I always wondered if they could cram some of the systems from an ah-1w’s nose including the turret into the Harrier. Kind of an attack helicopter on steroids.

Now that is a cool paint job. Looks like something out of James Bond.

Vietnam was a tragedy. The U.S. too easily overwhelmed the Vietnamese military in every head to head battle and left the battlefields a wasteland in return. The only way to save Vietnam was to kill every single one that opposed the puppet government. The problem was that the American public didn’t want to spend their gdp proceeds fighting a tragic war. Kind of like how they feel today with so much of their hard work going into Iraq for little to nothing but double speak in return.

I’m more or less disappointed that they wedged the F-18 into too many roles for its weight class. They could have continued to expand the roles of other platforms without driving the other aircraft makers out of the game. All of the consolidation we see today was due to politics getting in the way of competition.

Medvedev in control is far more dangerous than Putin. He’s GWB only in Russia. We don’t need any more leaders like that in control of nuclear arsenals ever again. Seriously, arrogance is the downfall of smart fellows like Medvedev. He’d just as soon bury Russia in a new mountain of debt just to have his day in the sun giving that one memorable speech in the history books. So what if it seriously fubars their economy because it was all worth his winning eternal fame.

NORAD was a money pit if you followed its history and F.U.D. drove its budget. Don’t get me wrong, it was an enigmatic organization. But hindsight has proven that most of the antagonisms behind its evolution through the years never really existed in the sense that people within the organization did advertise.

Its laughable that you would stick to the stockpiled gear for refueling story. The Backfire has a terrible mission rate. If they could hardly keep it flying at a dependable rate what makes you think they could have overhauled the whole lot into an air refuel certified fleet virtually overnight?

What part of “chance to develop the F-106” did you miss? The F-4 only went through three revisions before it finally evolved into a fighting machine. The F-106 was given band aid revisions over its 28 year history. Hell, its fire control got minor tweaks/changes to it about every week it seems like. But the overall system changed very little. Well, it did get a gun before the 70’s, so perhaps that was a big change.

The F-4 never replaced the F-106 because it simply didn’t offer any new capabilities. They probably should of sent the F-106 to Vietnam to carry out the same escort missions that the F-4 was performing. At least the F-106 was available in numbers and would of substantially bolstered the South’s security until the arrival of the refined F-4 models. There is one job the F-4 did finally replace the F-106 in – target duty.