is IRRELEVANT to a discussion of A2A combat, isn't it?  A nuclear weapon or a massive earthquake would also terminate air operations over Sasebo or Guam, as well....but they aren't relevant to this discussion. are they?  Godzilla or an attack by the "Zul" (for those who like Ian Douglas) would also be problemetic.......

nothing to do with the F-35, does it?

 

& I doubt by "missiles" the USN meant OFFENSIVE weapons, IIRC...the LPD-17 were supposed to receive ESSM vertical launch cells.  To add an OFFENSIVE capacity would require a major expenditure of funds for rebuild.....

Because you don't know jack diddly about aviation; I'm just going to say that you need to do some homework before you make ignorant comments. (see red)  

 

As a hint, what are we doing with those 600 F15Cs and 400 F-15Es? (* figure it out.)       

Wooo... hold your horses... that came from left field! How can you possibly compare the F-35 to something like that? Two different types of planes! Please tell me you are joking!!!!! And you are talking about buying two ultra expensive aircrafts with no potential for export orders with either of them. What would we do with a fleet of 200 raptors and 200 of these???? Because that would be all we could afford. And the up-grades!!! Over time it would be more expensive to up-grade than the Rafale would have been.

1. China; they have to knock us out there in order to drive us back from our forward based defense.

2. Neither have I. In fact the USAF will tell you that signal management is a 240 hemispheric for good reasons that have to do with the F-135 engine. I expect enemy tailchase weapons will be taken care of by decoys and expendables in the turn after the break.

3. Any air battle (I laughed at your exchange with HR about this one.) will be a combo of aircraft launched, ship/sub launched and surface to air and surface to surface launched missiles and projectiles as well as the usual air to air fighting that you would envisage going both ways. There will be more missile vs missile engagements than aircraft initially. But since that phase will be over quickly, assuming that our missile defenses hold and the Chinese exhaust their stocks (fairly quickly because any hope 2nd Artillery has is based on saturation and mass, and they really don't have enough missiles to guarantee all the targets they have to hit.) then it will come down to their aircraft versus ours. 

4. Assuming we don't go nuclear... when [if] the PRC loses the missile war and the sub campaign [blockade] starts to bite hard.) I've said this before, but let me refresh your memory. The PLAAF pilots are fairly good to excellent. Don't underestimate them or their doctrine. Their aircraft are not that good, so we can expect Vietnamese style performance out of the well flown junk aircraft.  That means we need at least near numerical parity at the point of contact or we are in trouble when the primary air to air phase begins.  As a rough guess, that means we will need 1000-1500 hundred combat effective heavy fighters (F-15 or better) from the US and its allies.  That is the minimum number to whittle the PLAAF down to the point where we can successfully invade their air-space and go to work on their infrastructure with our current bombers.           

 

Certainly, the USAF has never claimed that an F-35 with external carriage is going to be "stealthy"....rightfully so.

I believe both here & other places it is Day One-Day N that the F-35 flies Internal Carriage...Day N=1 will see external carriage...e.g. in the later stages of Desert Strom, once the IADS had been beaten down.