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Michael Hoddy wrote:

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People are hung up on the NATF because it's the only concept for Navy aviation that would have actually been dominant in the air-to-air arena over whatever any potential adversary brings to the table, and with enough LO to survive in a modern IADS environment.[/quote]

And yet that hasn't been needed to the present day and I'm willing to bet that we're not going to need it until after the F-35 is in service.

The Super Hornet is a useful aircraft in many ways, but it's not seen as a dominant air-superiority fighter against other potential 4th and 4.5th-generation threats. With it, the outcome of the air battle will depend mainly a lot of other factors besides the plane.

And the problem with continuing to use AWACS, EW, better training, and better weapons is what precisely?

It's certainly fine for lower-threat strike missions and for fighting asymmetric wars like OEF and OIF, but will it be viable against an integrated threat like a Taiwan Straits crisis 10 years from now?

And how good is a NATF for fighting the wars that we have fought when it doesn't appear until the past year or two? By the time the NATF makes its appearance, carrier wings would have, what, two squadrons of F/A-18Cs as their strike force.

As for the Taiwan Straits, I sincerely doubt that any military conflict requiring our intervention would ever occur there, but even if the mythical Chinese invasion were to occur, the landing beaches are on the east coast of Taiwan, not the west. Fairly easy pickings, wouldn't you say? I suppose there may be some fun if the Chinese have some AWACS to help control fighters over Taiwan (though the PLAAF will be having much fun trying to survive the ROC IADS). On the other hand, I wouldn't exactly call the J-10 or Su-27 variants low observable and I also rather suspect that AIM-120D is rather better than the PL-12.

So it's woulda, coulda, shoulda. Certainly, there has not been a recent scenario where we've faced an opponent with a truly competent air force, butshould we continue to depend on that streak of luck? I guess it doesn't matter because we get to fight with what we have, not what I or anyone else wishes we had.

Well, we haven't faced a truly competent air force since WWII or Korea and I really can't think of a likely near-future opponent who does have one.

I do agree with whoever said earlier that if anyone needed an airframe that could be dominant in small numbers over a large number of hostiles in a modern IADS
environment, it was the Navy. Probably more so than the USAF. And regardless of how they were conceived, large fighter airframes do adapt much more easily to
hauling bombs over long distances than do small ones. The Tomcat may have "only" carried 4 bombs, but have you looked at what the payload of a JSF or
even an F-18 would be over the same distance? It's not more.

Not having payload to range charts for any of those aircraft, I really can't say. Given the cleaner nature of the Lightning II, the internal carriage of two 2,000 pounders, the greater fuel capacity of the F-35C compared to the Tomcat, and the likelihood that it is more fuel efficient, I'd put my money on the Lightning II have a much further range with the same payload (or greater payload to the same range).

And lets hope it continues to be that way. If future conflicts look like OIF and OEF, no, we don't need something like NATF or, arguably, F-22A either. However, history has clearly shown the folly of planning for the last war rather than for the next one.

Straw man. Of course everyone believes in those things. But without dramatically superior NavAir hardware of our own, we're absolutely reliant on the intangibles. Russian weapons don't exactly suck anymore, they're not that expensive, and the Russians will sell them to anyone. I'm sure the Navy can win with Super Bugs against competently-operated Flanker variants with R-27 and R-73, and S-300 IADS systems, but it isn't going to be pretty, and the USAF is absolutely going to have to kick the door down for them.

This is a good point. If the A-12 had gotten canned earlier, the A-6F probably would have been produced, and functioned as the stopgap striker. Given the budget environment of the 90's, the Super Hornet was a good choice.

The Vietnamese weren't competent? US losses of 2800 aircraft not including operational losses suggests they were no slouches (and yes, I know most of those weren't A2A figures, but the US didn't exactly mop up in A2A until it changed tactics later on). This also should have cautioned us against an over-reliance on technology