And yet still totally rubbish. The only thing the Tomcat was good for was making Tom Cruise's acting look good by comparison and torturing mechanics with endless breakdowns.
Ironically, Iran proved the Tomcat to be quite effective during the Iran-Iraq war. Despite having a weakened and numerically inferior airforce they were able to run circles around Iraq for a while.
The AIM-54 Phoenix helped extremely there:
This was also helped by the Iraqis not bothering to add any radar warning receivers to the MiG-23s and 21s they had available. Then again, I don't think the Soviets were that inclined to give them out to someone as fickle as Saddam.
Maybe. That doesn't take away the fact that the Phoenix was advanced as fuck and shot down many Iraqis. You can only blame that so much on a lack of the RWR.
Realistically speaking, Gunslinger is Hornet shit. Same with the LREW, it's for the Eagles and Falcons. F-35s and 22s have been getting the first AIM-260 JATMs, which have a similar footprint to AMRAAMs and fit internally. It's the luxury of the USAF to continue investing in 4.5th generation (4.75th?) fleets to schlep around these big standoff missiles, so that even multi-role stealth fighters get to fly in cleaner configurations more often than not. There's some documentation pointing at B-21 as a potential stealth platform for these outsized AAMs, though.
It's been interesting seeing how the 4th gen jets have stuck around really. They make really good trucks. 5th gen is nice, but they aren't good at carrying big loads. Gunslinger I guess is the natural evolution of having no stealth. Just shoot outside the enemy attack envelope.
Yes, even with it's lack of reliability it did present a pretty insurmountable problem. The AESA radar also made for quite good of a ghetto AWACS in a pinch. I'm still going to attribute most of Iraq's failures coming down to it being the worst nepo-baby parade force there could be. They didn't even get look-down shoot-down radars in their MiG-29s.
They have stuck around because nobody except the US had money to develop whole new airframes from 1991 to 2005. Either they were genuine believers in the end of history like the EEC was and thus anything that already wasn't well into development like the Gripen, Rafale and Eurofighter got axed; or getting new fighters went down the order of list to do due to much more acute issues like Russia's lost decade in the 90's and China being too far behind to play catch-up when they could wait until they have their industrial base ready.
The Iraqi air force suffered from having Saddam's attention, so he did stack it with loyal people rather than competent people (though amusingly enough, Uday was such a fuckup even he couldn't get in).
I.... I don't think Iran has the cash for anything at the moment.
The A just got saddled with a bad engine.
They absolutely had RWRs on those jets. They just weren't great.
The Iraqis has RWR.... It just wasn't good on the Mig-21/23 as their sets were already ~10 years out of date in 1980. Allegedly the Tomcat radar would overwhelm the RWR on those two jets and cause to to indicate a threat in front and behind at the same time.
The Tomcat radar was a mechanically scanned radar, it was enormous and had a lot of power behind it.
START treaty is still in effect, it was going out of effect in 2021 but for all the issues of the trump-then-biden whitehouse diplomacy at the time a new formulation was not negotiated, and both washington and moscow agreed to extend the existing treaty till 2026, in 2023 the sections on notifications and inspections were effectively suspended from participation because both sides stopped participation of those sections, currently, the hotline, limitations on numbers, and ofc the placing of bombers visible to satalites is still in efffect and followed by both sides.
It was essentially the spiritual father to the B-2.
The best fighter Germany produced in WW2
Are there actually people who think that Messerschmidt was anything other than the biggest nazi nepobaby?
The Bf-109 was a really good late 1930s fighter....
Yeah, it's the same people who think the Me 262 was the best thing since sliced bread (spoiler, it was not, it was a piece of shit).
I have a soft spot for it because it looks cool but I realize it was just a Gen 1 fighter jet and the Meteor and P-80 were right on its heels.
It's greatest contribution was showing off the swept wing concept, which was known before, but never demonstrated at scale.