inaspin
The issues behind your comments are not simple, even if they may appear so. Defence procurement agencies around the globe struggle with them – and often fail, so we are not going to get far in a few paragraphs here.
If your only wish is to win in every guns dogfight that you find yourself in, then you do need extremely good agility, aerodynamic departure resistance, an ability to disconnect the flight path vector from the attitude of the aircraft (which makes it harder for the enemy to anticipate what you are up to and so to plan their tactics) and either a lot of fuel or a low fuel consumption at full throttle so that you will not be the first to break out of the scrap.
In those circumstances a suitably skilled pilot (most important) with a Harrier or a thrust vectoring variant of the Su27/Su30 family should not get shot down and may even shoot the other guy down.
But you have to ask yourself what job you want to do when you are not in a dogfight. That leaves everything else aeroplanes are used for which is a lot of stuff. You also have to ask yourself what if the enemy can prevent you getting in close in the first place. What do you do then – go home and complain they would not play your war?
Well actually, the last thing you might do is go home, because there is a good chance you will die while you are wandering around looking for the dogfight you know you can win.
The Harrier is still a remarkable device, but today is no longer viable as other than a sophisticated low level night bomb truck or BVR interceptor that can operate from small sites. Still not things to sniff at perhaps, but you need a bit more than that for the next generation of kit that may still be around in 50 years time.
I am more than content that the JSF programme (at present) includes a variant than can still use small sites (land vertically) and at the same time be competitive in most of the up and away jobs and require no special training to fly in the circuit.
After all do we by cars that can see off anybody at the local traffic island but are not on for everything else we need them to do?
Regards
John