[V_Terranova_Jr]

Current military thinking is "No" - the expectation, via lots of simulation, analysis, recent history, large-scale military exercises, and intel is that advanced weapons systems make dogfighting increasingly unlikely. Where it does happen, capability aspects other than pure kinematic superiority will make a big difference. And before anyone smugly reminds us all of Vietnam, they should refresh themselves on the lessons learned from the '91 Gulf War.

[elabajaba]

Not to mention in Vietnam, the Navy F4s that didn't have guns (and usually didn't bother with gun pods) were way more successful than the Air Force (who always flew with gun pods and eventually added an internal cannon to their planes). The issue was that they both (Navy and Airforce) initially only trained against other F4s, instead of against planes that were comparable to what they faced over Vietnam. The Navy setup schools to retrain their pilots to not drop speed to try and line up gun runs, and trained against other US planes that were more comparable to the Russian planes. Eventually the airforce adopted similar training regimes.