Re: Aerospace Ignorance
Speed and height is king along with being able to make fast, tight turns and maintain energy.
This is only true if you're dog fighting. So perhaps it still works for lard-arsed Pentagon generals (and their Whitehall poodles), who are still fighting the Korean air war, but dogfighting is irrelevant in modern air warfare, other than in low-magnitude confrontations against third rate air powers.
Ignoring the most common use case of bombing rebellious tribes, the point of the F35 is a general purpose strike fighter. In the event of an air war that justify its expense and ambition, the F35 superiority over the Harrier is pointless - even in the unlikley event that it is more capable as a dog fighter than an Su 35 or a J20 and their predecessors, risking F35s in close quarters dog fighting is idiocy - that is high risk, low benefit warfare, against enemies with greater numbers of aircraft to sacrifice. And for all the claims of US stealth and countermeasures, both Russians and Chinese have their own stealth programmes, they'll known what the vulnerabilities are - I wouldn't fancy my chances in an F35 flying in airspace defended by a modern missile system like an S400.
We live in the age of the missile and the UAV. There are definite uses for manned aircraft, fast combat jets are rapidly ceasing to be one of those uses, and the need for dogfighting capabilities is merely to put on a show at air displays and please the old solidiers at the top of the pyramid.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
