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]

Sounds abstract? The services were using the same aircraft,
near-identical missiles (Sparrows and different models of Sidewinder),
but the USAF's F-4Ds and F-4Es had guns (pods for the Ds, internal for
the Es) supposedly as a solution to the problems encountered during
Rolling Thunder. Yet they were twice as likely to be shot down and
barely half as likely to kill, as the gunless Navy fighters. (Only seven
of the forty-eight USAF Linebacker kills were achieved with guns,
despite the efforts made to fit them)

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

"We're not training our crews properly, aren't using our weapons
correctly, and are employing poor tactics that make us very vulnerable"
is much less palatable than "the only problem is the aircraft imposed on
us doesn't have a gun!"

Note that the missiles have improved very significantly since 1972,
while the M61 - though a fine weapon -has had only incremental
modifications.

[1] Stats from "Clashes" by Marshal Michel III
--
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