room doing a war game. It involved real ships, real people, real aircraft, and real money.

https://www.navalgazing.net/Millennium-Challenge-2002 https://www.reddit.com/r/CredibleDefense/comments/4qfoiw/mil...