Talk:Fighter Mafia

Use of 'ought'
Sprey has become an often-cited critic of the F-35, including using comparisons of the accident rates of the early F-16 design that most strongly felt his design influence to argue that the F-35 ought to be equally unsafe.

Does "ought to be equally unsafe" mean is, regrettably, likely to be equally unsafe or does it mean should be deliberately designed to be equally unsafe?

129.55.200.20 (talk) 14:00, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

I do not know much about fighters. The following part of the current (as of 2013-12-05) does not make much sense. "and the Air Force F-X proposal was quietly rewritten to reflect his findings, dropping a heavy swing-wing from the design, lowering the gross weight from 60,000+ pounds to slightly below 40,000, and increasing the top speed to Mach 2.3, from 2.5. "

If you go from Mach 2.5 to 2.3, you are not increasing your top speed.212.85.89.254 (talk) 19:40, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just added archive links to 1 one external link on Fighter Mafia. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/20050306075435/http://www.edwards.af.mil:80/articles99/docs_html/splash/jan99/docs_html/fightermafia.html to http://www.edwards.af.mil/articles99/docs_html/splash/jan99/docs_html/fightermafia.html

When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true to let others know.

Cheers.—cyberbot II  Talk to my owner :Online 18:19, 18 February 2016 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified 2 one external links on Fighter Mafia. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/20070202184707/http://www.codeonemagazine.com:80/archives/1991/articles/jul_91/july2a_91.html to http://www.codeonemagazine.com/archives/1991/articles/jul_91/july2a_91.html
 * Added archive http://web.archive.org/web/20070917232626/http://www.codeonemagazine.com:80/archives/1997/articles/jul_97/july2a_97.html to http://www.codeonemagazine.com/archives/1997/articles/jul_97/july2a_97.html

When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true or failed to let others know (documentation at ).

Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot  (Report bug) 19:20, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

Disgraceful Article
This article should be reduced to a stub. I is clearly a politically motivated polemic, an opinion piece and not appropriate for Wikipedia. There is a character assassination of Pierre Sprey, poorly referenced, and equally so for the A10. There is no balance. The writer should take this to a press outlet and try and get it published.Pesky Varmint (talk) 02:13, 30 July 2017 (UTC)


 * The references to the A-10 are irrelevant and should be removed. S C Cheese (talk) 09:40, 17 May 2023 (UTC)

Removed now. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 5.173.42.214 (talk) 12:33, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

Criticism of the fighter mafia
I tried to rework the legacy section, splitting off the criticism / controversy stuff. Though I'm not really happy with that section. Now I must admit that I am biased in favour of the Fighter Mafia's ideas. I haven't seen a lot of good arguments against them. "THE REVOLT OF THE MAJORS" by Marshall Michel is hot trash... if you read some of the footnotes, you see that the footnotes do not always support his points. One of his footnotes on p354 points out that the Israelis' standard operating procedure was to fire 2 AIM-7 missiles at each target... which says a lot about the missiles' lack of reliability. Overall, the empirical data suggests that many of the mafia's ideas are correct. e.g. while the F16 is really just a lightweight version of the F15, it does prove that you can do the same thing cheaper. Perhaps some things that the mafia got wrong are... underestimating the TOW missile (Sprey hated it), thermal imaging (for ground vehicles and infantry). Glennchan (talk) 10:27, 17 December 2017 (UTC)


 * This is asinine. what are bullets or artillery also unreliable because people don't typically just shoot one. he doesn't contend that early missiles weren't unreliable at all. If you fire a missile that has a Pk of .50 you have a 50% of scoring a kill. If you fire 2 it becomes 75%. If you actually read the damn thing you'd know that at the same time AIM-7F's the Israeli's were using had a 40% kill rate (p343). adjusting this for the fact that the Israeli's were firing two missiles every target(meaning that every time they fired at a target at least one missile would miss no matter what) we can get a Pk of around .55, or 55% per missile, not bad at all in my opinion.
 * If you want to look at shitty FM ideas look no further than the blitz-fighter or redbird. The things they pushed that got through, (increased training in dogfights, hi-low mix of fighters, lightening the F-15) were largely already things the air force largely agreed on just as the article states. YEEETER0 (talk) 04:38, 26 April 2023 (UTC)

Disproportionately high losses
I see a problematic sentence: "For example, the Fighter Mafia argued that the ground attack mission should be handled by more appropriate, dedicated aircraft such as the A-10, which has had an initially arguable record in that area, seeing disproportionately high losses during Operation Desert Storm while attempting low-altitude strikes as designed in high SAM threat/high AAA threat environments". I have read elsewhere that A-10 was extremely durable, and although planes were lost, any other could not have survived better than A-10. Strong references are needed. ––Nikolas Ojala (talk) 10:20, 12 May 2017 (UTC)


 * Ultimately this comes down to a misunderstanding of what survivability is. You seem to be under the impression that survivability starts and ends with what happens after you get hit but that's not true. Consult the survivability onion for further details.
 * The A-10 is durable but that's not the point. While it was more likely that for an A-10 to survive being hit by an enemy weapon it was also more likely to get hit in the first place than say an A-10 or F-16 (slower lower and thus more vulnerable to low level threats). You have to remember that even if an A-10 survives a hit it's still going to be out of action for a couple of days if not permanently.
 * This is reflected in this interview with Chuck Horner (Commander of coalition air forces in desert storm) in which he says
 * "The other problem is that the A-10 is vulnerable to hits because its speed is limited. It’s a function of thrust, it’s not a function of anything else. We had a lot of A-10s take a lot of ground fire hits. Quite frankly, we pulled the A-10s back from going up around the Republican Guard and kept them on Iraq’s [less formidable] front-line units. That’s line if you have a force that allows you to do that. In this case, we had F-16s to go after the Republican Guard."
 * and
 * "I think I had fourteen airplanes sitting on the ramp having battle damage repaired, and I lost two A- 10s in one day [February 15], and I said, “I’ve had enough of this.” It was when we really started to go after the Republican Guard."
 * https://www.airandspaceforces.com/article/0691horner/
 * This can also can be reflected that out of all coalition airplanes the A-10 suffered the most losses.pg.641
 * It also suffered the most aircraft damaged out of any aircraft type pg.651
 * Gulf war airpower survey https://media.defense.gov/2010/Sep/27/2001329816/-1/-1/0/AFD-100927-065.pdf YEEETER0 (talk) 03:56, 26 April 2023 (UTC)

I added a citation to "The revolt of the majors" and another to a GAO report that refutes it. Honestly a lot of the critics just make stuff up and don't have good arguments. Glennchan (talk) 10:30, 17 December 2017 (UTC)

A-10 and Blitzfighter Gun and size.
Okay, so the article says that the Gun is superior because it doesn't expose the plane to enemy AA fire like Missiles do. The Gun is Superior, because it doesn't...expose the plane...to gunfire.

Isn't this crazytalk? Like, the ZSU-23-4 beat the A-10 into production, and the 'armored bathtub' is just for the pilot, it can't protect the entire plane. You still need to line up your attack on that soviet armor column, and they can in fact shoot back at you. The design range of the Gau-8 is 1200 meters, but the ZSU has a deign range almost twice as long. The gun has to expose the plane to gunfire, there's no way around it. It's a good tool to have, but if it is the only tool you have, it is not a good tool at all, because it is so easily countered by it's natural enemy-the Russian sewing machine.

Removing all the bomb and missile hardpoints alone won't shrink the plane to 1/5th the empty weight either, not unless you also shrink it to the point where it's hardly any bigger than a Cessna. The Blitzfighter pictures I've seen depict a 2-engine plane, and if those are the same engines as on the A-10, then we're looking at a plane that's about 3000 pounds engine by mass and another 600 pounds of gun! On a plane which is, according to this page, only 5000 pounds. (1/5th the weight of an A-10 ) This leaves about 1400 pounds for all the skin, structure, fuel tanks and controls. I won't pretend there's enough mass left over for an ejection seat, let alone any armor. So either the Blitzfighter was a deathtrap, or it was not 1/5th the weight of the A-10. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.144.204.138 (talk) 00:45, 23 January 2022 (UTC)


 * Just found this article while on a bit of a wiki-walk and did some copyediting cleanup... but now that I'm reading the article further there seems to be a lot of problems with it. What I think happened was was at some point there was extensive coverage of just what it was the Fighter Mafia was claiming but that coverage got broken apart and distributed until it now looks like the article is actually claiming those things itself. And when people go to cite those statements they wind up citing them to Fighter Mafia publications like POGO, which means they're still primary sources at best. Not sure how to approach this without a total rewrite. Aero-Plex (talk) 23:11, 23 June 2022 (UTC)