Salute!
Went the the original document that the think tank fellow used for his presentation. Decent report. Classic RAND, CATO, etc document with many confusing statistics, monte carlo battles, heh heh. He is not a tactician with real world experience, best I could tell, and some of that shows in the report.
He shows a typical CVW for each of the eras in that graphic we are looking at. And as I expected, the long range years existed when the Intruder and Sluf carried the pig iron. And then USN air wings became mostly Bugs and the strike range from our carriers torpedoed!
@ Wolf-man , et al..... He has organic air refueling by various platforms on all his air wing configurations. His F-35C numbers seem low, so maybe the Bug mafia is ruling more than we are aware of.
I do like the idea of the drones for tankers, and as anyone here knows that has hooked up with the drogue, that plane in front just needs to be real stable, smooth for your probe.
Oh well, the naysayers will keep naysaying and pseudo experts like Sprey will continue to amuse us.
Gums sends...
P.S. The F-16.net has several posts about the Sluf, mostly by me ( heh heh) , as well as great comentary about other planes of different eras.