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It's not at all what it's built for. I'd be interested in seeing articles critiquing it's designed mission (or more reporting on the software woes, which would be very relevant here), since I'm no military strategy expert, but reports like this seem rather useless. Do we expect to be doing a lot of WWI/WWII-style close-range air fighting?

EDIT: this, for instance, seems much more interesting: http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/02/22/us-navy-to-...

But it's hard to see how dogfighting prowess would be any help against long-range radar systems that can detect it before being in range.



To borrow from a comment on another article, The question you ask is uncomfortably related to a bigger question "If you don’t really need competitive maneuverability, than why do we need a fighter at all?"

It is a genuine question.


while obviously nobody is planning to have dogfights, one can imagine 2 stealth fighters that no missile can lock onto while pilots can actually see each others planes - times for good old school dogfight :)

(the probably exception for missiles is IR missiles - as long as you can get behind the enemy plane it would probably be able to lock onto it, even on the stealth one, and trying to get behind each other means pretty much dogfight again. Or similarly, say regular missile can lock onto a stealth plane only from much closer distance - from behind would be much more preferable position as stealth planes are less stealthier from that direction and at close distance the target plane has much less chances to shake off the incoming from behind missile)


Even SU-27 had passive locking. If pilot can see, electronics can as well.




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