[SkyDancer]

It’s the pilot not the plane.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

The Goon Show, back on Down Under.

[sten]

interesting, considering 35% of our aircraft are pilot-less.

the future will be thousands of drones versus a handful of 1980s tech

any cost overruns are, of course, planned to help handicap / cripple US air superiority

[Heavyrunner]

That used to be somewhat true, but not so much anymore. Essentially, our entire air superiority doctrine is now built around first-look/first-shoot, and we rely upon our technology to do that.

If a 4th generation fighter manages to close in on an F-35, the newer fighter’s advantages largely disappear, leaving it in a knife fight with a more agile and maneuverable foe.

We threw in the towel on fair fighting a long time ago. Our whole strategy revolves around being invisible and untargetable.

What this article does NOT explain to my satisfaction, however, is why the F-35 is “no match for newer Communist bloc radars.” We know the Serbs downed an F-117, and we also know how.

The thing is, the trick the Serbs used isn’t something you can pull off anywhere or anytime. You have to have certain elements in place before hand and you also have to be looking specifically for a certain something (or lack thereof) to even point your missile in the right general direction.

[Nowhere Man]

It’s the pilot not the plane.

Agreed, the training of the pilot, his/her skills and the application of his/her ship is what is important (of course you can add in intangibles too such a luck, divine intervention and what else you can think of) but the first three are important. It is quite possible where you could have an F-100/MiG-19 win over a Su-30/F-22 although if I had to take something up, I'd want at least an F-4 or something made from 1960/1965 onward. Actually jet fighter performance in the physical world such as max speed, range and maneuverability pretty much plateaued at about 1960, from then on, it was mainly improvements in avionics/computers and stealth, the latter I think is overrated IMHO.

I'm a believer in Kurt Vonnegut where he wrote in his 1958 story, "The Manned Missiles," where you had UAV's fight each other in the future to a stalemate where you had the idea of using manned aircraft and manned kamikaze missiles being used to overcome the artificial intelligences of the UAV's.