Anyone remember the post Eagl made about his time in the ROK?
SA trumps kinetics unless you have a mission to accomplish and the only way through the door is to kick it down. Then the guy with the biggest stick (or most sticks) may not "win" but you're still gonna gonna suffer losses getting thru the door. Or keeping the other guy from coming in YOUR door. Guess what used to keep me up at night when I was responsible for a certain what-if scenario... 1000 cannon-equipped and obsolete fighters streaming south from North Korea. We'd run out of missiles and bullets before we got half of them, even if we could individually track and engage each one with optimum efficiency. Then you can have all the SA in the world, but the survivors are gonna strafe your O-Club and your chow hall when you run out of the kinetics you pass off as unnecessary. Buying a lot of new fighters with half the missile loadout of the ones we have isn't the way to win that fight.
Pred is right, others too, IF the DPRK played our game, they would get slaughtered in the air. However, what if they initiated a massive surprise arty attack vs Seoul, the DMZ, etc, and at the same time attacked the very, VERY few bases where the ROK/USAF fighters are based with huge, huge special forces attacks, and co-ordinated THAT with a selective nuke strike or two. Unlikely, yes, but it COULD happen, especially the first part. Then those ancient cannon/dumb bomb armed fighters aren't so useless any longer. Remember a few months ago when the DPRK sortied nearly all their subs? The South/NATO lost them, nearly all of them, for days. They COULD infiltrate in huge numbers of SF troops, they have the largest SF units in the world for a reason. 100+ of them hitting Kunsan, Osan, and others - which are all near the sea - isn't impossible.
Regarding the F35 specifically, that USMC General and his "velociraptor" comment has been the soundbite of the year for the F35, and I think he'll be proved either a PR master/loose with facts, or PR master/right all along, after this Red Flag going on right now. Not a lot of F35s are involved, and just the "B" model, and will be going up against a pile of higher end legacy fighters, like F16/F15Cs doing red air in some exercises apparently. Then we'll see how good this version of the F35 is right now. So, IMO, in the next few weeks, we'll have a better idea, as much as they'll tell us anyway, of how it did. If it gets slaughtered A2A, I think due to the nature of things, it'll be hard to keep it a secret, just like the F16w/tanks vs F35 thing was. Same if it dominates, and mows everything like the F22s do.
IF, IF, the F35B model works as well as this USMC General claimed they did in the last Ex at Red Flag, it'll be a pretty big media story. The USMC is standing up more squads of them now, they have a couple, and more coming, and will this time next year have 24+ of them forward deployed in Japan. The advantage the F35B gives over the Harrier is something, IF it works as advertised, but sure isn't cheap. We'll see on the A and C models I guess later on.
