Probably right. I aint a fighter pilot.
Just saying, the "WVR dogfighting is obsolete" idea has proven wrong before.
It'll be interesting to see what happens if/when we go up against, say China's air force. Very curious to see how their AESA's compare to ours.
I've posted a bit about this somewhere on SH recently but here goes again.
First, my experience and knowledge is 40 years out of date. We were still flying bi-planes when I was in USAF....well, almost. It seems that long ago.
And, when I did serve I was part of the adversary/red forces at Nellis and then at Clark AFB.
The basis of our training of dissimilar air combat tactics (DACT) at the time was based on studies that came out of Vietnam analyzing why McNamara's (and his host of best and brightest fucking idiot ops analysts) gee whiz F-4's (and F-105 for that matter) were shot down fairly regularly by fucking Mig-21's.
Very broadly (and vaguely as I've been away from this for a long, long time), this study concluded most air to air engagements devolved into a visual dogfight, that large size and hence being the most visible was a distinct disadvantage, that visual engagements tended to end up as slow speed fights and low speed rudder authority was very valuable (ah, look to the F-16 for how these lessons were implemented to some extent...and look at the fucking huge size of the F-22/35 which seems to indicate that these considerations were either forgotten or no longer valid with today's aircraft tech).
Now, understand, this was mainly addressing F-4's that used a pulse radar for a fire control system and there were indeed ways to beat this radar...to break the range gate and to get inside of min range on the AIM-7 radar guided missiles. Once inside min range, its a visual fight not much different that prior wars.
When I was part of this, the F-15 and its Doppler radar just started to come into the inventory and suddenly our little bag of tricks didn't work anymore. No way to break lock and get inside and those fuckers could go way high and had real look down/shoot down capability when all older radars were defeated in this by ground clutter.
We still practiced air combat maneuvers and tactics against dissimilar aircraft....but the game changed dramatically from that point forward.
I have no idea what tactics and limitations they have now with F-22/F-35 aircraft but I'm sure that those radars are far more effective than the F-15's that I was slightly familiar with. So, I speculate that shooting you in the face on the way in is probably an even higher confidence tactic than with the F-15. But even so, all pilots still need to know visual combat maneuvers and tactics just because (I presume that in a very dense, high threat, air combat environment you can't shoot everybody in the face from 15 miles out and will get jumped and need to visually maneuver, right?).
Oh, also....at the time I was in our rules of engagement required a visual ID before you could shoot. This sort of automatically got you into a visual range type engagement. F-4's used to use an "eyeball/shooter" type approach where someone would close with the bogey at high speed and get a bandit VID for trailing aircraft to then shoot. In the very early F-15 deployments that I had some shallow familiarity with back in the day, this was considered to be highly restrictive and inhibit the plane's advantageous capabilities. At one time, as a sort of interim measure, they mounted scopes (yeah, like what we use). in the cockpit attached to a canopy bow that could be swung down in front of the pilot and aligned with the longitudinal access of the aircraft. So, flip the scope down, pull the target box on the HUD to the center line, and look thru the scope to ID the bogey, and if bogey was a bandit then shoot them in the face. If I remember correctly, this was quickly supplanted with some sort of telescopic camera system. I'm sure that the new aircraft have far more sophisticated capabilities for VID and I have zero idea what current ROE are and if they still include VID requirement.
I don't go off about this stuff very often as I don't want to be one of those guys who lives in their past glory days....that, and I was really just a nobody. Just ayoung field grade officer who did his six years and then got out like an idiot. So, take anything I say with a grain of salt.
Cheers
