ess (phil hunt) wrote in message ...
On 17 Oct 2003 19:53:12 -0700, Kevin Brooks wrote:
(phil hunt) wrote in message ...

F-16 is optimised for air-superiority. It has a high-performance
engine, is highly maneouvrable, and has a big radar to track other
aircraft. It can do other stuff, but that's not its primary role.

Care to guess what the "primary role" of the F-16 is, and always has
been, within the USAF

It was designed as a low-cost airv superiority fighter to counteract
the USSR's large fleet of fighters and fighter bombers.

That was only during its very early stages of design; it was developed
for multi-role use before it ever entered into operational service.
The USAF was smart enough to realize that the usefulness of an
aircraft restricted to day light air superiority use was rather
limited, and design changes were implemented during the prototype/EMD
stages to rectify the situation and make it a multi-role platform.


(with the sole exception of the ADF variant)?
Yep, that's right, it spends (much, much) more of its time concerned
with BAI/CAS/SEAD than it ever has the air superiority role.

That's because the USSR doesn't exist any more, and the USA has
tended to fight enemies with less capable air forces.

Nope. The F-16 was spending more of its training time in the mud
moving role from the day it entered into active service, while the
USSR was still a going concern. Stop trying to revise history to suit
your less than accurate analysis. The F-16 entered operational use in
1980, but:

""...The General Dynamics YF-16 being declared the winner in January
1975 [of the LWF competition], but even at that early stage customers
were asking for more capability. As a result, a Westinghouse APG-66
multi-mode radar was added, as well as carrying capacity for
air-to-surface weapons, while wing and tail area were increased, and
the fin made taller and the fuselage longer...by the 1980's what had
started as a lightweight fighter had become a multi-role
middleweight." (Modern American Weapons, ed. David Miller, 2002)


At the
very beginning of the development program it was envisioned as
primarily being a lightweight air superiority product, but that
changed while it was still in early development and before it ever
entered into US service--it went multi-role rather early in its
gestation.

Multi-role, but with an emphasis on air superiority. Just as the
A-10 has multi-role capability: you can shoot down other aircraft
with it, but no-one would say it's designed as a fighter.

No, it has never, since the days when the LWF morphed into the
multi-role F-16 which entered into service, had an emphasis on "air
superiority" (other than the handful of A model ADF variants mentioned
earlier). Both US and European users placed more emphasis on its use
in the strike role, and its first major combat use, by the Israelis,
saw more strike missions than air superiority use (you do recall what
kind of aircraft toted the bombs to Osirak in 82?).

Your "look like" criteria just does not cut the mustard.

Brooks