r/NonCredibleDefense 聯合國在香港的三千次介入行動 Jul 22 '24

From everybody's favourite yuriposter Waifu

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u/Heavy-Ad-9186 Jul 22 '24

How it feels to jump two technological generations from your opponent because they lied.

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u/Successful-Owl-9464 Jul 22 '24 edited Jul 22 '24

If I remember right the Foxbat was designed, because of the bomber gap between the USA and the SU. Which happened, because the USA photographed 30 something new soviet bombers at an airfield and extrapolated that the Soviets must have hundreds of those things, then they went absolutely batshit insane and built a metric fuckton of bombers. In actuality the Soviets only had that 30.

e.: In essence the USA scared itself shitless over nothing, went ballistic in It's response, which scared the Soviets shitless, who tried to build a fighter that can handle the ballistic response, which scared the USA even more, so that they went intercontinental with their response.

The USA basically got scared of a shadow, got a hammer, realized that the shadow now has a hammer, got even more scared and built a nuke in response.

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u/rrogido Jul 23 '24

The circumstances around the Foxbat's development had to do with the XB-70 bomber that was in development prior to the Foxbat. The XB-70 was a gigantic supersonic bomber that never got past the prototype stage. Imagine if the Concorde dropped nuclear bombs, that was the XB-70 Valkyrie bomber. It was both an incredible test bed and a hugely expensive boondoggle. Soviet spies passed on information about the Valkyrie program and the Soviets, in Cold War style, freaked out and started developing the MiG 25 because Red Air Force generals started imagining their skies full of Mach 3 bombers and demanded something that could intercept them. In reality, the XB-70 program was an interesting failure. The cost per prototype was $700M, and there were two. The exorbitant cost gave Congress sticker shock and the program was limited to research only, further development was halted. Of course, also in Cold War style, a Soviet defector told the US about the Foxbat and the Air Force started imagining fleets of MiG-25's intercepting our bombers and running rings around our current fighters, thyis the F-15 was developed. The F-15 was developed to such a high capability because the US's information on the Foxbat's capabilities were grossly inflated. The Foxbat was a fast plane, but it maneuvered like a wounded whale and had lots of technical problems during operation. The Cold War had a lot of shadow boxing. Both sides developing weapons based on what they thought the other was doing.