> If you look at the actual data from the past couple decades, far more aircraft were destroyed by SAMs or cruise missiles (on the ground) than in BVR or WVR combat. Dogfights haven't been a significant factor for a long time.
Data can only tell you so much. For instance, according to the data, nuclear weapons haven't destroyed any enemy equipment in the last 80 years, but you'd be going too far to infer from that conventional weapons have made them militarily obsolete.
The difference is that nobody is avoiding WVR dogfights just so they can get shot down by a missile in BVR or a SAM. Nobody is getting within range of a dogfight nowadays because these other weapons are so extraordinarily dominant.
> The lesson is to preserve the capability until it's actually been proven to no longer be needed.
And yet when faced with evidence of this, your immediate response is "data can only tell you so much".
>> The lesson is to preserve the capability until it's actually been proven to no longer be needed.
> And yet when faced with evidence of this, your immediate response is "data can only tell you so much".
That evidence probably isn't sufficient. The kind of evidence I'm looking for is: fight an actual war against an enemy with an air force, and find out your pilots never actually used dog-fighting skills or capability. Until then, maybe hold off on plans to replace all the fighters with missile trucks or something.
> fight an actual war against an enemy with an air force
Like Iraq? Or Afghanistan? Or do you mean an air force that's at least somewhat comparable to ours, like Russia or China?
Case one is that we're up against an enemy with a drastically inferior air force, in which case WVR is never going to happen. Their air capability will be devastated whether on the ground or in the air.
Case two is that we're up against a country with a powerful air force. Assuming we're somehow tiptoeing around the issue of full-blown nuclear war, we're now talking about a situation where combat is somehow happening hundreds of miles away from either side's radar-guided mobile SAM systems (Russia's S-400 has an operational range of at least 400km), both sides have managed to evade multiple BVR missile launches per airframe, both sides have an equal number of jets in the engagement, and the area objective is so important that it's worth gambling multiple $50+ million jets on.
Do you realize how comically implausible this scenario is?
If you can think of a more realistic situation in which the US will actually engage their fighter jets in dogfighting, I’m all ears.
Data can only tell you so much. For instance, according to the data, nuclear weapons haven't destroyed any enemy equipment in the last 80 years, but you'd be going too far to infer from that conventional weapons have made them militarily obsolete.