And, ‘ol’ Maveric can go and fly his f-14 right to the museum if you ask me! (;

And forgive me if I misread your nationality, but there was a certain didacticism in your tone of wounded superiority that suggested a rare class of gent from POME that I have occasionally entertained.

As far as “top gunning” for too long to provide adequate ground support, I fear your data is a little aged. I taught at TOPGUN actually, taught strike training there in fact as well as air-to-air. The syllabus changed a great deal after the ‘91 scrape, had to if the school was to remain relevant.

Oh, and by the way – if you’ve come looking for someone to defend the F-14 you’ve come looking in the wrong hole. As a career FA-18 pilot, I was never a fan.

As for “who am I” to monopolize what is written here, well: No one, I suppose, apart from being the siteowner. The guy who pays the bandwidth, corrects his commenter’s spelling when it suits him, etc.

But really, I did think you were rather stretching the point of the post beyond what is normally called “on topic” in these fora.

It does take cohones to go low, but only if you must to get the mission done – like this guy did, providing an object lesson in the dangers involved. It’s not brave but foolish to unneccessarily hazard your craft to AK-47 fire from an illiterate peasant lying on his back in a ditch, and getting shot down by one of them does not improve the lot of the poor infantry on the ground. To lift a line or two from Kipling:

A scrimmage in a Border Station?

It does take cohones to go low, but only if you must to get the mission done – like this guy did, providing an object lesson in the dangers involved. It’s not brave but foolish to unneccessarily hazard your craft to AK-47 fire from an illiterate peasant lying on his back in a ditch, and getting shot down by one of them does not improve the lot of the poor infantry on the ground. To lift a line or two from Kipling:

A scrimmage in a Border Station—
A canter down some dark defile—
Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezail—
The Crammer’s boast, the Squadron’s pride,
Shot like a rabbit in a ride!

No proposition Euclid wrote,
No formulae the text-books know,
Will turn the bullet from your coat,
Or ward the tulwar’s downward blow
Strike hard who cares—shoot straight who can—
The odds are on the cheaper man.

As for the rest, ask yourself who you’d have rather been when the bombs began to fall: The guy in the cockpit watching the aimpoint fade away in heat and dust? Or the impotent fist shaker rising from the rubble? Warfare is not about fair fights and “who wins that may,” it’s no game for romantic amateurs. I would have thought that we learned all that in those Flanders fields, having lost the lesson in Gallipoli.

I decline to indulge you in conversation on Israeli/Palestinian moral equivalence however. Chat that up where it might find some traction, you’ll get none here.

sorry… Not my invention… Some supersilous nato guy’s did it because they want to cut down friendly fire, as it doesnt make selling ’smart’ bombs easy… But I guess the Isrealis already realized that, the ‘empire has striken back’, as you know everything goes in cycles, and the insurgents have got wize to the new weapons again…

like the Brits used helicopters ect in Malaysia and won, it took ten years or something close, and special forces, but they got the job done, only that when the US tried the same in Vietnam, very much based on the British tactics, the Vietnamese had studied the Brit tactics too, and developed the ‘belt buckle technique’… And getting into sanctuary across the border, yes?

Well, similarly , the insurgents, after desert storm, looked at Mogadishu, so ‘fight in urban areas’, was the first lesson, Saddam, and even the Taleban, knew this, after all, both the baathists and taleban are out there still causing Coalition casualties, and as was pointed out The previously feared Israeli’s were put to putting the thinking cap back on, after the Hizbollah got Syrian made copies of the rpg-14s…

The ’swing’ hase gon to the insurgents now…
And the air to air guys are being put to do ground support, and it’s costing friendly fire casualties…

that was my point, just thought that a graphic description would have put some human touch to the fact… Maybe your subconcious was too hurt reading it so that you reacted by taking it to a personal, and misguided national level instead of sticking to the issues, and who said you have a monopoly on what is being written here, I thought it’s about Jet fighters, their pilots and their behaviour ect…? Maybe I was wrong…

And who said I’m british???

Get YOUR ‘america universalis’ glasses of if you can…