>How important are top-gun style "dogfights" in modern warfare? >If everyone has stealth aircraft, how do they even find eachother to fight? There are two maj

>How important are top-gun style "dogfights" in modern warfare? >If everyone has stealth aircraft, how do they even find eachother to fight? There are two major tasks when trying to shoot down an airplane: detecting it and bringing a missile to it. Detecting a stealth fighter is possible with a long wavelength radar[1]. The problem is that the precision of location it provides is not sufficient for targeting the airplane, because an air-to-air missile needs to be very close to target in order to shoot it down (think <10 meters). Short wavelength radars are typically used for targeting airplanes as they provide very precise location. But such radars can "see" stealth fighters only at very short distances, when it's too late to counteract. So the idea of fighting one stealth fighter with another would be a) bring our fighter into the approximate area where the hostile fighter is, and b) let the pilot figure out the enemy's exact location using an on-board short wavelength radar and/or FLIR [2]. Since (b) can happen at rather large distances (think 40-50kms) it is believed that a dogfight is very unlikely nowadays, because modern air-to-air missiles allow shooting down reliably the adversary long before two planes become close enough for a dogfight. [1] https://theaviationist.com/2014/03/27/vega-31-shot-down/ https://theaviationist.com/2014/03/27/vega-31-shot-down/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_looking_infrared https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_looking_infrared >How do missiles work? There are two ways how missiles target airplanes. The problem with missiles is that they are too small to have a powerful radar sufficient for long-range targeting. Therefore one way is to "highlight" the target by a powerful radar (typically ground-based) so missiles can use the "reflected" signal for navigation. That's how long-range surface-to-air missiles typically work. Air-to-air missiles operate at shorter ranges and typically use infra-red detectors for navigation. Stealth fighters emit only slightly less heat radiation than regular fighter jets and therefore very vulnerable to IR targeting. I believe there are various combinations of both approaches, but that's another story.