F-14 Tomcat: The Navy Fighter It Wishes It Could Bring Back from the Dead

[rangerrebew]

F-14 Tomcat: The Navy Fighter It Wishes It Could Bring Back from the Dead


Who cares about the F-35.
Dave Majumdar [2]

The Navy’s F/A-XX program could be used to fill the service’s air superiority gap—which has essentially been left open since the F-14’s retirement and the demise of the NATF and A/F-X programs. But the problem is that the Navy is pursuing the F/A-XX as a multirole Super Hornet replacement rather than an air superiority-oriented machine. “The danger in its development is that it suboptimizes the fighter role in the quest for a hybrid fighter/attack jet,” the Hudson Institute report notes. “This would leave the Joint Force without a carrier-based sixth generation air superiority fighter.”

While the requirement for a carrier-based long-range strike capability is a frequent subject of discussion around Washington, the U.S. Navy’s need for improved air superiority capabilities is often neglected.


Source URL (retrieved on January 13, 2018): http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/f-14-tomcat-the-navy-fighter-it-wishes-it-could-bring-back-24045?page=show