The F-117 in 1982 or even in 1999 was only a tactical weapon to be used in limited conflicts.
It had several limitations similar to the German super planes of WWII.
First it was built in very small numbers, second it was slow and a lumbering and third it did need some air defences to operate with inpunity.
In a full scale war where you have 50-100 aircraft clashing over each battlefiled it might had some degree of invulnerability, but one way or another it was going to have losses.
First it was going to need being deployed in air bases far from the enemy`s strike reach.
In Europe the whole of the continent was in the reach of the Soviets, so no air base was safe.
This included even north Africa.
If you remember studies made in the 1980s, it was stablished that in a NATO-Warsaw pact clash the losses of airplanes were going to be very high due to attacks to their air bases.
By not being able to hit Moscow the soviets still could have command of their forces.
Most F-15 were not in Europe either in 1982 some were station in the US or Japan.
In 1982 NATO was not only F-15 and F-16s but F-5s, Mirages and even F-4s.
In 1982 the F-16 had not AIM-120, so even if it had the close combat edge it did not have the BVR edge over the MiG-23ML deployed by the soviets and in 1982 the first MiG-23MLDs were built.
It is true that in 1982 NATO had the advantage in fourth generation fighters, also it is true the Soviets had not the disadvantage Syria had, at least a few MiG-31 were operational and had thousends of MiG-23s and MiG-25s, and a thousend SU-24s and a few hundred Tu-22M.

Now tactics are made according the aircraft`s ability, to defeat the F-15 you would had needed overwhelm it.
The Soviets had plenty of fighters, first in the Bekka Valley of 1982 40% of the airplanes downed were attack planes with no dogfighting ability and no radars.
another 40% were obsolete MiG-21s, another 10% helicopters and the rest 10% were MiG-23MFs.

Israel had the quantitative and qualitative advantages in 1982, same was the US in 1991 and same was NATO in 1999 over Serbia.
Israel not only had more F-15s than the Syrians MiG-25PDs and more F-16s than Syria MiG-23MFs, but also more Kfirs than Syria MiG-23MS.

The F-15 in Europe in 1982 was not like that, even if the F-15 would had shot down 2-3 fighters each they would had have loses.
The F-15A and even C in 1982 could only fire a single missile at at time to a single target, if you have 2-3 MiG-25s and MiG-23 against it one of the enemy fighters will shot down the F-15 or forced to abort the attack even in 1991 the F-15 failed many times against the MiG-25s even having superiority in numbers.
In an all clash with the Soviets the F-15 would had have loses.

Ok lets take this very slow.

1. the soviet war machine was centrally controlled.

2. F-117 number are limited.

3. because of points 1, and 2, you would use the F-117 on very high value command targets.

4. Stealth aircraft have never been sortied from a front line base. even in desert storm they would use a base out of scud range.

5. The Soviet style of warfare has fallen apart in every war in which high value decapitation strikes are used. the issues isn’t just doctrine. it goes all the way down to the NCO level. Soviet military avoided the use of professional NCO s and fully relied on officers and political officers to over see enlisted forces. This discouraged out of the box thinking and initiative. This may seem like a tangent but in reality you cant discuss a hypothetical Warsaw versus NATO conflict without troop and airmen quality and discipline coming into play. This thinking even factors into the Soviet air force when you consider that they didn’t train to fight a war cutt off from ground control.
Which brings me back to my point. Decapitate the Soviet command and control and there forces would have had difficulty. This was the F-117s Job.

I’m happy to speculate as well.

If B and C models are cancelled HMG will jump with joy, shout ‘breach(sp) of contract‘ and cancel JCA altogether.

FAA MIGHT be allowed to keep what’s left of Joint Force Harrier or RAF might have to have a token number to act as a figleaf (no STOVL JCA means it doesn’t meet the requirement, see?)

RAF MIGHT be allowed to keep all of their EFs (and if they’re really lucky they might even get some Tranche IIIbs or some of the Luftwaffe’s ‘excess’ airframes), luckily some new simulations will show that EF is sufficiently stealthy and STOL performance will be good enough for future operations anyway

In that case if your goign to buy INFERIOR planes, just buy upgraded F-4s or sky hawks. I mean they are just as capable as a EF versus s-300 systems Jsut cheaper. :diablo:

Lockheed Adds Resources To F-35 Testing

NAS PATUXENT RIVER, Md. — Lockheed Martin and its teammates plan to add resources to F-35 Joint Strike Fighter flight testing to ensure the program stays on a revised schedule that extends development by 13 months.

At the U.S. Navy’s test center at Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Md., where four short-takeoff-and-vertical-landing (Stovl) F-35Bs are now based, the industry team is set to add 80 engineers, maintainers and test operations personnel to step up the pace of flying.

Testing at Pax River was planned to involve 600 people — 40% government and 60% contractor personnel — but this is to increase following the program restructuring in March. “I’ve requested more assets from Lockheed Martin,” says Bill Coutts, the company’s integrated test force site director.

Pax River eventually will have the largest concentration of flight-test aircraft, with five Stovl F-35Bs and four F-35C carrier variants. The first two of four conventional-takeoff-and-landing (CTOL) F-35As have been delivered to the U.S. Air Force flight-test center at Edwards AFB, Calif.

http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/generic/story_generic.jsp?channel=defense&id=news/asd/2010/06/22/03.xml&headline=Lockheed%20Adds%20Resources%20To%20F-35%20Testing

No one said stealth made the aircraft invisible. but it shortens the detection range to the degree and gaps can be artificially created even with over lapping coverage. The whole idea is to bypass some radars you don’t need to engage and if the the coverage is to thick make a hole. anything else emitting or tryign to track modern stealth aircraft will be toast.

Interesting point about the F-117, this from statements made by USAF officials immediately after its vulnerabilities became public knowledge after the Gulf.
Low RCS doesn’t work within networked EWR environments. Basic physics.
As it is it has enough troubles operating near major population centres because of virtually universal modern telecommunications networking (which functions a lot like an EWR network by accident), low RCS a/c come in and start scattering signals which shows up as gaps in the coverage from towers that don’t return faults, along a traceable flight path.

In the case of overlapping EWR networks all low RCS tech does for you* is bounce signals from one emitter to a different receiver. Low RCS only works well when you have isolated receivers so that scattered signals aren’t picked up by alternate receivers and the data networked to provide common signal interpretation.
Unfortunately all EWR networks are based on common signal interpretation and data processing from multiple, overlapped receivers. So as stated by USAF officials, low RCS technology isn’t suitable for overlapping EWR networked environments such as you find with major military powers like Russia. It is very suitable for use against small nation militaries like Iraq or Pakistan.

*note that low RCS is still very effective high survivability tech for fighters because AAMs and their platforms are a different story.

1. Please post a link or it never happened,

2. Is this the reason why every major player on earth want stealth fighters?

3. At the time Iraq was the 4th largest military in the world and a serious fight.

During the late 1970s and the mid-1980s, the Iraqi armed forces underwent many changes in size, structure, arms supplies, hierarchy, deployment, and political character. Between 1980 and the summer of 1990 Saddam boosted the number of troops in the Iraqi military from 180,000 to 900,000, creating the fourth-largest army in the world. With mobilization, Iraq could have raised this to 2 million men under arms–fully 75% of all Iraqi men between ages 18 and 34. The number of tanks in the Iraqi military rose from 2,700 to 5,700 and artillery pieces went from 2,300 to 3,700.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/iraq/army.htm

a million man army is a small force? there air force was the 6th largest on earth.

4. So made s-300 air defenses over lapping cant be defeated by stealth?
Tel Aviv earlier said that the purchase of F-35 fighters would effectively eliminate the threat from Russian-made S-300 air defense systems because a series of computer simulations had clearly demonstrated that new U.S. stealth fighters outperform the Russian missiles.

http://en.rian.ru/mlitary_news/20100917/160619264.html

5. I’m starting to question your knowledge on this subject.