Now do it in a LaGG-3!

Agree 100%. Something A-10 critics forget to mention when they say that the A-10 is vulnerable by losing 6 in Desert Storm (or 5, depending on how you count), is the Day/Night factor. F-111F’s flew 99.6% of their sorties at night, and F-15E’s flew under darkness 94.2% of the time. With night came a host of benefits;…

I still don’t understand why the F-15 and F-16 weren’t designed with internal IRST. It is passive, light, provides very good angular resolution, and new versions like PIRATE and Skyward G can even ID the stuff that they’re looking at once they get closer. (PIRATE claims greater than 40 km for ID, and I dunno about…

This isn’t really a reply to the article, but I really would like to see a response made to this RAND report and this article about a theoretical Lightweight Fighter.