We tried this with air-to-air missiles in Vietnam on F-4s with no guns. It didn't go well.And you start to wonder if maybe we ought to just invest in really fuckin' good surface to air missiles and be done with it.
Right - this is that whole "top gun" mystique. But let's take a look at the sleight of hand you just performed - I flippantly said "surface to air missiles" and you trotted out the old saw about how the Navy was fucked without 20mm. Have you ever really looked at that? I haven't. But I just did: So that's 1,737 that were in some way shot down. How many of those were shot down air-to-air? Fuckin' 89. Okay, so five percent of US combat air losses were in air-to-air combat. How many were due to something other than air-to-air missiles? Well there it gets tricky. That chart above lists 83 losses due to air-to-air missiles, 86 due to "cannon", but 21 due to "SAM" and 20 due to "AAA." 86 kills, meanwhile, are "not confirmed". So let's just roll with a percentage - roughly 50% of the recorded kills were missiles, 50% guns. We're down to 2.5% of air combat losses to air-to-air combat with guns. 2.5%. Which is pretty stupid to have a moral panic over but let's also focus for a minute on the fact that nobody has fond things to say about the F-4 as a fighter. It was the F-35 of its day in every way, shape and form. Big, slow, stupid, and intended to drop lots of standoff weaponry on a numerically-superior, technologically-inferior force. Ever been next to one? They're huge. Trust the modelers to put one next to a MiG-17: It begs the question - what sort of numbers wouldn't the Air Force and Navy freak balls about? I mean, when 95% of your trouble comes from the ground, "air-to-air cannon" is a tough sell. But when you say "we lost to a bunch of 20-year-old surplus Chinese monkey-version Soviet hardware" it's obviously because you don't have a cannon, right? Do me a solid - ctrl-f "cannon" on this page. You'll find two instances of A-10s strafing the shit on the ground. Now take a gander here and look at how well cannons aren't represented. Not that this has anything whatsoever to do with surface-to-air missiles vs the F-22 or F-35. I mean, that would be the "95%" portion of the program as opposed to the "2.5%" portion so I think we can call that settled. But I think it demonstrates a certain amount of pervasive mythology that has little to do with actual air tactics. But there’s a problem with that. Nobody will play with us. It’s like investing your entire sports fund on a stable of polo ponies (except polo ponies are cheap compared to air-superiority fighters) and finding nobody in the neighborhood even knows what polo is, let alone wants to spend all that money to play against you. What the USAF really gets called on to do is bombing raids, usually on small, low-value targets, and close air support (CAS) for US ground forces or their allies. The problem with that is that the USAF hates that job. For all kinds of reasons. It’s not as glorious as dueling enemy fighters; it’s downright dangerous; and worst of all, it calls for really ugly, cheap airplanes like the A-10 Warthog. I stand by my argument, even though it was flippant.All told, the U.S. Air Force flew 5.25 million sorties over South Vietnam, North Vietnam, northern and southern Laos, and Cambodia, losing 2,251 aircraft: 1,737 to hostile action, and 514 in accidents. 110 of the losses were helicopters and the rest fixed-wing. A ratio of roughly 0.4 losses per 1,000 sorties compared favorably with a 2.0 rate in Korea and the 9.7 figure during World War II.
What is the air force’s job? If you ask the USAF, it’s all Top Gun stuff: Owning the skies, downing enemy fighters in high-tech dogfights. That’s the mission they love, dream about—and spend their money on.
That's fantastically interesting (in case it isn't clear, there's no sarcasm there). I'd never done that analysis, I'd just taken a sentence or two in Wikipedia at face value. Your argument, flippant or not, stands up well. My take is it's an air force who likes to talk about air superiority but can't admit being the top airplane doesn't mean anything when a couple people on the ground with a decent surface-to-air missile can shoot you down with impunity. I agree with your assessment of the USAF, too. I think the same thing applies to the Army. They envision WWII conflicts. The enemy wears a uniform, and anyone not wearing a uniform just wants to stay out of the way. There is a clear front, and behind the front is effectively as safe as being in Omaha. But like air-to-air dogfights, nobody wants to play with us. The military is so much more of a mess than I realized. Thanks for the educational response.
I appreciate the chance to dig into it. It's always bugged me; the footage of these giant F-4s clearly dusting the shit out of MiG-17s, which are obviously a generation or two older, followed by the observation that clearly the fact that an F-4 occasionally got shot down was proof positive that they needed cannons. And then you play even the most rudimentary flight sim and combat's gotta be fuckin' weird for it to be anything other than you and a blip on the radar trading air-to-air missiles. Go guns hot and you are useless. Digging into it there's a lot of speculation as to why fighters need guns/why the F-4 needed guns and it seems to come down to this: 1) If you need to get close enough to look at it, and then decide you need to blow it up, it's good to have a gun. mmmmmmmmmmeh. 2) Early air-to-air missiles sucked ass and when an F-4 used up all its missiles, the MiG could eat it alive. mmmmmmmmaybe. 3) Rules of engagement in Vietnam required pilots to have visual contact on a MiG before they could engage it and by the time they were close enough, any advantages they may have had with standoff weaponry were erased. This one's truthy, although it's nowhere in this 56-page study from the Air Force's School of Advanced Airpower studies. but there is this: required to protect their strike forces. Even when chasing hostile MIGs, US fighters were not authorized to attack North Vietnamese MIG fighter bases until 1967. One pilot explained the situation by noting that "MIGs could wait on the end of their runway until they saw us fighters approaching, then takeoff, make one turn, and wound up in shooting position on the trailing flight of aircraft". The passage directly before is telling: antiaircraft artillery accounted for the most aerial kills. With air defense systems near their peak, summary reports of aircraft losses from 1967-1968 indicate that AAA accounted for more than seventy-five percent of all US aircraft shot down over North Vietnam. 11 Fighters loaded with bombs normally defeated MIGs and SAMs by flying fast and at low altitudes. In Vietnam, this tactic placed fighters within lethal range of the AAA guns. It seems to loop back to the beginning, like Ouroboros eating its tail: If you're only going to be given one plane, it better do fuckin' everything 'cuz you might end up painted into a really, really stupid corner. I'll bet they'd put bayonets on the things if they could. American aircraft were prohibited from engaging MIG's except as
MIGs and SAMs were the more advanced elements of the air defense system, but
Slightly off-topic, but this is just wrong. Yeah, the Army brass would love to fight WWII-style conflicts. The US technological superiority in such a conflict is so obvious and astounding that it's indisputable that they would come out looking very good in such a conflict. But, the operational Army doesn't train for that kind of conflict at all anymore. From the time I went through basic training in 2006 until I got out in 2010, every single moment of training was focused on counter-insurgency. We trained on urban warfare, small unit tactics, and even spent a large amount of time on cultural sensitivity and how to interact with local populations in a positive way. I doubt any of that has changed significantly in the last 6 years. What we absolutely never trained for was total war against the uniformed military of another nation. I never once saw anyone dig a foxhole. Only once in two and half years assigned to a cavalry unit did we do any kind of training involving coordinated maneuvers beyond the company level, and even that was still in the context of counter insurgency. The Army might not actually be good at fighting modern wars, but they're sure as hell aware that they won't be fighting a full-scale nation vs. nation war again in the foreseeable future.I think the same thing applies to the Army. They envision WWII conflicts. The enemy wears a uniform, and anyone not wearing a uniform just wants to stay out of the way.