"Paul J. Adam" wrote in message
...
In message , Chad Irby
writes
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.

It's an interesting area to actually analyse, particularly when
comparing USAF and USN performance: in Linebacker the USAF shot down
forty-eight MiGs for twenty-four air-to-air losses, while the USN lost
four and scored 24 kills. More interesting yet, the Navy's fighters met
MiGs twenty-six times, for a .92 probability of killing a MiG and a .15
chance of losing one of their own; the USAF had eighty-two engagements,
for .58 kills per engagement but .29 losses.[1]

Ugh! That all sounds dangerously like the "operations research", or systems
analysis, kind of numeric mumbo-jumbo so characteristic of the McNamara
era---PLEASSSE don't go there! It took us a generation to rid ourselves of
the most of the "mantle of the number crunchers" (and we were only partially
succesful--witness the continued use of the POM process in budgeting) as it
was...

Brooks

snip