The F22 naval variant they proposed was the answer. At some point you are throwing good money after bad.

Yes! The A-10 would like a brrrrrrrt of your time.

We need to stop giving equipment out to other countries just because they're fighting who we don't like today. it winds up getting used against us 10 or 20 years later.

ETA-even giving them broken shit, if they need it, they'll get it working.

You could have the FB-23

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This.  But at least it be fleet would have some legs to it.

Even Tomcats needed big wing tanking to do anything significant. A non issue.

I'm not sure anyone is worried about facing off against a shitload of M113s, but we sure as shit shouldn't send anything more modern for those reasons.

What's the bad idea?  There isn't an equivalent replacement aircraft or the F-14 is gone?

Realistically it would have served GWOT and done an alright job.

Always loved the F-14. We share a bithday also. We both went into service on Sept. 22 1974. Glad I made it past 2006 though, LOL.

The AGM-54 PHOENIX was past it's end of life.  The solid rockets it had were all failing inspection due to cracking from age.

There was no budget to build new, design and build something better, and no justification at that time of a threat that needed it's range.  If you have no usable PHOENIX missiles, that's another reason to retire the only platform that can launch them.

The F14 was an interceptor, it was really only meant to launch, get out as fast as possible (hence the Mach 2.4 speed requirement) engage the target and head back.

These days the Aegis missile defense system (and/or whatever it's supplemented or replaced with) pretty much takes care of that kinda stuff.

Things like the F18 and F35 can still intercept (except at lower top speeds) but they can also do a whole whack of other usefull stuff. I think the F14D in its later years could do bombing runs and stuff too.

When I was looking into aircraft top speeds, the Vietnam war they looked at hundreds of thousands of sorties and looked at how fast aircraft would go and for what reason. They number of times supersonic was used was in the low thousands IIRC and the number of times top speed was at or above Mach 1.3 was literally 3 times. They still kept speed requirements at Mach 1.6 as that's the fastest an aircraft ever tactically used in a Sortie in Vietnam era. Just in case. Most of the time when using an afterburner the jet uses so much fuel it kneecaps its combat radius, so most pilots only even use afterburners to reach higher speeds in incredibly rare circumstances.

Not such a big deal when an F14 was "intercepting" an enemy jet and only had to go a couple hundred miles tops, but when a jet is going from a carrier to land and performing strikes or CAS you need legs. The Mach 2.4 became completely irrelevant with modern SAM's, and with the lack of top speed the entire swing wing became completely obsolete. It's a ton of weight for very little usage. Even now modern fighter aircraft take the supersonic shockwave into account when designing the wings, so it's not a big deal like it used to be. Likely there will never be another swing wing fighter made again.

I was in an F-14 squadron during GW1 and was a plane captain for a time (was supposed to be in the rigging loft but wasn’t needed there).  If that big ass aircraft was not dripping hydraulic fluid on the ground it’s because the reservoirs were empty.  

No first hand experience with the FA-18 but I can see it being a much less maintenance intensive aircraft without the variable wings.  I wasn’t around them much because the Kennedy still had A7 (man eater) squadrons aboard.

ETA the posters above are correct.  Our pilots main job during GW1 was a “bomb cat” role.  They weren’t doing much if any air to air combat.

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