It wouldn’t have been a cheap aircraft to operate, not when you have to operate it beside the F/A-18 – too much duplication of the aircraft fleet.

Not sure what you mean by “too much duplication”, they would complement each other very well. With F404s it would also have common engine logistics with legacy Hornets.

What “increased capability”?

Much longer range, larger payload. Plus the ability to be an actually useful mission tanker, unlike the Super Hornet which can really only act as a recovery tanker due to its own fuel consumption.

A-6E’s using non-afterburning F404’s would have had greater range and payload.

This is what the A-6F was supposed to be (along with a new radar, AMRAAM capability for self protection, and a host of other avionics improvements). I always thought canceling the A-6F was a terrible decision, unlike the F-14 it would have been a fairly cheap aircraft to operate and the increased capability compared to the F/A-18 more than worth the added cost.

Is the answer to the original question, if there were a number of them available would P8’s not make a good bomb carrying and appropriately dispensing platform and if it could perform the task appropriately would its total mission costs be lower than that of a B1B, B52 or B2B?

The P-8 has a tiny weapons bay sized for five torpedoes or bombs, and four external hardpoints. Its payload is nothing compared to that of a bomber, closer to a typical fighter’s. In terms of mission cost, it might make sense for CAS if you only need to drop one or two JDAMs over a four-hour loiter, but if the mission requires a significant bomb load then it can’t compete with a bomber.

As far as the conversion of airliners to bombers, this has been beaten to death many times on this forum. It is not practical or cost effective. Airliners simply are not suitable structurally for this kind of use, and a bomber “variant” of an airliner would basically reuse nothing other than perhaps the wings and engines.

Consider this :http://youtu.be/L5L6vDPZJ2k
And now this:http://youtu.be/XLBuvK9_rPY
Now tell the truth…wich would be easier to hit if you had one of these: http://youtu.be/T2f2e8eYGTE

Yes but FACs don’t fly at treetop level. They have to fly high enough to see a wide area and slow enough to identify targets and call them out to strike aircraft. At least with a 2-seater the back seater can use binoculars so they can be higher / farther away.

Enter the A-10 🙂

Single-seat fighters make very poor FACs, and we don’t have any 2-seat OA-10s any more. What you need is properly trained aircrew, as the article says there are some F-15E and F/A-18F back seaters trained as FACs, but even that is a poor substitute for JTACs on the ground.

There are noncombatants already in theatre already painting targets. That’s not the problem. It’s the asymmetrical nature of the threat. Small, fast groups, using the population as cover.

In some cases, not in others. Just yesterday a large armed group attacked Sejar military base, killing 300 Iraqi troops and destroying dozens of vehicles. Likewise today around Kobani there are ISIS tanks and mechanized forces fighting Kurds equipped only with small arms. These are significant numbers of troops engaged in large scale maneuvers and they are succeeding because there is no air threat. The problem is that if they can secure enough cities, then it really will become impossible to deal with them, for the exact reason you state. But at present that is still not the case. We just aren’t doing enough to stop it.

And no; an AEGIS destroyer or Arleigh burke class specifically, wont survive 100 AShM, not by a long shot: No matter how many SAMs it carry, it can provide 3 Guidance channels due to fact it has 3 SPG-62 guidance radars. New ARH SAMs do not require terminal guidance, but they still require mid-course updates which is still provided by SPG-62.

Not correct. Aegis’ Mark 99 FCS time-shares the SPG-62 directors, and they are only used for terminal phase illumination with most Standard missile variants. Primary search and midcourse guidance comes from the AN/SPY-1. Only in terminal phase does the AN/SPG-62 energy illuminate the target, so the AEGIS battle management system can have more missiles flying against more targets than it has illuminators. I won’t claim effectiveness against 100 targets (the upper limit is not public knowledge) but it has always been the AEGIS design that a single ship can engage more targets than it has directors.

You can test all you want, but expecting magical performance against modern VHF sets similarly to the (claimed) performance vs more common engagement radars is deluded in itself.

Nobody is expecting magical performance. However, the assumption here seems to be that F-22 and F-35 pilots will blithely fly in a straight line toward their target, thinking they are invisible to VHF radars because they are deluded by visions of American superiority. When in fact they know very well how their aircraft performs against such systems, and, since they can see the radar long before the radar can see them, they can take appropriate action to avoid detection.