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

If "lack of guns" is the real problem, surely gun-armed fighters are
a complete and satisfactory answer?

It's not a simple question of "lack of guns."

It's "relying on missiles 100% and not having guns when they're really
bloody useful."

In other words, guns solve the problem? Not according to the facts they
don't: in fact they're pretty damn marginal (and not cheap either).

We learned that lesson over 30 years ago,

And of course, nothing has changed since then. (Well, the M61 hasn't...)

and a whole new generation of
bean counters are trying to resurrect the kind of silliness that the
McNamara school brought us in Vietnam...

Actually, one key mistake McNamara's crowd made was to extrapolate
conclusions without information. Case in point, the "get rid of guns"
idea: made sense for a fleet air defence interceptor, but not for a
general-purpose fighter when its missiles had not even been tested in
trials against manoeuvring fighter-size targets (and when the trial was
belatedly undertaken, the AIM-9B missed every time).

Once the missiles have demonstrated ~80% lethality in actual combat
against real enemies doing their best to survive, then perhaps there's
more evidence to support the analysis. Oh, I forget - they did that
twenty-one years ago.


--
When you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite.
W S Churchill

Paul J. Adam MainBoxatjrwlynch[dot]demon{dot}co(.)uk