Reply #33: Well I'll be. [View All]

[sofa king]

It is an F-5, only with a twin tail. That should make it slightly more survivable, but the control surfaces on that tail are surprisingly small.

The F-5 was good enough to keep Val Kilmer and Tom Cruise busy for a couple of hours, but that might be this thing's greatest liability: Navy fighter pilots practice against F-5s all the time.

Perhaps not coincidentally, just a couple of weeks ago I saw three F-5s flying low over Arlington, in the middle of all that "sheiks on a plane" hoo-ha that was supposed to scare you into voting for the Dark Side. Maybe our guys were taking a closer look at them, in case they run into something like them in the near future.

Edit: I might as well say it here, rather than below. This plane isn't designed to take on the Americans toe to toe; the Iranians are not so crazy as to think they can do that. No, this is a pretty nifty little defense fighter designed to go after ground attack planes, hit and run style. Iran is a big country with hundreds of widely separated primary targets. These things are small and ludicrously overpowered, so they can likely operate from highways, and maybe they even have zanier ideas like launching them off of dams or rolling them down mountains or threading the needle between craters on the runway--who knows? So what you do is hide one or two of them under highway overpasses or wherever, wait for something to come by, then dash off and chase the intruder down before they can be intercepted themselves.

They don't even necessarily need to hit their target if they can chase it into the operational range of a SAM battery, or throw off the intruder's approach to the target long enough to burn off its fuel. It's a little higher-tech and performance than the MiG-21, and parts should be easily available on the world market (or direct from our own unscrupulous contractors, as recent disclosures have shown).

If they're lucky, they might even be able to set it down again before it's intercepted--probably not if the Israelis and the Americans are ganging up on them. But it might be a one-for-one asset that can shoot something down before it goes down itself--and no modern air force can withstand much attrition before it becomes unwise to continue bombing. With all those hundreds of targets, this little bastard suddenly becomes a headache: Do you have to escort every single bombing mission now? Do you have to confine your bombing to nighttime operations? Do you have to make them a target priority and send Green Berets tromping through every valley trying to find them like SCUDs? If they're shooting them out of cannons (a joke) or otherwise launching them in ways where safe return is unlikely, are the pilots kamikazes who will head out for the Gulf looking for a carrier to smash into when the interception mission is done? I don't know, but I'll bet some poor Lieutenant Colonel at the Pentagon has been staying at work late figuring it all out.