It was certainly true in the old Soviet days that their fighters
are designed with a shorter airframe life than their western
counterparts, the idea was to have cheap, easily mass-produced
aircraft that's easy to maintain by poorly trained conscripted
personnel in war time too ... but i suppose that has been changing
... since this doctrine would be unsustainable in modern warfare
...
and for the statement about agile fighters being "useless" , i'm
not sure if that's entirely wrong too ... with HMS cueing systems
and super agile next generation AA missiles, like the python 5, AIM
9X etc, and of course, the BVR missiles, the agility of an aircraft
may be secondary to the stealth, speed, and electronics, one got to
remember that no matter how agile an aircraft is, it's still
limited by the amount of g forces a human body can take, but a
thrust vectoring missile has no such limitations, in other words,
the missile wins, all the time ...
what do you guys think ? ...
