Wargaming the South China Sea

[slapout9]

I fear people, even here, don't realize the deeply dangerous straits the ongoing failure that is the F-35 is getting us into. People here are mostly ground guys who know about war but I think maybe many have the same blithe attitude toward having air supremacy the general public has. We have had it all our own way since 1943 but it can change. It really can. It is not like the sun coming up in the east.

Air fighting is fighting with machines. If your machine is inferior to his machine, you lose. Pilot quality (boy we love to talk about how great our pilots are, but great depends on flying so check out how much our guys fly nowadays) and better tactics will help only so much if the other guys machine is better. That is even more so nowadays. We don't have tens of thousands P-51s and Hellcats contesting tens of thousands of FW-190s and Zeros. We have handfuls of machines contesting the sky. When there are only few machines their quality is that much more important.

We have a very big, potentially fatal problem.

Since the end of WW2 the Air Force has always won, people seem to forget that point. They also forget that it is our land forces that keep loosing!!!!!and cannot even face that fact..... but we keep hammering the Air Force as being unable to Win.
We have had complete Air Dominance for so long we just assume we will have it. We will have a big shock one day if we don't wake up.

In general the Air Force is way to small!