re: How do air fuel tankers not signal where a stealth plane is?

There's always... flip that transponder to Delta Flight 1808 to Fukincamel, Turkey.

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I promise this will make sense.

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You would make a fine analyst for the losers…

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We don’t want to mess with China and they don’t want to mess with us. It would be ugly

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Reading that is just disappointing. People really need to more pissed about this being a true statement more than anything about Israel. People act like Israel are the only ones that control DC. Yet China pulled this off in less than 25yrs. Smfh.

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The Navy was developing Sparrow missiles in 1948. One of the prime reasons for adopting a BVR- centric approach in 1958 (when the Sparrow went into frontline service) was because of White Paper thinking… that future wars would be completely push-button BVR affairs with no need for air combat skills. The initial follow-up to the F-4 was supposed to be a straight-wing, subsonic, BVR missile only bird called the F6D Missileer. Look it up. Vietnam came along. Pilots found out differently the hard way. Oh look, MiG-17’s shooting down Mach 2 F-4’s and F-105’s. Top Gun and Red Flag came about because we realized “Well shite, air to air fundamentals matter after all”. So when Lockheed says that dogfighting is obsolete, well, I’ve seen how that movie
ends.

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Vietnam we were in a bit of a mess from a doctrine standpoint. The F-105 was being used as a bomber and it was sluggish and not comparable to a MiG-21 in a straight fight, and it was flying predictable routes which the reds noticed. We actually took advantage of that on one occasion (Operation Bolo) and lured the MiGs into a situation that favored the F4s, which was a battle we won decisively.

A story. Back in 1980 Iran and Iraq had a war. Iran had just gone through a purge of its military and a lot of their most senior pilots got caught in it. Iraq on the other hand had great pilots for the era. The difference between the two is that Iran had the more modern F-14 Tomcat while Iraq had the MiG-23 and the Su-20. Both of those Russian made planes were known to be great in a dogfight for the era.

To open the war, Iraq sucker punched Iran with an air attack meant to knock out Iran’s air defenses and planes on the ground. Iran was caught with their pants down. Luckily for them though their most advanced planes were safe in their reinforced bunkers.

Over the course of the next two days Iran responded and sent F-4s in to attack Iraqi infrastructure. So Iraq sent up their dogfighters in response. Then something strange happened; one of the Iraqi aircraft was shot out of the sky seemingly out of nowhere. No enemy in sight. No radar contact. A plane simply exploded. They grounded that flight thinking it had to be sabotage, but nothing was wrong with the planes. Another flight had the same thing happen. No enemy in sight. No radar contact. Plane exploded out of nowhere.

This eventually got so bad that the Iraqi’s had to ground their Air Force.

What was actually happening was that the F-14s were capable of over the horizon attack. They could detect, lock on, fire and destroy the Iraqi planes before the Iraqis knew they were there.

So even with inexperienced pilots very likely incapable of holding their own against the veterans of the Iraqi Air Force in a dogfight, technology rendered that disadvantage moot.

This was the death of the dogfight. The US has been involved in 50 dogfights since Vietnam. Only twice has US had to resort to guns. Both of those were A-10s shooting down helicopters.

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B-2's reported range is 6,000 nautical miles. We have multiple tankers in the area holding at different locations. They won't be anywhere near the target when they refuel. We have numerous bases all over the region where they could land if need be.

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This is really all people need to be concerned with.

We are world histories biggest logistical problem. The world is only so big, and we mapped it long before our adversaries. Thank WWI and WWII

b2 and tankers have state of the art radar jamming as well

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Much like you don't stop for gas in ATL at 3am

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For real, for real