Do the math.

And the decision makers that decided that the F-15/16 was a better plane than the f-5 because its "wow-factor" is higher are the same people who are touting (and stand to profit from) the so-called "Star Wars" defense.

I knew someone who worked on radar systems for many military planes. One of his last projects before he retired was working on a "radar simulator".

Do I hear you say, "Eh?"

As I understood it, it feeds simulated radar signals from various planes into radar receivers so that they can be tested, tweaked, etc., and so operators can be trained on the receiver equipment.

You may be thinking: Why do that when you can simply fly the planes and use the receiver on the plane? Why spend X hundreds of thousands of dollars, or more, on such developing such a piece of equipment? Even the data collection for the simulator must have been very expensive. Surely it must just have been a boondoggle project to get more money into the military industrial complex, eh?

No.

Most of the time the military isn't at war. It's waiting around, and training people in case of war - trying to stay ready. And in peacetime (and probably in wartime too) one of the biggest expenses the Air Force has is the cost of fuel. Pilots have to fly to keep up their skills, etc. and its expensive. It's also expensive to fly a bomber or tanker or cargo plane around to test its radar systems, train radar operators, etc. There are big payoffs in using simulators to reduce the amount of flying time that has to be done. It reduces noise. It reduces pollution. It's safer. Etc.

Similarly, replacing a F-16 with 5 F-5s isn't necessarily cheaper. Maintenance costs are likely much higher on the older planes than the newer ones. Maintenance costs are also a high percentage of the Air Force's costs. The cost for keeping 5 times as many pilots trained, flying them around, etc., would also be much higher than the F-16 in just fuel. And how good would an F-5 be at being a platform for stand-off weapons?

This isn't to say that often times projects are started which don't make much sense, and projects are ended for the wrong reasons. That has happened and continues to happen.

But most of the people making these decisions aren't idiots. They can do back-of-the-envelope calculations as well as anyone. Most of them have dedicated their professional careers to doing the best job they can with the constraints they have.

My $0.02.

Cheers,
Scott.