Let's Buy a Fighter Plane

Welcome to America, the place where we buy things we don't need, mostly to show off to the neighbors and put them away in the garage or the closet.  That is all well and good if you are spending your own money, but we have had a very unusual thing going on in the military hardware business for many years.  This process is to build the most sophisticated and expensive piece of hardware the engineers can think of and sell it to our military.

An admiral was being questioned by a congressional hearing on the cost of Naval ships, the admiral said what the Navy needs was ships, ships that were usable, flexible and cost effective.  The admiral said, "If we keep designing ships without thought to cost, then we are going to end up with two ships, one in the Atlantic and one in the Pacific."  He makes an excellent point.

Now let's look at what the Air Force is doing.  They are trying to build a replacement for the F-15 and F-16 aircraft.  They have been in the process for over 10 years and what have we got?  Not one usable aircraft has been produced.  Let's say that our Air Force had acquired an aircraft.  Should we purchase it?  The answer is actually easy, the answer is no.  Why?  Let's go back in history and find out why we replaced aircraft.  One, they were outdated, their electronics could not be updated, the aircraft was too slow to protect a ship, a town or even itself, so they were replaced.

There was another guide and it was what is referred to as the "kill ratio".  This is the ratio of enemy aircraft destroyed in air to air combat compared to the loss of this model of aircraft.  For example; the P-51 in WWII had an approximate kill ratio of around 8 to 1.  The P-47 Thunderbolt had about the same.  What is the kill ratio of the F-15 Eagle?  Are you sitting down?  The answer is 104 to Zero, but we want to replace it.

We have long since reached the maximum speed at low altitude where a fighter aircraft operates and the F-15 Eagle bumps up against this limit already, in fact, we have been bumping into this since the late 1950's and early 1960's.  The F-15 is big enough and powerful enough to continue to have electronic upgrades to see that it has air to air superiority over any aircraft in the world.  Electronics is actually where the battle is now won, not in the airframe.  It comes down to our airplane is smarter than your airplane, not how fast and pretty it is.

So our Air Force is trying to sell the American public on the idea of spending something like $181,000,000 per aircraft for a F-35, when we are flying a F-15 that has never been knocked down by another aircraft, plus it can still be upgraded with the latest electronics.  We can have a lot more F-15's for the money, too.  Enough to defeat a lesser number of F-35 aircraft in air to air combat.  How smart is that?