On Wed, 10 Dec 2003 16:36:08 GMT, Chad Irby wrote:

In article ,
Alan Minyard wrote:

Are you familiar with the concept of guided missiles? If you get into
gun range you have already screwed the pooch. The gun is a last
ditch, desperation weapon in ACM, wasting airframe volume and weight
on a honking great, slow, unreliable gun is not a wise trade off.

Comments nearly identical to the one above were very popular in the
early 1960s. And then we got into a real shooting war, and pilots
suddenly needed guns again.

Yep, McNamara is still influencing military thought. I was sure we'd
gotten over that, but what goes around, comes around.

It's funny to hear someone call a gun "unreliable," since the failure
rate for modern aircraft guns is *miniscule*...

I did not mean "no gun", I meant that the M-61 is quite adequate for the
scenarios that are likely to occur in ACM.

Al Minyard