WI: Sabres used in Vietnam War

I personally wouldn`t mind seeing the figures breakdown that arrived at the 11% Pk for the sparrow. What was the Pk for the USN vs the USAF and for 1966/6/7/8 vs 1972.

Its interesting you mention the air to ground tasking of the 8th TFW. Ault mentions that now there are numbers of A6 and A7 in the fleet that have good payload/range that F4s can be tasked only with air to air missions and trained as such. If it was a problem for the USN surely it was a problem for the USAF.
 
Remember that from '65-late '67 was MacNamara (ugh, retch, puke) and his insistence on sorties flown and bombs dropped. Even Navy F-4s did bomb dropping when the MiGs didn't come up (not just strike, but flak suppression).

The main reason that Sparrow performed so poorly was that it wasn't a dogfight missile, but a BVR weapon designed to kill bombers. Less restrictive ROE would've meant the weapon could have been used to its full potential (i.e. killing contacts that either the EC-121 College Eye or the cruiser manning the Red Crown station designated as hostile instead of waiting for visual ID).
 
There is always a hope, in undertaking a review of this nature, that there will be uncovered a few major discrepancies so crucial to systems performance that there is little question that corrective action will achieve, at once, a readily measurable, quantum improvement in performance and capabilities. Such was not to be the case, however, and as the review proceeded,
it became clear that the road to improvement lay through a virtual jungle of problems: some readily and easily solvable; others requiring more funds, more time, greater effort and sustained perseverance and
follow-through.


That is a direct cut and paste of the opening paragraph of the Summary Report of General Findings of Captain Frank Ault USN, 1 January 1969.

And the Overview.

In summary,
it must be emphasized that the actions recommended in this report will improve the capabilities and performance of the Navy's present air-to-air missile systems. They will not, however, provide a true "dog fight" missile capability because of basic design limitations in the systems themselves. True "dog fight" capability will require a new missile development. In the interim, the Navy can more fully exploit the design capabilities of its present systems by upgrading their reliability, by better maintenance practices, and by improved training methods.
http://www.history.navy.mil/a-record/ault/sections1-4.pdf

The problem was that due to a `virtual jungle` of issues from the missile manufacturer, through squadron level maintenence to aircrew performace in combat the Navy (and presumably the USAF) did `not fully exploit the design capabilities of its present systems`.

Have a read of the report, its 58 pages but a lot of that is double spaced indexes and crap, the good stuff is only about 30 pages. Its a real eye opener
 
Last of the gunfighters

The MiG19SF was arguably the best dogfighter of the 50s, and in chinese F6 form they served until the 90s. If we're going to talk kill ratios, and to be fair for everybody we must then remember that US numbers and Vietnamese numbers are huguly different. (and if you addd all the US kills each VPAF MiG must have been shot down twice...) than Pakistani MiG19s did very well, and Chinese MiG19 did well vs Taiwanese fighters and intruders. If The USAF had sent more dogfighters to Nam (either the F86 or paying for FGA9 Hunters in somebody else AirForce) the VPAF would probably have gotten more MiG19s and less MiG21. Most USAF pilots regarded the 19 as a much more dangerous opponent than the 21, so the Vietnamese migh have done better in a dogfighter war. Remember that Pakistani pilots traded their sabres for MiG19 and never looked back...
 
As others have stated earlier, there were plenty of dogfighters in Vietnam, F100s and F8s. The F100 didn`t do that well in early encounters so it was replaced by the F4C.

The answer to a dogfighter like the Migs is to blast them out of the sky with better planes like the F4. But a mixture of internal and external circumstances meant this this didn`t happen as well as it should have. This is the problem, the underperformance of the worlds best fighter in combat, not the lack of planes to tackle the Mig 17 in like-on-like dogfights.
 
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