Why? The planes are certainly significantly updated now versus when they first flew. We can actually forward deploy meaningful numbers of them and keep them operational. Its orders of magnitude better than the F15 in air to air combat, and the F15 is unmatched globally. We've had over 30 years to learn from that program and develop new tech.

A country who cannot field planes to compete with the F15 does not have better missile hardware than us, or ways to defeat our countermeasures for it. If China has hypersonic long range missiles, we have hyper-er sonic longer range missiles and lasers to track and shoot theirs down with.

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Posted by lsu777

Lake Charles

Member since Jan 2004

31765 posts

Posted on 8/2/22 at 11:54 am to DownshiftAndFloorIt

quote:
Because every shred of empirical evidence we have proves that we have stayed decades ahead of everyone else in force projection. We spend more than the rest of the world combined. While we certainly waste more than them all combined, we also undoubtedly productively spend far more than China does. Theres no reason to believe anyone has leveled with us. There's no evidence for it. China is just now attempting to field planes and ships that can compete with our 70's airframes and whether they REALLY can compete or not is still up for debate.

We may not be as dominant as we were in the 80's and 90's, but we are still the only country who can project power globally.

quote:
Why? The planes are certainly significantly updated now versus when they first flew. We can actually forward deploy meaningful numbers of them and keep them operational. Its orders of magnitude better than the F15 in air to air combat, and the F15 is unmatched globally. We've had over 30 years to learn from that program and develop new tech.

A country who cannot field planes to compete with the F15 does not have better missile hardware than us, or ways to defeat our countermeasures for it. If China has hypersonic long range missiles, we have hyper-er sonic longer range missiles and lasers to track and shoot theirs down with.