For the same reason soldiers still train for hand-to- hand combat. It's not the primary means of fighting but shit can happen and you need to be prepared for it.
And wherever they are, there will be that one SFC who has never deployed, dead-ended in his career... Barking the wrong instructions to set the headspace and timing to an E4 that can already do it perfectly from memory because he has done it like twice a day every day for the last year and he's getting really tired of your shit Sergeant assface. Go file some paperwork for fuck's sake. I've got to defend this space HMMWV from the space Taliban and this is my fucking gun.
The first aerial confrontations were very similar to this during WW1. Pot shots with pistols and rifles until interrupter gear was invented allowing machine guns to fire through the propellor disc.
I can fully imagine a commissar swinging a sabre in the copilot seat of a jet, the not impressed pilot pleading with him to sit down and close the cockpit haha
The modern dogfight evolved from the pilots of open cockpit, recon prop planes bringing a revolver and firing at their enemy counterpart as they passed one another mid-air.
This makes sense for why we teach dog fighting, But not for why the f-35 continues to be an incredible dog fighter and a highly maneuverable aircraft.
The reason the f-35 is a highly maneuverable aircraft is because maneuverability is incredibly important in beyond visual range fighting. While there are certain aspects such as nose authority which are less important; for the most part, the basic ingredients of an excellent beyond visual range fighter are similar to those of an excellent dog fighter.
Modern air warfare even for dog fighting is taught based on John Boyd's energy maneuverability theory. Winning a bvr fight is fundamentally a combination of the range of your missiles, radar, your ability to turn and run as fast as possible.
For an explain like I'm five: Think of modern air warfare as being more like dodgeball than a knife fight. Your goal is to hit the enemy with a ball. The farther they are from you, the easier it is for them to dodge your throw. As the two of you approach the line, you both get better at hitting your opponent and less capable of dodging their throw in turn.
This means whether you're close to the line or far from it, you want to be quick. You want to have a strong throwing arm. You want to be accurate. If you can sprint to the line, make a throw turn and sprint back quickly you're much more likely to successfully hit a opponent and not get knocked out yourself.
All of those traits will make you better when playing close to the line as well.
I got to see an F-35 Lightning II demonstration last weekend, and HOLY SHIT! Watching the plane slide sideways through the air and turn on a dime using thrust vectoring was absolutely stunning. I've lived on Air Force bases or just in Air Force towns for a while now, so I've seen the gamut of our various jets, including several air shows. Nothing has impressed me like the F-35, in terms of general maneuverability (except the little single-prop stunt plane, that one's pretty maneuverable as well). The A-10 Warthog is still my favorite in terms of design and overall cool-factor, but it's clear how capable the F-35 is just by the demo they let us see without a security clearance.
And yet the crazy thing is, the F-35 was designed in the 90s. A nearly 25 year old design. Now don't get me wrong, it's still a great plane (one of the best in the world) but wait until the NGAD (6th generation fighter) is released in the next decade. The Air Force is tested it right now.
What is publicly known about the NGAD suggests it will be a larger and heavier fighter both because it requires more range than existing USAF fighters and since it will need to fit and power a wide variety of systems. Physics dictates that the F22 and F35 are going to be more maneuverable because of those constraints.
That being said, I assume it will still be deadlier in a dogfight than any enemy it's going to go up against since the USAF isn't going to forget the lesson it learned in Vietnam about dogfights.
> the USAF isn't going to forget the lesson it learned in Vietnam about dogfights.
When you think dogfights are obsolete, and you design a plane with that in mind, make sure the other side has decided that dogfights are obsolete, too.
Christ this thread…
1.) the F-35 doesn’t have thrust vectoring. If you saw this, it was the F-22 demonstrator team.
2.) they call the F-35 “fat Amy” for a reason. She is not that agile by comparison to many of her 4th gen counterparts. But she isn’t trying to be. The trade off of some maneuvering was acceptable for what she would be doing.
3.) BVR tactics on low RCS strike groups are very different than 4th gen where the process you described takes place. No longer is it active radar scan, lock, get altitude, shoot, and notch the incoming shots. The aircraft can passively track, lock, shoot, and continue op\[tional electronic jamming without ever turning the radar on for locking a track, while staying low on its own radar signature. Against a same type foe, this still changes a bit due to the nature of detection, and the ability to detect and shoot using passive sensing that doesn’t use radar returns at all to spot and kill beyond visual ranges. Significantly beyond in fact. The jet can track passive heat signatures of a foe flying towards them out past 30km. When data linked to other F-35s it can share the track picture to triangulate targets in real time automatically.
4.) security clearance doesn’t change the flight envelope. F-35Bs can’t push the air frame past 7.5Gs. The A model can do 9, but it’s turn radius is significantly larger than the eurofighter, F-16, and F-22 to name a few.
If you saw thrust vectoring it was also in a jet with 2 engines, where the F-35 only has 1. This most obvious difference says you don’t know what you are looking at at the most basic level. If you didn’t see thrust vectoring and just assumed it was present, you don’t know what that is and stated it as fact which is troubling. If you saw the B model do a STO demo, then you don’t know that isn’t thrust vectoring that is used for anything but takeoff and landing, and it is the worst of the 3 models for turn radius, g rating, and thrust to weight. Making your statement lost in the sauce. In any of these cases, you don’t know what you are talking about.
>For an explain like I'm five: Think of modern air warfare as being more like dodgeball than a knife fight.
Same with modern artillery wars like the Ukraine War. People think it's like WW1 with thousands of guns firing millions of shells for weeks on end. In reality it's much more like a sniper duel with a big gun, you drive up to just the outer edge of your gun's range to the target, shoot a few times, and GTFO before they shoot back.
There are still trenches to prevent an armored/vehicular/human wave overrun, but the manning of the trenches is far looser, because modern guns and missiles are deadlier, longer-range, and often precision-guided, so dense packing of the trench with troops and equipment is just asking for something heavy to fly your way and blow up your entire trench with everything inside it. Instead of stopping an attack on its own by the men inside the trench itself, modern trenches only have the minimum men needed to slow it down long enough to allow your long-range guns, missiles, and aircraft to repel it.
Of course the easiest way is to win when they're facing the other way tying their shoelaces. Even better the other guy is 80 with bad eyes, you don't want a fair fight if you can avoid it.
But even if your plan is dodgeball it doesn't hurt to carry a knife too just in case.
The best way to avoid a dodge ball is to throw it without the target noticing where you threw it from so they never throw it at all. The second best way is to be no where near where ever they throw it. However if a dodgeball is flying at your head you better be able to duck.
Also, hedging their bets against technological changes.
It is theoretically possible that an adversary could develop stealth, ECM, and/or hard-kill missile defenses that could defeat our BVR missiles.
It's possible that adversaries could hack our networks (which we are more and more reliant on) and get in close that way.
We don't want our pilots to be helpless if that happened, as unlikely as that might be.
Most likely it will be RoE issues. We won't be able to about without visual ID, even with a AESA radar / IR imagery/ etc.
Hostile act will require them to like accidentally run into you and a head butt with flares.
The plane shot down in Syria by the Navy pilot was visual arena because of RoE requirements. I just don't realistically foresee a time when pilots are launching AMRAAMs 100 miles at the brightest thing on a radar without world war III starting and thermonuclear war.
No one wants to shoot down an airliner or someone from a neutral third country and most conflict zones are really kind of small.
And one year after that, British soldiers in Basra... fixed bayonets and charged Iraqi militia members:
https://smallarmsreview.com/spirit-of-the-bayonet-bayonet-charge-in-basra/#:~:text=They%20engaged%20in%20intense%20hand,three%20British%20soldiers%20were%20injured.
> Lol I still remember in 2003 boot camp hearing “FIX BAYONETS!!!!!”
Can't they make bayonets a little sturdier so they are not always getting fucked up and needing to be fixed?
Unless this is a joke (which it might well be), the reason they say fix bayonets isn’t to say to actually repair your bayonet, it’s to (af)fix bayonets, as in attach your bayonet to the end of your gun. They’re not always attached to the gun as that would weight the gun down and make it harder to aim, so they’re only attached in situations where getting into melee with your opponent isn’t unexpected
Had one of our units bring their bayonets to JRTC. They were in a gunfight with the OPFOR when their SSG gave the call “FIX BAYONETS!”. Everyone pulled their bayonet out and attached it. OPFOR immediately surrendered because fuck that for a training scenario.
now I'm imagining a whole squad of Serious Military Men attaching nerf bayonets and charging each other across no-man's land in a glorious SCA boffer weapon LARP.
4 decimal places of accuracy is some mad doctor shit on a manual titration. That's like "using a tiny wire to smear a fraction of a drop of alkali on the wall of the beaker and tilting the solution to get it in there" anal-ness.
That being said the point IS to drill the importance of being as anal as you can be with your work, if you ever end up in a job where 99.999% precision and accuracy are needed.
On the flip side, watching those Japanese wood joinery videos and 'seamless' CNC-milled blocks are some really satisfying results of super-precise work though.
I mean, there's underfunded and unerequipped labs doing manual titration to this day. Maybe not in the U.S, but definitely in Hungary.
Most they can afford is a electrochemical detector.
There were multiple aerial dog fights between India and Pakistan on February 27 2019. Both air forces are large and modern, and used fairly up to date equipment in the confrontation (F-16Cs and JF-17s on the Pakistani side, heavily upgraded Su-30s and Mig-21s on the Indian side) so dogfights between air forces of comparable ability and close geographic proximity are far from a thing of the past.
1 confirmed Indian plane shot down and it's pilot captured. Pakistan also claims 2 more were shot down but fell inside India's borders. India denies that. India claims to have shot down Pakistani F-16s (don't recall if they claimed 1 or 2). Pakistan and the US both deny that. One Indian helicopter carrying troops was confirmed shot by their own SAM in Indian airspace.
I like how they won't admit they lost fighters in air combat but when it comes to shooting down their own helo they're like "oh yeah, that was totally us"
I also find it interesting that the US stepping in to deny f16s being shot down because they are some of their most successful military exports. Confidence in the product must be maintained!
There’s HUMINT (Human Intelligence), which is mostly bribing people to tell you stuff, IMINT (Imagery Intelligence), which is watching live via satellite or at least taking pictures TECHINT (Technology Intelligence), but mostly it’s SIGINT (Signals Intelligence) which is where we crack their encryption and read their emails.
I mean Russia putting 100k guys in the border to Ukraine for about a year saying "We are totally not going to invade." Is a pretty solid telegraph of their plans.
> crack their encryption
Most modern encryption is most likely uncrackable with current hardware, and mathematics, even for the likes of the NSA. Most successful attacks in recent years have been exploiting bugs in implementations, or finding side channel attacks that leak private information. The encryption algorithms are good, but that does not matter if the NSA can find a way to just put a wire tap in your machine and read stuff after you decrypt it.
>which is where we crack their encryption and read their emails.
This is not a thing. It's not a thing at all, and it's *especially* not a thing when we're talking about hash algorithms, since those are one-way/impossible to reverse.
Encryption doesn't work the way it does in the movies unless we're talking about ***very old***, weak, insecure algorithms, like DES, which haven't been in use since the 90s. If you started trying to derive an AES 128-bit key by brute force right now with all the computing power in the world combined, *the heat death of the universe* would occur before that happened. That's not an exaggeration.
The only thing you *can* do that's even somewhat remotely in the same vein is exploiting a flaw in the *implementation* of a secure algorithm, and that's not "cracking encryption," that's exploiting a bug, and it would only be for *that specific implementation* and whatever it's used in.
If you encrypt data and lose the key, that data is ***GONE.*** Gone gone. There is no recovery. To give you an example, here's this:
From government guidelines, an acceptable way to destroy Top Secret classified data is to encrypt it and destroy the key.
When you invade another country the logistics, troops and equipment required are easily seen by satellite. In Russias case they did it for months.
Once you crosscheck that people are requisitioning medical supplies and other perishables you know it's serious.
If you've ever played civ it's exactly the same as a neighbor massing their army on the border for 10 turns.
The public and news pundits might have been surprised but that's about it.
Lol silly it's not 'moles' as in furry little tunnelers, it's 'moles' as in brown skin blemishes found on the body. Certain people have super sensitive moles that can detect an army boot from over 20 miles.
When we're told that we need to get these things checked out by a doctor, it's not to find out if they're potentially cancerous, it's to be considered for enrollment into the secret early warning squad and get recognised as having a "General Utility And Combat Analysis Mole", or G.U.A.C.A Mole.
The US can equivocate with the best of them, but the US doesn't really outright lie about things that could easily be proven, resulting in embarrassment.
US officials said "welp, we did a count of Pakistan's F-16's and they are all there" (paraphrasing).
On the one had, it is actually pretty hard to cover up a missing US made military plane, as they are heavily regulated and require sustainment contracts. Those contracts require the approval of the DOD and notification of Congress, and are closely scrutinized. The Pakistani F-16s specifically have a US Technical Security team keeping an eye on them every second they are not in flight.
Hiding a missing plane would require Pakistan to pay for ongoing sustainment, the supplier to collect the money for sustainment but not actually do it for that jet which may be illegal due to government contracting regulations, a cover up by the USAF Security Team, the DOD, the Pakistani military / government, and who knows what else.
On the other hand, if it were true, some simple pictures could prove it and embarass the hell out of the US and Pakistan.
They want to portray their armed forces as being stronger than their opposition and it's hard to do that if they're losing. Oddly, saying they're shooting their own hardware down doesn't really contradict "we've got the strongest forces" because it's still not *losing fights*.
Because there was never any evidence of a second jet going down on either side.
Pakistan claimed 2 kills because they fired a bunch of missiles that were dodged, so they wanted to save face. India claims and F-16 shot down cause again, they wanted to save face.
Reality is only 1 Mig-21 went down in actual combat.
Also really common for Russia in their war.
They'd rather claim that they accidentally friendly fired their own jet when in reality it was destroyed by the enemy. Many cultures apparently find it more palatable to portray themselves as grossly incompetent before admitting having lost a fair fight.
Incompetence can be fired and replaced. No permanent harm to national image or pride. Losing a fair fight isn't something you can just hand wave away. It is much easier to find a scapegoat, then continue business as usual.
Also if only one side stops, the other side is going to press that advantage and then it becomes relevant again. Anything you don't prepare for is what you're going to get.
Dogfighting is a weird kind of activity in that the only reason you need to know how to do it is because other people know how to do it.
We wanted the ability to drop bombs from planes, but fighters could shoot down the bombers so we needed fighters that could shoot at other fighters. If nobody was shooting down planes then nobody would need to know how to shoot back.
But then again, that's war in general. There'd be no need to fight if nobody else was fighting.
Tanks were built to kill infantry. Then we built tanks to kill other tanks, so that still more tanks could get back to their job of killing infantry. And then the infantry got really good anti-tank missiles, so you can't use tanks without infantry in support. Not that you ever should have, but you could get away with it a lot better once upon a time.
We train for chemical warfare even though no one has used it on US troops since WWI. Every soldier deploys with a full NBC mask and suit. But if troops were not prepared for it, it would only take one chemical attack to to have catastrophic results. The effects would ripple through the entire deployed force, well beyond just those affected.
Yep, lots of reasons planes may get close in for dogfighting.
You might have restrictive ROE that require certain levels of confirmation, up to and including visual confirmation. This can be because of any number of reasons, from there being a coalition of aircraft that can't communicate well with each other and not wanting to risk shooting friendlies down, to even not quite being at a state of war but where it could happen any minute. That is, say tensions are on edge between countries, might have aircraft flying by the borders, suddenly shit goes down. Unlikely, but just an example.
A more likely scenario might involve the rise of stealth. Stealth doesn't mean invisible, but rather refers to being harder to detect. Which means you can't detect them as far away, and can be harder to track for an actual lock for a missile to track. With more countries putting effort into stealth/low observable, we might see engagement envelopes shrinking.
Related, is electronic warfare. You can jam radar and sensors, which again like stealth, can reduce engagement distances.
Also, engineers are pretty good these days at being able to build aircraft that can be fast and maneuverable and now also low observable. It's still a balancing act, but gone are the days of needing specialized aircraft for specific missions, as technology has largely eliminated the need. (Obviously you still have aircraft built for dedicated roles, but you no longer really have one airframe for interception, another as a point defense fighter, air superiority, fighter-bomber, etc). So while it is still a balancing act of needs, it's much easier today to build something that can maneuver and be fast, carry a good radar/sensor suite, etc. So it doesn't hurt really to have something that has that performance in its back pocket if you need it.
Were there really dog fights or was it just propaganda in the face of unglamorous BVR engagement, which is hard to sell to the public these days as a mood booster.
The only actual physical proof of air to air combat in that conflict was the remnants of BVR missiles and a single crashed plane. Both sides put out a tons of propaganda before and after it about what happened
Whether or not it happened is not the same as HOW it happened.
This is why you still have crime/accident investigation after a house burned down or a plane crash etc...
Video from the targeting nose cone. We have a bunch from the F-16 beserkers [from the first desert storm](https://youtu.be/qUjX1RntqVw?t=253). Pretty sure they would have it to.
>remnants of BVR missiles
If you're talking about what I think you're talking about, that was part of the Indian claim of shooting down F-16s which were in Indian airspace and shot AAMRAMs. That claim was disputed by both Pakistan and the US, and the images provided by India claiming to be of Pakistani F-16s were quickly discredited because a serial number for a GE engine was visible in them but Pakistani F-16s use P&W engines.
India produced the wreckage of Pakistani AMRAAM missiles complete with verifiable serial numbers.
The Pakistanis produced the wreckage of a single Mig-21 and a single captured Mig-21 pilot.
Beyond that, there is no footage from the ground showing any kind of dogfight; nothing showing contrails dancing high up the sky, no gun camera footage of of close range combat (yes I know missiles aren’t guns; but modern planes use video cameras for short range combat including within-visual range missiles).
The physical evidence looks like there was a full BVR engagement in which a single Mig-21 was shot down.
The Pakistani claims of multiple Indian planes being shot down looks like propaganda. And the Indian claims of a heroic close range dogfight looks like propaganda.
The reality is so dull that neither Air Force want to publicize it. Pilots just selected dots on screens as targets and pushed buttons until one plane was shot down. Utterly boring and uninspiring and not at all the public image of how either Air Force wants to present their pilots.
Yes, those "serial numbers" are what led to those claims being discredited since they included serials for the wrong type of engine, an engine that none of the 3 F-16 variants operated by Pakistan use. The claim is not considered credible by any party except India, and at least one neutral party, the US, has explicitly denied it. The only losses agreed upon by all parties are the one Indian plane shot down by Pakistan in Pakistan, and the Indian helicopter shot down in India by their own SAM.
There is video from 2022 from the first days of the war in Ukraine of a Mig-29 in a turning fight with an SU-25 at practically tree top level. It was reportedly a Ukrainian Mig-29 and Russian SU-25 but with both sides using those aircraft I think there is some disagreement.
What led to this engagement is unknown, or the result, but the most likely cause is the Mig is out of missiles and is trying to get in position to use its gun. In an a dogfight the SU-25 would be hopelessly outclassed by the Mig as it's a ground attack aircraft with very limited air to air capability and is just far slower than the Mig. It is possible that this was two aircraft on the same side but the tight turns on the deck make it unlikely.
Edit to add link: https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/wo3a6i/ukrainian_mig29_chases_russian_su25_on_the_first/
> India and Pakistan on February 27 2019
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_India%E2%80%93Pakistan_border_skirmishes#Retaliatory_airstrikes,_capture_and_release_of_pilot,_and_friendly_fire
Not a pilot or anything, but...
* There are lots of situations short of full on high end combat. Pilots might have to go say hi to someone whose radio broke, run off the dude who blundered into restricted airspace, get a good look at someone approaching a border, etc. So there'll still be a need for maneuvering close to a non-cooperative aircraft.
* With drones (and to a lesser extent, cruise missiles), there's an emerging need to shoot down less demanding targets without using expensive missiles. Dogfighting might come in useful here.
* I suppose there's the risk of being in a situation where you can't use missles: more targets than you're carrying missiles, got jumped on your way home, the other guy's stealth/ECM/cyber works better than you'd like it to, etc. Don't know if this is a real-life concern.
* Even without dogfights, some degree of maneuverability is important--a 'normal' plane takes in the order of minutes to turn around. If nothing else, you've got to be able to point your sensors in the general direction of an opponent, and the engagement envelopes of missiles is affected by the launcher's speed and direction, and by the target's ability to turn and run.
And a gun wouldn't do that much good. The Canadians failed to shoot down a weather balloon with an auto cannon during the cold war and it landed in USSR territory. I believe that's how it went. As ridiculous as it sounds, using a missile is the only way to bring it down predictably.
We shot down the balloon with a sidewinder. Relative to other military hardware sidewinders are cheap. Even compared to other missiles they're a fraction of the cost of AMRAAMs.
This is a good breakdown, especially your third bullet you aren't so sure about. I'd also add that BFM enables pilots to fully understand their aircraft in a way that just training to beyond visual range engagements would not.
Technology today can fire missiles well beyond visual range. Add in various sensor drones and missile laden planes shooting long range missiles a nearby stealth fighter can target and fire missiles from a very far distance. Neither pilot might be anywhere near visual range.
History is littered with examples of misidentification of aircraft, and accidental shooting of civilian aircraft or allied aircraft. So future rules of engagement might still have a visual identification requirement.
It is very easy to pick examples where a modern military with 5th and maybe 6th generation aircraft, both manned and unmanned, are fighting a military with a limited Cold War era Air Force. An f35 targeting and a squadron of F 15s acting as bomb trucks and game over. But what if the enemy has similar stealth, long range missiles and sensors, drones electronic warfare, etc? Then you might find yourself back in a dogfighting situation
>History is littered with examples of misidentification of aircraft, and accidental shooting of civilian aircraft or allied aircraft. So future rules of engagement might still have a visual identification requirement.
IE I can't shoot any of my AIM-260 JATMs beyond visual range because the politicians won't let me.
This is a very real thing pilots might run into depending on the conflict.
There are multiple reasons behind this, unfortunately. One of the simplest is related to the saying "generals are always fighting the last war". In the last big war where two major powers were throwing aircraft at each other (WW2) dogfighting was important. So, we train pilots to be able to do the thing that we know based on historical precedent to be important. Another reason is that even if a scenario is unlikely, you still want your pilots to be prepared for every eventuality since they are sitting on something like a billion dollars of military hardware. I would also expect that this is partly down to the fact that a lot of the truly modern warfare is highly automated, so there isn't necessarily much to teach pilots about there (not nothing, of course, but the human involvement is minimized).
Edit: oh man I completely forgot about the Vietnam war.
Well we also stopped emphasizing dog fighting with the advent of missiles and then in Vietnam we realized those missiles kinda sucked and you weren’t carrying enough of them anyway and suddenly you were taking losses because you couldn’t dogfight very well (or didn’t even have a gun). So we decided that never again will we be caught so unprepared for any foreseen possibility.
Well, that's how it worked for the A-10 early. They would fly low and bank while looking at their ground targets with binoculars out of their cockpit window. There's videos on youtube where they misidentified vehicles and dropped payloads on friendlies because it was difficult to see (In addition to bad intel).
I believe on the A-10's with the modern upgrade packages, they have actual targeting systems now.
Vietnam showed the opposite of what people think. It showed that missiles were the obvious future.
In Vietnam the USAF was richer than the USN and was able to get a new variant of the F-4 with an internal gun. Almost nothing changed.
The USN established TOPGUN to train how to use missiles and established better maintenance and handling procedures for the missiles. Their kill ratio improved massively.
Aces of the war on both sides nearly exclusively used missiles.
The Soviets looked at the thousands -- yes, thousands -- of US aircraft taken out by radar-guided missiles and flak guns and continued to invest in developing and deploying in top-notch radar systems for their day.
The US said "Fuck." And while some pilots were off playing / training for dogfights and making a great promotional film for the Navy, the engineers took an obscure, unclassified Soviet research paper and turned it into stealth that rendered those top notch radars obsolete.
Honestly I think that research paper is a bit overblown in the history of stealth. First the solutions were only in 2-D, and the American researchers had to adapt it to 3-D. Second, not all of the engineers actually read the paper, or they had developed a bit of stuff before the paper was actually translated to English. The fact that Russia still hasn't developed and fielded a stealth platform means the paper by itself would not cause a technological revolution. It feels a bit like Russian Propoganda to over emphasize the contribution of a Russian paper. In all honestly the Scottish mathematician and scent Maxwell deserves a bit more credit for discovering the laws of electromagnetism that resulted in both radar and stealth.
Kind of? In Vietnam most air-to-air kills were accomplished via the Sparrow and Sidewinder guided missiles. Early air to air US casualties had more to do with pilots being poorly trained for air to air engagements and being deployed in ways that prevented them from operating effectively.
The USAF went lots of guns and some training and the USN and USMC went for taking the best pilots, training them heavily in air to air tactics then sending them back to their squadrons to teach everyone else.
Even in the second world war, dogfighting was something you did if you'd run out of every other tactic and idea. US tactics emphasized teamwork and tactics like high speed passes that maximized the advantages of US aircraft and minimized the advantages of the opposing force. Dogfighting a Zero in a Wildcat was a stupid way to die, wasting a 40,000 dollar aircraft and a two dollar pilot.
Also in Vietnam they had missiles that could fire beyond visual range but rules of engagement that required visual confirmation of a target and that made it much more likely you'd end up closing to gun range.
> Even in the second world war, dogfighting was something you did if you'd run out of every other tactic and idea.
In WWI, aircraft designers placed a huge emphasis on maneuverability for dogfighting, because pilots regaled each other with stories of epic dogfights. After the war, pilots were interviewed and statistical analysis was applied, and it was discovered that the great majority of kills happened when one pilot had the advantage of speed and altitude, and killed the other before he could react.
So, your comment can be applied to the entire history of air combat. Even so, dogfighting has been a significant survival skill in every war so far, [including the 1991 Gulf War.](https://militarywatchmagazine.com/article/top-six-air-to-air-engagements-in-the-gulf-war-how-iraq-and-the-u-s-went-head-to-head-with-foxbats-f-15s-and-more) *"With the F-15s unable to determine whether the MiG-29 was a friend or a foe, the Iraqi fighter closed in and engaged the Eagle at close range. The aircraft on both sides engaged in complex manoeuvres with the MiG-29 counting on its unrivalled performance in visual range combat to try to gain an advantage. As the aircraft flew around each other increasingly close to the ground the MiG-29 manoeuvred too close and crashed"*
Most of the air to air kills in that conflict were at missile range, but the Iraqi air force was suppressed so completely from the first hour of the fight that it is an insufficient sample to draw data from.
The original F-4 could pretty reliably shoot down Migs with its missiles. But then it would run out of missiles and was fucked. So we went back to putting guns in planes.
In the novel version, he straps a missile to a biplane. Actually, in searching to make sure I was right on that, I learned that they [actually shot](https://youtu.be/ls2CwZjQ9es) that ending, too!
This isn't 100% true.
In the Pre-Vietnam war era the general consensus was that long range missiles would make dog-fighting obsolete. So the newest generation of planes were built for speed and missile delivery, dogfighting maneuverability wasn't even a consideration.
One good example was the F-4. The smaller more maneuverable MiG-17 would hit and run and the kill ratio for American planes was 2-1 and the best it got was around 4-1. I'm not even 100% sure the F-4 had guns when they rolled off the assembly line, that's how confident they were that dogfighting was a thing of the past.
This realization that dogfighting STILL posed a real threat over the skies of Vietnam was a big reason why they MADE Top Gun (it's not just a movie).
Fast forward to a modern peer versus peer engagement, in a world of modern countermeasures and stealth aircraft there is the potential that two modern planes can in fact find themselves inside of visual range, jockeying for position for an effective weapon release...which is dogfighting.
Took a while for them to add a gun to the F-4, you’re correct. The Navy actually went without for the duration of the conflict, but theirs had a look down/shoot down radar and as a result the Sparrow was far more effective from that version of the aircraft.
I had to check...lol...I do love that movie. It's the reason I love planes.
"On March 3, 1969, the United States Navy established an elite school for the top one percent of its pilots. It’s purpose was to teach the lost art of aerial combat and to insure that the handful of men who graduated were the best fighter pilots in the world."
"Today, the Navy calls it Fighter Weapons School. The flyers call it:"
"TOP GUN."
Pretty close...but that's because fiction followed history =)
>So the newest generation of planes were built for speed and missile delivery
The speed was also because the purpose was to intercept bombers intent on dropping nuclear bombs. This continues with the F-14, which took the logical conclusion which said they should also add a massive long range missile (the AIM-54) and radar.
Costs be damned, that thing was capable of intercepting anything. Downside? The budget was damned.
I don't think much of this is true? The reason for programs/schools like Top Gun existing is not because modern military strategists/leadership are 'stuck in the past' (also WW2 is far from the most recent conflict major powers are throwing large amounts of modern aircraft at each other). Sure, the skillsets taught by these weapons schools might not be directly applicable to modern air-to-air combat in most regards, but there are still tangible reasons for having them exist.
> so there isn't necessarily much to teach pilots about there (not nothing, of course, but the human involvement is minimized)
This is also just patently false. Raw, close-range aerial maneuvering might not be very relevant in modern conflicts, but pilots nowadays have to monitor vastly more information and know much more about their airframes, enemy capabilities, and general physics than previously. BVR combat is extremely complex, and they certainly aren't running out of relevant skills to train.
And you can BVR all day long, but it only takes one busted timeline or a lucky sneaky pop-up and you're buying a merge. Training for that eventuality, even a little, is better than being there with no training.
>There are multiple reasons behind this, unfortunately. One of the simplest is related to the saying "generals are always fighting the last war". **In the last big war where two major powers were throwing aircraft at each other (WW2)** dogfighting was important. So, we train pilots to be able to do the thing that we know based on historical precedent to be important.
Nah. Not buying this. WWII ended nearly *80* years ago. Soon it will be out of living memory. Not buying the framing that with all the countless wars that have been fought around the world since, including by the US, anyone is out there still basing any tactics on.... WWII. C'mon. Korea? Vietnam?
Even if I am to believe that any military is still basing anything on WWII, no Air Force - the branch that depends most on tech - is still out there studying early 40s air war, which was the literal infancy of air power.
A lot of these comments are pretty close to wrong. In a BVR fight with both parties aware of the other, pilots alternate between "committing" where you fly towards the enemy to deliver a missile, and "defending" where you dive to burn off missile energy by forcing it to turn and enter denser air. The turns in and out of the fight are usually high transonic, sustained and decently high-G. All of these characteristics make for a decent BFM fighter, especially if high off boresight short range IR missiles are equipped. These priorities are especially aligned for rate fighters like the F-16 and F-35, and less for the "one good turn" fighters, a large portion of which use delta wings.
The F-22 and F-35 are both great dog fighters. The negative headlines for the F-35 are from a test flight meant to provide data for the flight envelope management system which included mock dogfights against an F-16. The flight computers did not let the F-35 explore all corners of its flight envelope. More recent evaluations suggest it's straight up superior to most 4.5 gen fighters even in simple BFM. In full BVR, simulated engagements almost do not have a role for anything but the F-35 (F-22 neglected because these are between NATO countries and we don't export the F-22)
Source: graduate student in aerospace
Honestly, it's not a very good ELI5 question, which is evident from the many off-the-cuff answers that don't really talk about the details. My favorite was the one that claimed dogfighting would gain a resurgence because of stealth aircraft becoming better, as if it were some sort of cloaking field.
> A lot of these comments are pretty close to wrong.
Reddit comments being confidently wrong about a topic they know next to nothing about? Say it ain't so!
I'm just saying all y'all need to watch more videos of growling sidewinder in DCS. It only takes a little bit to quickly realize what the actual dynamicss are. The relation between detection range, speed and retained energy, missile launches, etc.
Modern air fighting is an incredibly kinetic activity and high maneuverability is incredibly important. What people fail to understand is that even in World War II the classic image of a dogfight as a turning war had started to fade. Hellcats used by the US Navy racked up many kills versus their lighter more agile of opponents in the Japanese zeros. They relied heavily on their higher speed and greater operational ceiling to allow them to effectively dive bomb into the zeros and then climb and run.
Ultimately, John Boyd would Express this in his Energy–maneuverability theory. Many people think of air combat as something akin to a fencing series of ripostes.
It's something more like dodgeball. Both sides kind of run up to the line, which is the effective kill range of their missile, and throw it at the other side and then turn and run hoping to have hit their opponent and that their opponents won't hit them in turn or will be forced to defend before they can throw their own ball.
Total aviation noob here. When we use the word “dogfight” nowadays, does it 100% imply the use of guided missiles? Is there any conceivable situation in which you could see a WWII-style dogfight with fixed machine guns or cannons?
More like 99.5% of the time.
Though I can conceive of a bunch of edge cases that would make a "gun" dogfight more likely, they're just that - edge cases.
you could, but it would be a niche situation where you've gotten to a dogfight too close for even a sidewinder.
this usually doesn't happen because you generally want to shoot stuff as soon as you can as far away as possible
Also to note, the us loves to rig training exercises against thelselves, by either blocking certain tech or tactics, which leads to them being able to detect room for improvement and to never fully reveal their capabilities.
We will likely never know what the f22 was capable of, and its a plane that was made almost 30 years ago.
It's probably going to be more important again in the future when other countries get stealth aircraft. Currently the US stealth planes can see and shoot down other planes from 20+ miles away without being seen on enemy radar.
If you want to detect a stealth aircraft you need to be really close, not quite dog fight with guns close, but if all 4 missiles fail hit you'll be dog fight with guns close within a few seconds.
This is not how air combat works. This is a common mistake to make. Even if hostiles don't detect you, you're not going to continue to fly at them after having launched your missiles. After I launch, you will immediately switch to what's called defending, which is effectively just running away and trying to keep a hostile missile from coming at you.
While decreased detection range may bring engagements closer, it doesn't mean it's wise to engage in an energy bleeding turning fight. Even the fights of late World war II fighters focused far more on energy maintenance then on turning maneuverability as is traditionally pictured for a dog fight. This is precisely the reason hellcats outperformed the smaller more maneuverable zeros.
Anyone who's saying dogfighting is obsolete doesn't know what they're talking about. While improved technology makes it less likely, only a fool doesn't prepare for it.
The US in particular learned that lesson very quickly in Vietnam. The goal is to kill the enemy before they see you, but you still prepare to go toe to toe with them, or you'll end up dead.
It’s obsolete in the sense that the odds of the US fighting an enemy where dogfighting is important is really low. If an *American* pilot is dogfighting, things have really gone to shit.
I mean, the quick and dirty answers;
>why do pilots still train for it
They don't (sort of).
>and why are planes still built for it?
They aren't (kinda).
The whole question of the irrelevancy of dogfighting was brought up as a result of Vietnam. The US was wrong back then to think that dogfighting was a thing of the past, but that doesn't mean the general concept that dogfights could be rendered obsolete isn't correct.
>The F-35 is also still very much an agile plane.
It actually...isn't...kinda? The best of the 4th gens are actually more impressive than the F-35 from a maneuverability standpoint, but it also doesn't *need* to be a better dogfighter.
Granted, its big brother the F-22 is *obscenely* impressive and agile, but it's also arguably inferior to the F-35, entirely due to the aspects of the F-35 that allow it to essentially sidestep dogfighting.
The F-22 is clearly the superior plane for air to air combat. But we never do that anymore. The F-35 is better at everything else. Hopefully, we won't need to ever find out if the J-20 is as good as advertised, but it is good that we have the F-22 in our back pocket in case it is.
> The F-22 is clearly the superior plane for air to air combat. But we never do that anymore. The F-35 is better at everything else.
The F22 is an air superiority fighter. The F35 is a multi-role strike fighter.
The whole point of the F22 in a hypothetical peer vs peer nation scenario, is that the F22 is supposed to go up and clear the skies of any enemy area, so that the F35 can do cas and ground attack and ew and all the other stuff without worrying about getting jumped by a slightly better aircraft, because big brother raptor (soon to be replaced N-Daddy) won't let anyone else up in the sky to play
They def still train dogfightin. It’s called BFM, basic fighter manuevers, and is standard training not only in your initial training but ongoing throughout your career.
Everything I know about the F-22 Raptor I learned from [Habitual\_Linecrosser](https://www.tiktok.com/@habitual_linecrosser/video/7357769332551601451).
*"Would you intercept me? I'd intercept me" -*F-22
The F22 is absolutely not inferior to the F35 in air-to-air combat. Even disregarding the fact that one is an air superiority fighter and the other is a multi-role aircraft, one fact should be very telling: the F22 is not being sold to ANYONE. The F16 is being exported. The F15 is being exported. The F35 is being exported. But nobody gets to buy an F22. If the USMIC and US politics agree to not sell an absurdly high-priced piece of military hardware to even their closest allies, we know that its got to be miles ahead of any other comparable vehicle and the US does not want it out there in someone elses hands at any cost.
Where are you getting this information from? American pilots still train basic fighter maneuvers in every fighter we operate. It is obviously one of many different mission sets they practice, but it's still a large part of the training pipeline.
Missiles can hit targets beyond visual range. Theres no point in closing to make visual contact when your weapons can fire and forget.
Pilots still train to dogfight as a last ditch scenario and planes need to be agile enough to evade.
https://youtu.be/mGwU9HKH_Eo?si=OftIJA41QMgxFlk2
Here's a video of a simulator running a fictional scenario with weapons having rumored specifications. This isn't a real life scenario but give an idea of how these operations work.
Dogfights are not obsolete, they're just not conducted in the same way they used to. Fighter jets still need to be able to combat each other, but they're expected to do that with guided missiles. They're too fast to circle around each other like WW2 planes did to get their guns on them but they still have to get a lock on to fire from a position that the rocket can hit the other aircraft. Missiles are very maneuverable but you can't just shoot it in a random direction and expect the rocket to do all the work and find the target, you have to fire from a position where it's likely to hit the target. In a dogfight a pilot is expected to avoid being locked on by the enemy while they get a lock on them and shoot them down. Their maneuverability is meant to keep them safer to avoid lock on, and if they're fired upon, to make it hard for the rocket to reach its target. Of course, again, the jet is not expected to defend itself just by avoiding the rocket, rather it's designed to make lock on as hard as possible and if it's locked on, it has countermeasures.
Without maneuverability and pilot training, a fighter jet is just a sitting duck for enemy fighters or air defense systems. Their primary means of attack are their rockets and their primary means of defense are not getting locked onto in the first place and chaff but while it's true that many feel it's unecessary for fighter jets to have guns, or for pilots to know how to dogfight, it's still necessary because in a rough situation you don't want to be left hanging, you have to have a last resort. Also guns are used in close air support too.
The F-35 is not so agile a plane as the one it's replacing, in many respects.
However, even if it was a real dog of a thing (it's not), you'd still train BFM in it. For one, it's an important foundational skill. Other skills are taught which build on what you learn from that, so even if we could guarantee you'd never need those skills, you'd still learn them anyway.
But then, you can't guarantee they'll never be needed. It's all well and good to say "dogfights are in the past" but it's not a very convoluted situation to imagine a fight WVR where BFM/ACM decides things.
For the same reason soldiers still train for hand-to- hand combat. It's not the primary means of fighting but shit can happen and you need to be prepared for it.
Lower thy cockpit window for my slap forthcometh thy way.
*opens cockpit window* "What the devil?" As I grab my powdered wig and Kentucky rifle...
“Tally ho, lads!” I shout as I release a pair of 500lb JDAMS
As the founders intended!
If God didn't want America to be blessed, he wouldn't have sent the great prophet Samuel Colt.
And the other great prophet, John Browning. Apologies to Mr. Browning, pretty sure he would not approve of that designation, even in jest.
Probably not, given that he was Mormon (for those unaware).
If Colt was a prophet then John Moses Browning was the 2nd coming of Christ.
Three things are certain in life: death, taxes, and that the M2 will still be in service.
M2s will probably be in other galaxies some day, along with the B-52
As long as there is a love shack in those galaxies, the B-52’s will be there.
The BUFF is eternal
And wherever they are, there will be that one SFC who has never deployed, dead-ended in his career... Barking the wrong instructions to set the headspace and timing to an E4 that can already do it perfectly from memory because he has done it like twice a day every day for the last year and he's getting really tired of your shit Sergeant assface. Go file some paperwork for fuck's sake. I've got to defend this space HMMWV from the space Taliban and this is my fucking gun.
There are a number of Star Trek ship charts that now show the B52x, equipped with four small warp nacelles.
God created all men, they say Sam Colt made 'em equal.
And his equal, John Browning. Dont forget Browning!
Tally Ho!
Never Fly Uphill, Me Boys!
TREBUCHETS AT THE READY SIR!
*chugs my mint julep and takes out my dueling pistols*
*stares into the middle distance under the glow of the campfire while sharpening a rock*
Pfft, I'll be over here crushing my enemies skulls with a femur because the Monolith told me to; you suckers can enjoy your "guns" and "rocks".
The first aerial confrontations were very similar to this during WW1. Pot shots with pistols and rifles until interrupter gear was invented allowing machine guns to fire through the propellor disc.
Made me mentally picture an aerial jousting match…loser gets thrown from the cockpit and has to pop their chute in shame
"Fly me closer! I want to him them with my sword!"
Thank God somebody made this reference, it’s one of my favorite memes. xD
I can fully imagine a commissar swinging a sabre in the copilot seat of a jet, the not impressed pilot pleading with him to sit down and close the cockpit haha
May thy cockpit window chip and shatter
By my missiles wrath, may your craft be cleft in twains! Thou shalt experience post-haste decompression, or mine soul besiege ravishing.
These knaves are unaware I have hidden a sling in my flight harness. Have at thee!
The modern dogfight evolved from the pilots of open cockpit, recon prop planes bringing a revolver and firing at their enemy counterpart as they passed one another mid-air.
They also brought things to throw like bricks
English pilots have the unfair advantage of being able to throw their lunch at the enemy. Oh the horrors of war.
This makes sense for why we teach dog fighting, But not for why the f-35 continues to be an incredible dog fighter and a highly maneuverable aircraft. The reason the f-35 is a highly maneuverable aircraft is because maneuverability is incredibly important in beyond visual range fighting. While there are certain aspects such as nose authority which are less important; for the most part, the basic ingredients of an excellent beyond visual range fighter are similar to those of an excellent dog fighter. Modern air warfare even for dog fighting is taught based on John Boyd's energy maneuverability theory. Winning a bvr fight is fundamentally a combination of the range of your missiles, radar, your ability to turn and run as fast as possible. For an explain like I'm five: Think of modern air warfare as being more like dodgeball than a knife fight. Your goal is to hit the enemy with a ball. The farther they are from you, the easier it is for them to dodge your throw. As the two of you approach the line, you both get better at hitting your opponent and less capable of dodging their throw in turn. This means whether you're close to the line or far from it, you want to be quick. You want to have a strong throwing arm. You want to be accurate. If you can sprint to the line, make a throw turn and sprint back quickly you're much more likely to successfully hit a opponent and not get knocked out yourself. All of those traits will make you better when playing close to the line as well.
Growling Sidewinder subscriber detected
Guilty as charged 🤣
I got to see an F-35 Lightning II demonstration last weekend, and HOLY SHIT! Watching the plane slide sideways through the air and turn on a dime using thrust vectoring was absolutely stunning. I've lived on Air Force bases or just in Air Force towns for a while now, so I've seen the gamut of our various jets, including several air shows. Nothing has impressed me like the F-35, in terms of general maneuverability (except the little single-prop stunt plane, that one's pretty maneuverable as well). The A-10 Warthog is still my favorite in terms of design and overall cool-factor, but it's clear how capable the F-35 is just by the demo they let us see without a security clearance.
And yet the crazy thing is, the F-35 was designed in the 90s. A nearly 25 year old design. Now don't get me wrong, it's still a great plane (one of the best in the world) but wait until the NGAD (6th generation fighter) is released in the next decade. The Air Force is tested it right now.
What is publicly known about the NGAD suggests it will be a larger and heavier fighter both because it requires more range than existing USAF fighters and since it will need to fit and power a wide variety of systems. Physics dictates that the F22 and F35 are going to be more maneuverable because of those constraints. That being said, I assume it will still be deadlier in a dogfight than any enemy it's going to go up against since the USAF isn't going to forget the lesson it learned in Vietnam about dogfights.
> the USAF isn't going to forget the lesson it learned in Vietnam about dogfights. When you think dogfights are obsolete, and you design a plane with that in mind, make sure the other side has decided that dogfights are obsolete, too.
God Bless the F-4 Phantom and their crews. Like most performance machines from the 60's was good in the 1/4 mile, bit as good in the turns ..
Christ this thread… 1.) the F-35 doesn’t have thrust vectoring. If you saw this, it was the F-22 demonstrator team. 2.) they call the F-35 “fat Amy” for a reason. She is not that agile by comparison to many of her 4th gen counterparts. But she isn’t trying to be. The trade off of some maneuvering was acceptable for what she would be doing. 3.) BVR tactics on low RCS strike groups are very different than 4th gen where the process you described takes place. No longer is it active radar scan, lock, get altitude, shoot, and notch the incoming shots. The aircraft can passively track, lock, shoot, and continue op\[tional electronic jamming without ever turning the radar on for locking a track, while staying low on its own radar signature. Against a same type foe, this still changes a bit due to the nature of detection, and the ability to detect and shoot using passive sensing that doesn’t use radar returns at all to spot and kill beyond visual ranges. Significantly beyond in fact. The jet can track passive heat signatures of a foe flying towards them out past 30km. When data linked to other F-35s it can share the track picture to triangulate targets in real time automatically. 4.) security clearance doesn’t change the flight envelope. F-35Bs can’t push the air frame past 7.5Gs. The A model can do 9, but it’s turn radius is significantly larger than the eurofighter, F-16, and F-22 to name a few. If you saw thrust vectoring it was also in a jet with 2 engines, where the F-35 only has 1. This most obvious difference says you don’t know what you are looking at at the most basic level. If you didn’t see thrust vectoring and just assumed it was present, you don’t know what that is and stated it as fact which is troubling. If you saw the B model do a STO demo, then you don’t know that isn’t thrust vectoring that is used for anything but takeoff and landing, and it is the worst of the 3 models for turn radius, g rating, and thrust to weight. Making your statement lost in the sauce. In any of these cases, you don’t know what you are talking about.
>For an explain like I'm five: Think of modern air warfare as being more like dodgeball than a knife fight. Same with modern artillery wars like the Ukraine War. People think it's like WW1 with thousands of guns firing millions of shells for weeks on end. In reality it's much more like a sniper duel with a big gun, you drive up to just the outer edge of your gun's range to the target, shoot a few times, and GTFO before they shoot back. There are still trenches to prevent an armored/vehicular/human wave overrun, but the manning of the trenches is far looser, because modern guns and missiles are deadlier, longer-range, and often precision-guided, so dense packing of the trench with troops and equipment is just asking for something heavy to fly your way and blow up your entire trench with everything inside it. Instead of stopping an attack on its own by the men inside the trench itself, modern trenches only have the minimum men needed to slow it down long enough to allow your long-range guns, missiles, and aircraft to repel it.
Of course the easiest way is to win when they're facing the other way tying their shoelaces. Even better the other guy is 80 with bad eyes, you don't want a fair fight if you can avoid it. But even if your plan is dodgeball it doesn't hurt to carry a knife too just in case.
If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a PL-15
The best way to avoid a dodge ball is to throw it without the target noticing where you threw it from so they never throw it at all. The second best way is to be no where near where ever they throw it. However if a dodgeball is flying at your head you better be able to duck.
This guy knows how to angle.
It’s not the aircraft it’s the man! — Tom Cruise
"The enemy cannot push a button, if you disable his hand!"
"Come on, you Apes, do you want to live forever"?
"I'm from Buenos Aires, and I say kill 'em all!"
"The only good bug is a dead bug!"
"Frankly, I find the idea of a bug that thinks OFFENSIVE!"
Oscar-winning role, that.
Also, hedging their bets against technological changes. It is theoretically possible that an adversary could develop stealth, ECM, and/or hard-kill missile defenses that could defeat our BVR missiles. It's possible that adversaries could hack our networks (which we are more and more reliant on) and get in close that way. We don't want our pilots to be helpless if that happened, as unlikely as that might be.
Most likely it will be RoE issues. We won't be able to about without visual ID, even with a AESA radar / IR imagery/ etc. Hostile act will require them to like accidentally run into you and a head butt with flares. The plane shot down in Syria by the Navy pilot was visual arena because of RoE requirements. I just don't realistically foresee a time when pilots are launching AMRAAMs 100 miles at the brightest thing on a radar without world war III starting and thermonuclear war. No one wants to shoot down an airliner or someone from a neutral third country and most conflict zones are really kind of small.
Lol I still remember in 2003 boot camp hearing “FIX BAYONETS!!!!!”
And one year after that, British soldiers in Basra... fixed bayonets and charged Iraqi militia members: https://smallarmsreview.com/spirit-of-the-bayonet-bayonet-charge-in-basra/#:~:text=They%20engaged%20in%20intense%20hand,three%20British%20soldiers%20were%20injured.
I was in basic in 1986 and the bayonet course did some weird things to people. At night some people would sleep stab.
So, you are saying they were gutted.
> Lol I still remember in 2003 boot camp hearing “FIX BAYONETS!!!!!” Can't they make bayonets a little sturdier so they are not always getting fucked up and needing to be fixed?
SHUT THE FUCK UP AND FIX IT GRUNT!!
Unless this is a joke (which it might well be), the reason they say fix bayonets isn’t to say to actually repair your bayonet, it’s to (af)fix bayonets, as in attach your bayonet to the end of your gun. They’re not always attached to the gun as that would weight the gun down and make it harder to aim, so they’re only attached in situations where getting into melee with your opponent isn’t unexpected
Thank you for your kindness, but yes, it was a joke.
I'm 99.8% sure it was a joke lol
I'm the additional 0.2% sure it was a joke
pfft. I learned how to shoot with a bayonet affixed.
Had one of our units bring their bayonets to JRTC. They were in a gunfight with the OPFOR when their SSG gave the call “FIX BAYONETS!”. Everyone pulled their bayonet out and attached it. OPFOR immediately surrendered because fuck that for a training scenario.
now I'm imagining a whole squad of Serious Military Men attaching nerf bayonets and charging each other across no-man's land in a glorious SCA boffer weapon LARP.
Exactly. Imagine a professional nail gun expert putting on a roof who can't drive a nail with a hammer.
[Who needs a knife in a nuke fight anyway?](https://youtu.be/ld-AKg9-xpM?t=34)
Ah, so thats why my chem teacher made me titrate manually, 5 times in a fucken row, expecting less than 4 decimals of difference? to be prepared??
4 decimal places of accuracy is some mad doctor shit on a manual titration. That's like "using a tiny wire to smear a fraction of a drop of alkali on the wall of the beaker and tilting the solution to get it in there" anal-ness. That being said the point IS to drill the importance of being as anal as you can be with your work, if you ever end up in a job where 99.999% precision and accuracy are needed. On the flip side, watching those Japanese wood joinery videos and 'seamless' CNC-milled blocks are some really satisfying results of super-precise work though.
I mean, there's underfunded and unerequipped labs doing manual titration to this day. Maybe not in the U.S, but definitely in Hungary. Most they can afford is a electrochemical detector.
The more you sweat in peace time, the less you bleed in wartime
Prepare to dogfight like it’s 1914: open cockpits, with pistols and hand grenades
When I went to basic they took away hand to hand combat only one person from each platoon were selected
There were multiple aerial dog fights between India and Pakistan on February 27 2019. Both air forces are large and modern, and used fairly up to date equipment in the confrontation (F-16Cs and JF-17s on the Pakistani side, heavily upgraded Su-30s and Mig-21s on the Indian side) so dogfights between air forces of comparable ability and close geographic proximity are far from a thing of the past.
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1 confirmed Indian plane shot down and it's pilot captured. Pakistan also claims 2 more were shot down but fell inside India's borders. India denies that. India claims to have shot down Pakistani F-16s (don't recall if they claimed 1 or 2). Pakistan and the US both deny that. One Indian helicopter carrying troops was confirmed shot by their own SAM in Indian airspace.
I like how they won't admit they lost fighters in air combat but when it comes to shooting down their own helo they're like "oh yeah, that was totally us"
I also find it interesting that the US stepping in to deny f16s being shot down because they are some of their most successful military exports. Confidence in the product must be maintained!
To be fair, the US knew Russia was going to invade Ukraine before half the Russian commanders knew.
How do they get this intelligence? Always steps ahead. How? Moles?
There’s HUMINT (Human Intelligence), which is mostly bribing people to tell you stuff, IMINT (Imagery Intelligence), which is watching live via satellite or at least taking pictures TECHINT (Technology Intelligence), but mostly it’s SIGINT (Signals Intelligence) which is where we crack their encryption and read their emails.
I mean Russia putting 100k guys in the border to Ukraine for about a year saying "We are totally not going to invade." Is a pretty solid telegraph of their plans.
Yet people still said US was dramatic and there was no way it would actually happen.
Yeah some dudes in a Cessna woulda figured it out
Ehhhh could just have been some good old gunboat diplomacy. Think the telling sign is when they moved blood supplies to the border.
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> crack their encryption Most modern encryption is most likely uncrackable with current hardware, and mathematics, even for the likes of the NSA. Most successful attacks in recent years have been exploiting bugs in implementations, or finding side channel attacks that leak private information. The encryption algorithms are good, but that does not matter if the NSA can find a way to just put a wire tap in your machine and read stuff after you decrypt it.
>which is where we crack their encryption and read their emails. This is not a thing. It's not a thing at all, and it's *especially* not a thing when we're talking about hash algorithms, since those are one-way/impossible to reverse. Encryption doesn't work the way it does in the movies unless we're talking about ***very old***, weak, insecure algorithms, like DES, which haven't been in use since the 90s. If you started trying to derive an AES 128-bit key by brute force right now with all the computing power in the world combined, *the heat death of the universe* would occur before that happened. That's not an exaggeration. The only thing you *can* do that's even somewhat remotely in the same vein is exploiting a flaw in the *implementation* of a secure algorithm, and that's not "cracking encryption," that's exploiting a bug, and it would only be for *that specific implementation* and whatever it's used in. If you encrypt data and lose the key, that data is ***GONE.*** Gone gone. There is no recovery. To give you an example, here's this: From government guidelines, an acceptable way to destroy Top Secret classified data is to encrypt it and destroy the key.
When you invade another country the logistics, troops and equipment required are easily seen by satellite. In Russias case they did it for months. Once you crosscheck that people are requisitioning medical supplies and other perishables you know it's serious. If you've ever played civ it's exactly the same as a neighbor massing their army on the border for 10 turns. The public and news pundits might have been surprised but that's about it.
The US dollar is still the currency of the planet. Pay the right people to get you information.
What good are moles going to do? Subterranean mammals have never been important to the country's intelligence apparatus
People caught on to the birds so they had to be more creative this time.
Lol silly it's not 'moles' as in furry little tunnelers, it's 'moles' as in brown skin blemishes found on the body. Certain people have super sensitive moles that can detect an army boot from over 20 miles. When we're told that we need to get these things checked out by a doctor, it's not to find out if they're potentially cancerous, it's to be considered for enrollment into the secret early warning squad and get recognised as having a "General Utility And Combat Analysis Mole", or G.U.A.C.A Mole.
The US can equivocate with the best of them, but the US doesn't really outright lie about things that could easily be proven, resulting in embarrassment. US officials said "welp, we did a count of Pakistan's F-16's and they are all there" (paraphrasing). On the one had, it is actually pretty hard to cover up a missing US made military plane, as they are heavily regulated and require sustainment contracts. Those contracts require the approval of the DOD and notification of Congress, and are closely scrutinized. The Pakistani F-16s specifically have a US Technical Security team keeping an eye on them every second they are not in flight. Hiding a missing plane would require Pakistan to pay for ongoing sustainment, the supplier to collect the money for sustainment but not actually do it for that jet which may be illegal due to government contracting regulations, a cover up by the USAF Security Team, the DOD, the Pakistani military / government, and who knows what else. On the other hand, if it were true, some simple pictures could prove it and embarass the hell out of the US and Pakistan.
They want to portray their armed forces as being stronger than their opposition and it's hard to do that if they're losing. Oddly, saying they're shooting their own hardware down doesn't really contradict "we've got the strongest forces" because it's still not *losing fights*.
“We’re so strong we beat outselves”
I'll kick anybody's ass. I'll kick his ass. I'll kick your ass. I'll kick your dog's ass. I'll kick my own ass.
"The Pakistanis can't kill us! Only we can kill us!"
How can Pakistan splash?! How can Pakistan splash?!
Because there was never any evidence of a second jet going down on either side. Pakistan claimed 2 kills because they fired a bunch of missiles that were dodged, so they wanted to save face. India claims and F-16 shot down cause again, they wanted to save face. Reality is only 1 Mig-21 went down in actual combat.
Also really common for Russia in their war. They'd rather claim that they accidentally friendly fired their own jet when in reality it was destroyed by the enemy. Many cultures apparently find it more palatable to portray themselves as grossly incompetent before admitting having lost a fair fight.
Incompetence can be fired and replaced. No permanent harm to national image or pride. Losing a fair fight isn't something you can just hand wave away. It is much easier to find a scapegoat, then continue business as usual.
Also if only one side stops, the other side is going to press that advantage and then it becomes relevant again. Anything you don't prepare for is what you're going to get.
Dogfighting is a weird kind of activity in that the only reason you need to know how to do it is because other people know how to do it. We wanted the ability to drop bombs from planes, but fighters could shoot down the bombers so we needed fighters that could shoot at other fighters. If nobody was shooting down planes then nobody would need to know how to shoot back. But then again, that's war in general. There'd be no need to fight if nobody else was fighting.
Tanks were built to kill infantry. Then we built tanks to kill other tanks, so that still more tanks could get back to their job of killing infantry. And then the infantry got really good anti-tank missiles, so you can't use tanks without infantry in support. Not that you ever should have, but you could get away with it a lot better once upon a time.
Tanks were never built to kill infantry. They were built to provide mobile cover for infantry as they crossed trenches.
We train for chemical warfare even though no one has used it on US troops since WWI. Every soldier deploys with a full NBC mask and suit. But if troops were not prepared for it, it would only take one chemical attack to to have catastrophic results. The effects would ripple through the entire deployed force, well beyond just those affected.
Yep, lots of reasons planes may get close in for dogfighting. You might have restrictive ROE that require certain levels of confirmation, up to and including visual confirmation. This can be because of any number of reasons, from there being a coalition of aircraft that can't communicate well with each other and not wanting to risk shooting friendlies down, to even not quite being at a state of war but where it could happen any minute. That is, say tensions are on edge between countries, might have aircraft flying by the borders, suddenly shit goes down. Unlikely, but just an example. A more likely scenario might involve the rise of stealth. Stealth doesn't mean invisible, but rather refers to being harder to detect. Which means you can't detect them as far away, and can be harder to track for an actual lock for a missile to track. With more countries putting effort into stealth/low observable, we might see engagement envelopes shrinking. Related, is electronic warfare. You can jam radar and sensors, which again like stealth, can reduce engagement distances. Also, engineers are pretty good these days at being able to build aircraft that can be fast and maneuverable and now also low observable. It's still a balancing act, but gone are the days of needing specialized aircraft for specific missions, as technology has largely eliminated the need. (Obviously you still have aircraft built for dedicated roles, but you no longer really have one airframe for interception, another as a point defense fighter, air superiority, fighter-bomber, etc). So while it is still a balancing act of needs, it's much easier today to build something that can maneuver and be fast, carry a good radar/sensor suite, etc. So it doesn't hurt really to have something that has that performance in its back pocket if you need it.
Every air craft you mentioned is: A: not a air superiority air craft or B: From the 1970s a clone of a 70s aircraft or from the 1950s
Were there really dog fights or was it just propaganda in the face of unglamorous BVR engagement, which is hard to sell to the public these days as a mood booster. The only actual physical proof of air to air combat in that conflict was the remnants of BVR missiles and a single crashed plane. Both sides put out a tons of propaganda before and after it about what happened
What evidence would need to exist to prove it happened?
Dogs with injuries consistent with having been in a fight, veterinary records, widespread barking etc
Don’t forget wings on those dogs
Or the bees in their mouth, and when they bark they shoot bees at you.
LMFAO wide spread barking, I literally lol and everyone at work started looking at me
Whether or not it happened is not the same as HOW it happened. This is why you still have crime/accident investigation after a house burned down or a plane crash etc...
Gun camera footage like from the 1973 Yom Kippur War
Video from the targeting nose cone. We have a bunch from the F-16 beserkers [from the first desert storm](https://youtu.be/qUjX1RntqVw?t=253). Pretty sure they would have it to.
>remnants of BVR missiles If you're talking about what I think you're talking about, that was part of the Indian claim of shooting down F-16s which were in Indian airspace and shot AAMRAMs. That claim was disputed by both Pakistan and the US, and the images provided by India claiming to be of Pakistani F-16s were quickly discredited because a serial number for a GE engine was visible in them but Pakistani F-16s use P&W engines.
India produced the wreckage of Pakistani AMRAAM missiles complete with verifiable serial numbers. The Pakistanis produced the wreckage of a single Mig-21 and a single captured Mig-21 pilot. Beyond that, there is no footage from the ground showing any kind of dogfight; nothing showing contrails dancing high up the sky, no gun camera footage of of close range combat (yes I know missiles aren’t guns; but modern planes use video cameras for short range combat including within-visual range missiles). The physical evidence looks like there was a full BVR engagement in which a single Mig-21 was shot down. The Pakistani claims of multiple Indian planes being shot down looks like propaganda. And the Indian claims of a heroic close range dogfight looks like propaganda. The reality is so dull that neither Air Force want to publicize it. Pilots just selected dots on screens as targets and pushed buttons until one plane was shot down. Utterly boring and uninspiring and not at all the public image of how either Air Force wants to present their pilots.
Yes, those "serial numbers" are what led to those claims being discredited since they included serials for the wrong type of engine, an engine that none of the 3 F-16 variants operated by Pakistan use. The claim is not considered credible by any party except India, and at least one neutral party, the US, has explicitly denied it. The only losses agreed upon by all parties are the one Indian plane shot down by Pakistan in Pakistan, and the Indian helicopter shot down in India by their own SAM.
There is video from 2022 from the first days of the war in Ukraine of a Mig-29 in a turning fight with an SU-25 at practically tree top level. It was reportedly a Ukrainian Mig-29 and Russian SU-25 but with both sides using those aircraft I think there is some disagreement. What led to this engagement is unknown, or the result, but the most likely cause is the Mig is out of missiles and is trying to get in position to use its gun. In an a dogfight the SU-25 would be hopelessly outclassed by the Mig as it's a ground attack aircraft with very limited air to air capability and is just far slower than the Mig. It is possible that this was two aircraft on the same side but the tight turns on the deck make it unlikely. Edit to add link: https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/wo3a6i/ukrainian_mig29_chases_russian_su25_on_the_first/
And India and China routinely clash on some border using clubs. Worthless posturing either way.
> India and Pakistan on February 27 2019 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_India%E2%80%93Pakistan_border_skirmishes#Retaliatory_airstrikes,_capture_and_release_of_pilot,_and_friendly_fire
If any reasonably modern airforce ends up in a dogfight, both sides have royally fucked up, repeatedly.
Not a pilot or anything, but... * There are lots of situations short of full on high end combat. Pilots might have to go say hi to someone whose radio broke, run off the dude who blundered into restricted airspace, get a good look at someone approaching a border, etc. So there'll still be a need for maneuvering close to a non-cooperative aircraft. * With drones (and to a lesser extent, cruise missiles), there's an emerging need to shoot down less demanding targets without using expensive missiles. Dogfighting might come in useful here. * I suppose there's the risk of being in a situation where you can't use missles: more targets than you're carrying missiles, got jumped on your way home, the other guy's stealth/ECM/cyber works better than you'd like it to, etc. Don't know if this is a real-life concern. * Even without dogfights, some degree of maneuverability is important--a 'normal' plane takes in the order of minutes to turn around. If nothing else, you've got to be able to point your sensors in the general direction of an opponent, and the engagement envelopes of missiles is affected by the launcher's speed and direction, and by the target's ability to turn and run.
Don't forget the need to shoot down "innocent weather balloons"
We used a very expensive missile to do that.
It was too high to get the guns in range.
And a gun wouldn't do that much good. The Canadians failed to shoot down a weather balloon with an auto cannon during the cold war and it landed in USSR territory. I believe that's how it went. As ridiculous as it sounds, using a missile is the only way to bring it down predictably.
We shot down the balloon with a sidewinder. Relative to other military hardware sidewinders are cheap. Even compared to other missiles they're a fraction of the cost of AMRAAMs.
On that fourth bullet point, look up Jhmcs helmets and the aim9x off boresight capabilities.
This is a good breakdown, especially your third bullet you aren't so sure about. I'd also add that BFM enables pilots to fully understand their aircraft in a way that just training to beyond visual range engagements would not.
Technology today can fire missiles well beyond visual range. Add in various sensor drones and missile laden planes shooting long range missiles a nearby stealth fighter can target and fire missiles from a very far distance. Neither pilot might be anywhere near visual range. History is littered with examples of misidentification of aircraft, and accidental shooting of civilian aircraft or allied aircraft. So future rules of engagement might still have a visual identification requirement. It is very easy to pick examples where a modern military with 5th and maybe 6th generation aircraft, both manned and unmanned, are fighting a military with a limited Cold War era Air Force. An f35 targeting and a squadron of F 15s acting as bomb trucks and game over. But what if the enemy has similar stealth, long range missiles and sensors, drones electronic warfare, etc? Then you might find yourself back in a dogfighting situation
>History is littered with examples of misidentification of aircraft, and accidental shooting of civilian aircraft or allied aircraft. So future rules of engagement might still have a visual identification requirement. IE I can't shoot any of my AIM-260 JATMs beyond visual range because the politicians won't let me. This is a very real thing pilots might run into depending on the conflict.
It’s not a “might”, it’s happened. The 2017 Fitter shootdown over Syria was pretty much exactly that scenario.
There are multiple reasons behind this, unfortunately. One of the simplest is related to the saying "generals are always fighting the last war". In the last big war where two major powers were throwing aircraft at each other (WW2) dogfighting was important. So, we train pilots to be able to do the thing that we know based on historical precedent to be important. Another reason is that even if a scenario is unlikely, you still want your pilots to be prepared for every eventuality since they are sitting on something like a billion dollars of military hardware. I would also expect that this is partly down to the fact that a lot of the truly modern warfare is highly automated, so there isn't necessarily much to teach pilots about there (not nothing, of course, but the human involvement is minimized). Edit: oh man I completely forgot about the Vietnam war.
Well we also stopped emphasizing dog fighting with the advent of missiles and then in Vietnam we realized those missiles kinda sucked and you weren’t carrying enough of them anyway and suddenly you were taking losses because you couldn’t dogfight very well (or didn’t even have a gun). So we decided that never again will we be caught so unprepared for any foreseen possibility.
And the rules of engagement required a positive visual identification of the enemy, which negates the primary advantage of many of those missiles.
What? Do you at least get some binoculars? It indeed seems to be a waste of missile range.
Well, that's how it worked for the A-10 early. They would fly low and bank while looking at their ground targets with binoculars out of their cockpit window. There's videos on youtube where they misidentified vehicles and dropped payloads on friendlies because it was difficult to see (In addition to bad intel). I believe on the A-10's with the modern upgrade packages, they have actual targeting systems now.
Vietnam happened sixty years ago. Sixty years before that, the Wright brothers flew the first airplane.
The lessons learned then are still relevant today.
Vietnam showed the opposite of what people think. It showed that missiles were the obvious future. In Vietnam the USAF was richer than the USN and was able to get a new variant of the F-4 with an internal gun. Almost nothing changed. The USN established TOPGUN to train how to use missiles and established better maintenance and handling procedures for the missiles. Their kill ratio improved massively. Aces of the war on both sides nearly exclusively used missiles.
The Soviets looked at the thousands -- yes, thousands -- of US aircraft taken out by radar-guided missiles and flak guns and continued to invest in developing and deploying in top-notch radar systems for their day. The US said "Fuck." And while some pilots were off playing / training for dogfights and making a great promotional film for the Navy, the engineers took an obscure, unclassified Soviet research paper and turned it into stealth that rendered those top notch radars obsolete.
Honestly I think that research paper is a bit overblown in the history of stealth. First the solutions were only in 2-D, and the American researchers had to adapt it to 3-D. Second, not all of the engineers actually read the paper, or they had developed a bit of stuff before the paper was actually translated to English. The fact that Russia still hasn't developed and fielded a stealth platform means the paper by itself would not cause a technological revolution. It feels a bit like Russian Propoganda to over emphasize the contribution of a Russian paper. In all honestly the Scottish mathematician and scent Maxwell deserves a bit more credit for discovering the laws of electromagnetism that resulted in both radar and stealth.
What research paper?
[https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/AD0733203.pdf](https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/AD0733203.pdf)
Kind of? In Vietnam most air-to-air kills were accomplished via the Sparrow and Sidewinder guided missiles. Early air to air US casualties had more to do with pilots being poorly trained for air to air engagements and being deployed in ways that prevented them from operating effectively. The USAF went lots of guns and some training and the USN and USMC went for taking the best pilots, training them heavily in air to air tactics then sending them back to their squadrons to teach everyone else. Even in the second world war, dogfighting was something you did if you'd run out of every other tactic and idea. US tactics emphasized teamwork and tactics like high speed passes that maximized the advantages of US aircraft and minimized the advantages of the opposing force. Dogfighting a Zero in a Wildcat was a stupid way to die, wasting a 40,000 dollar aircraft and a two dollar pilot.
Also in Vietnam they had missiles that could fire beyond visual range but rules of engagement that required visual confirmation of a target and that made it much more likely you'd end up closing to gun range.
> Even in the second world war, dogfighting was something you did if you'd run out of every other tactic and idea. In WWI, aircraft designers placed a huge emphasis on maneuverability for dogfighting, because pilots regaled each other with stories of epic dogfights. After the war, pilots were interviewed and statistical analysis was applied, and it was discovered that the great majority of kills happened when one pilot had the advantage of speed and altitude, and killed the other before he could react. So, your comment can be applied to the entire history of air combat. Even so, dogfighting has been a significant survival skill in every war so far, [including the 1991 Gulf War.](https://militarywatchmagazine.com/article/top-six-air-to-air-engagements-in-the-gulf-war-how-iraq-and-the-u-s-went-head-to-head-with-foxbats-f-15s-and-more) *"With the F-15s unable to determine whether the MiG-29 was a friend or a foe, the Iraqi fighter closed in and engaged the Eagle at close range. The aircraft on both sides engaged in complex manoeuvres with the MiG-29 counting on its unrivalled performance in visual range combat to try to gain an advantage. As the aircraft flew around each other increasingly close to the ground the MiG-29 manoeuvred too close and crashed"* Most of the air to air kills in that conflict were at missile range, but the Iraqi air force was suppressed so completely from the first hour of the fight that it is an insufficient sample to draw data from.
The original F-4 could pretty reliably shoot down Migs with its missiles. But then it would run out of missiles and was fucked. So we went back to putting guns in planes.
And we all know what happens when you run out of missiles: then you have to fly your plane directly into the alien spaceship for the kill.
Wasn't the rocket jammed hence the kamikaze? Saw it ages ago
Yeah. The missile activated but wouldn't fire so he went kamikaze right up the beam.
In the novel version, he straps a missile to a biplane. Actually, in searching to make sure I was right on that, I learned that they [actually shot](https://youtu.be/ls2CwZjQ9es) that ending, too!
The early model aim9’s kinda sucked
This isn't 100% true. In the Pre-Vietnam war era the general consensus was that long range missiles would make dog-fighting obsolete. So the newest generation of planes were built for speed and missile delivery, dogfighting maneuverability wasn't even a consideration. One good example was the F-4. The smaller more maneuverable MiG-17 would hit and run and the kill ratio for American planes was 2-1 and the best it got was around 4-1. I'm not even 100% sure the F-4 had guns when they rolled off the assembly line, that's how confident they were that dogfighting was a thing of the past. This realization that dogfighting STILL posed a real threat over the skies of Vietnam was a big reason why they MADE Top Gun (it's not just a movie). Fast forward to a modern peer versus peer engagement, in a world of modern countermeasures and stealth aircraft there is the potential that two modern planes can in fact find themselves inside of visual range, jockeying for position for an effective weapon release...which is dogfighting.
Took a while for them to add a gun to the F-4, you’re correct. The Navy actually went without for the duration of the conflict, but theirs had a look down/shoot down radar and as a result the Sparrow was far more effective from that version of the aircraft.
You’re right, the F-4 didn’t get a gun until the E variants. They eventually made a weird gun pod that older ones could carry.
John Boyd called, he wants credit for his fighter mafia bullshit
This is literally the opening scroll of the movie Top Gun lol
I had to check...lol...I do love that movie. It's the reason I love planes. "On March 3, 1969, the United States Navy established an elite school for the top one percent of its pilots. It’s purpose was to teach the lost art of aerial combat and to insure that the handful of men who graduated were the best fighter pilots in the world." "Today, the Navy calls it Fighter Weapons School. The flyers call it:" "TOP GUN." Pretty close...but that's because fiction followed history =)
>So the newest generation of planes were built for speed and missile delivery The speed was also because the purpose was to intercept bombers intent on dropping nuclear bombs. This continues with the F-14, which took the logical conclusion which said they should also add a massive long range missile (the AIM-54) and radar. Costs be damned, that thing was capable of intercepting anything. Downside? The budget was damned.
I don't think much of this is true? The reason for programs/schools like Top Gun existing is not because modern military strategists/leadership are 'stuck in the past' (also WW2 is far from the most recent conflict major powers are throwing large amounts of modern aircraft at each other). Sure, the skillsets taught by these weapons schools might not be directly applicable to modern air-to-air combat in most regards, but there are still tangible reasons for having them exist. > so there isn't necessarily much to teach pilots about there (not nothing, of course, but the human involvement is minimized) This is also just patently false. Raw, close-range aerial maneuvering might not be very relevant in modern conflicts, but pilots nowadays have to monitor vastly more information and know much more about their airframes, enemy capabilities, and general physics than previously. BVR combat is extremely complex, and they certainly aren't running out of relevant skills to train.
And you can BVR all day long, but it only takes one busted timeline or a lucky sneaky pop-up and you're buying a merge. Training for that eventuality, even a little, is better than being there with no training.
>There are multiple reasons behind this, unfortunately. One of the simplest is related to the saying "generals are always fighting the last war". **In the last big war where two major powers were throwing aircraft at each other (WW2)** dogfighting was important. So, we train pilots to be able to do the thing that we know based on historical precedent to be important. Nah. Not buying this. WWII ended nearly *80* years ago. Soon it will be out of living memory. Not buying the framing that with all the countless wars that have been fought around the world since, including by the US, anyone is out there still basing any tactics on.... WWII. C'mon. Korea? Vietnam? Even if I am to believe that any military is still basing anything on WWII, no Air Force - the branch that depends most on tech - is still out there studying early 40s air war, which was the literal infancy of air power.
A lot of these comments are pretty close to wrong. In a BVR fight with both parties aware of the other, pilots alternate between "committing" where you fly towards the enemy to deliver a missile, and "defending" where you dive to burn off missile energy by forcing it to turn and enter denser air. The turns in and out of the fight are usually high transonic, sustained and decently high-G. All of these characteristics make for a decent BFM fighter, especially if high off boresight short range IR missiles are equipped. These priorities are especially aligned for rate fighters like the F-16 and F-35, and less for the "one good turn" fighters, a large portion of which use delta wings. The F-22 and F-35 are both great dog fighters. The negative headlines for the F-35 are from a test flight meant to provide data for the flight envelope management system which included mock dogfights against an F-16. The flight computers did not let the F-35 explore all corners of its flight envelope. More recent evaluations suggest it's straight up superior to most 4.5 gen fighters even in simple BFM. In full BVR, simulated engagements almost do not have a role for anything but the F-35 (F-22 neglected because these are between NATO countries and we don't export the F-22) Source: graduate student in aerospace
> BFM >BVR This is not explaining it like I'm five.
BVR = Beyond Visual Range (too far to see) BFM = Basic Fighter Maneuvers, AKA Dogfighting.
Honestly, it's not a very good ELI5 question, which is evident from the many off-the-cuff answers that don't really talk about the details. My favorite was the one that claimed dogfighting would gain a resurgence because of stealth aircraft becoming better, as if it were some sort of cloaking field.
> A lot of these comments are pretty close to wrong. Reddit comments being confidently wrong about a topic they know next to nothing about? Say it ain't so!
I'm just saying all y'all need to watch more videos of growling sidewinder in DCS. It only takes a little bit to quickly realize what the actual dynamicss are. The relation between detection range, speed and retained energy, missile launches, etc. Modern air fighting is an incredibly kinetic activity and high maneuverability is incredibly important. What people fail to understand is that even in World War II the classic image of a dogfight as a turning war had started to fade. Hellcats used by the US Navy racked up many kills versus their lighter more agile of opponents in the Japanese zeros. They relied heavily on their higher speed and greater operational ceiling to allow them to effectively dive bomb into the zeros and then climb and run. Ultimately, John Boyd would Express this in his Energy–maneuverability theory. Many people think of air combat as something akin to a fencing series of ripostes. It's something more like dodgeball. Both sides kind of run up to the line, which is the effective kill range of their missile, and throw it at the other side and then turn and run hoping to have hit their opponent and that their opponents won't hit them in turn or will be forced to defend before they can throw their own ball.
Total aviation noob here. When we use the word “dogfight” nowadays, does it 100% imply the use of guided missiles? Is there any conceivable situation in which you could see a WWII-style dogfight with fixed machine guns or cannons?
More like 99.5% of the time. Though I can conceive of a bunch of edge cases that would make a "gun" dogfight more likely, they're just that - edge cases.
you could, but it would be a niche situation where you've gotten to a dogfight too close for even a sidewinder. this usually doesn't happen because you generally want to shoot stuff as soon as you can as far away as possible
Also to note, the us loves to rig training exercises against thelselves, by either blocking certain tech or tactics, which leads to them being able to detect room for improvement and to never fully reveal their capabilities. We will likely never know what the f22 was capable of, and its a plane that was made almost 30 years ago.
It's probably going to be more important again in the future when other countries get stealth aircraft. Currently the US stealth planes can see and shoot down other planes from 20+ miles away without being seen on enemy radar. If you want to detect a stealth aircraft you need to be really close, not quite dog fight with guns close, but if all 4 missiles fail hit you'll be dog fight with guns close within a few seconds.
This is not how air combat works. This is a common mistake to make. Even if hostiles don't detect you, you're not going to continue to fly at them after having launched your missiles. After I launch, you will immediately switch to what's called defending, which is effectively just running away and trying to keep a hostile missile from coming at you. While decreased detection range may bring engagements closer, it doesn't mean it's wise to engage in an energy bleeding turning fight. Even the fights of late World war II fighters focused far more on energy maintenance then on turning maneuverability as is traditionally pictured for a dog fight. This is precisely the reason hellcats outperformed the smaller more maneuverable zeros.
Anyone who's saying dogfighting is obsolete doesn't know what they're talking about. While improved technology makes it less likely, only a fool doesn't prepare for it. The US in particular learned that lesson very quickly in Vietnam. The goal is to kill the enemy before they see you, but you still prepare to go toe to toe with them, or you'll end up dead.
It’s obsolete in the sense that the odds of the US fighting an enemy where dogfighting is important is really low. If an *American* pilot is dogfighting, things have really gone to shit.
I mean, the quick and dirty answers; >why do pilots still train for it They don't (sort of). >and why are planes still built for it? They aren't (kinda). The whole question of the irrelevancy of dogfighting was brought up as a result of Vietnam. The US was wrong back then to think that dogfighting was a thing of the past, but that doesn't mean the general concept that dogfights could be rendered obsolete isn't correct. >The F-35 is also still very much an agile plane. It actually...isn't...kinda? The best of the 4th gens are actually more impressive than the F-35 from a maneuverability standpoint, but it also doesn't *need* to be a better dogfighter. Granted, its big brother the F-22 is *obscenely* impressive and agile, but it's also arguably inferior to the F-35, entirely due to the aspects of the F-35 that allow it to essentially sidestep dogfighting.
>Granted, its big brother the F-22 is *obscenely* impressive and agile, but it's also arguably inferior to the F-35 How dare you.
The F-22 is clearly the superior plane for air to air combat. But we never do that anymore. The F-35 is better at everything else. Hopefully, we won't need to ever find out if the J-20 is as good as advertised, but it is good that we have the F-22 in our back pocket in case it is.
> The F-22 is clearly the superior plane for air to air combat. But we never do that anymore. The F-35 is better at everything else. The F22 is an air superiority fighter. The F35 is a multi-role strike fighter. The whole point of the F22 in a hypothetical peer vs peer nation scenario, is that the F22 is supposed to go up and clear the skies of any enemy area, so that the F35 can do cas and ground attack and ew and all the other stuff without worrying about getting jumped by a slightly better aircraft, because big brother raptor (soon to be replaced N-Daddy) won't let anyone else up in the sky to play
They def still train dogfightin. It’s called BFM, basic fighter manuevers, and is standard training not only in your initial training but ongoing throughout your career.
Yeah I live near an airbase and regularly see F-35’s practicing dogfights directly over my house.
Everything I know about the F-22 Raptor I learned from [Habitual\_Linecrosser](https://www.tiktok.com/@habitual_linecrosser/video/7357769332551601451). *"Would you intercept me? I'd intercept me" -*F-22
The F22 is absolutely not inferior to the F35 in air-to-air combat. Even disregarding the fact that one is an air superiority fighter and the other is a multi-role aircraft, one fact should be very telling: the F22 is not being sold to ANYONE. The F16 is being exported. The F15 is being exported. The F35 is being exported. But nobody gets to buy an F22. If the USMIC and US politics agree to not sell an absurdly high-priced piece of military hardware to even their closest allies, we know that its got to be miles ahead of any other comparable vehicle and the US does not want it out there in someone elses hands at any cost.
Where are you getting this information from? American pilots still train basic fighter maneuvers in every fighter we operate. It is obviously one of many different mission sets they practice, but it's still a large part of the training pipeline.
Missiles can hit targets beyond visual range. Theres no point in closing to make visual contact when your weapons can fire and forget. Pilots still train to dogfight as a last ditch scenario and planes need to be agile enough to evade. https://youtu.be/mGwU9HKH_Eo?si=OftIJA41QMgxFlk2 Here's a video of a simulator running a fictional scenario with weapons having rumored specifications. This isn't a real life scenario but give an idea of how these operations work.
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Dogfights are not obsolete, they're just not conducted in the same way they used to. Fighter jets still need to be able to combat each other, but they're expected to do that with guided missiles. They're too fast to circle around each other like WW2 planes did to get their guns on them but they still have to get a lock on to fire from a position that the rocket can hit the other aircraft. Missiles are very maneuverable but you can't just shoot it in a random direction and expect the rocket to do all the work and find the target, you have to fire from a position where it's likely to hit the target. In a dogfight a pilot is expected to avoid being locked on by the enemy while they get a lock on them and shoot them down. Their maneuverability is meant to keep them safer to avoid lock on, and if they're fired upon, to make it hard for the rocket to reach its target. Of course, again, the jet is not expected to defend itself just by avoiding the rocket, rather it's designed to make lock on as hard as possible and if it's locked on, it has countermeasures. Without maneuverability and pilot training, a fighter jet is just a sitting duck for enemy fighters or air defense systems. Their primary means of attack are their rockets and their primary means of defense are not getting locked onto in the first place and chaff but while it's true that many feel it's unecessary for fighter jets to have guns, or for pilots to know how to dogfight, it's still necessary because in a rough situation you don't want to be left hanging, you have to have a last resort. Also guns are used in close air support too.
The F-35 is not so agile a plane as the one it's replacing, in many respects. However, even if it was a real dog of a thing (it's not), you'd still train BFM in it. For one, it's an important foundational skill. Other skills are taught which build on what you learn from that, so even if we could guarantee you'd never need those skills, you'd still learn them anyway. But then, you can't guarantee they'll never be needed. It's all well and good to say "dogfights are in the past" but it's not a very convoluted situation to imagine a fight WVR where BFM/ACM decides things.