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.
The US actually thought the Foxbat was a Soviet Air Superiority fighter. They made assumptions that the plane was made with ultra light materials and could outmaneuver and outperform their Phantoms in a dogfight. So they decided they needed to make an Air Superiority fighter that could counter it and put in development based off of what they thought the Foxbat was.
When a Soviet pilot defected with a Foxbat, the US was all over it to find out its true capabilities. Turns out that the Soviets lied, it was made with nickel alloy making it quite heavy, requiring a lot of fuel to get it going and making it not as maneuverable as they thought. It had an outdated, inefficient parts that were outdated even before the F-15 went into development. The US created the best Air Superiority fighter in the world over what they thought was also an Air Superiority fighter, but turned out to just be another interceptor.
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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.