It is called a strike fighter because it is capable of precisely attacking surface targets while also fighting agile enemy aircraft.
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If there were to be another war with Israel, argue the Syrians, enemy aircraft might use Turkish airspace to strike at Syria from almost any direction.
There he met a woman whose voice he instantly recognised: Ellen Margaret Graves, the radar operator who had been guiding his plane towards formations of enemy aircraft for the past two years.
General Richard Myers, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chief of Staffs, pointed to a possible breakdown of the "elaborate procedures and electronic means to identify friendly and enemy aircraft" as causing the incident.
This makes it hard, for instance, to compare real-time video images (from a camera in the nose-cone of a missile, for example) with a set of several thousand targets (pictures of enemy aircraft, say), because all the targets have to be tested within a thirtieth of a second, the duration of a single frame of video.
During World War II, radar was invented to detect enemy ships and aircraft.
"I can fly a single-seat aircraft in enemy territory, but I can't drive a vehicle, " she said on a recent CBS 60 Minutes television show.
Second, even in the absence of enemy air defenses, unmanned aircraft are relatively fragile.
Stealth does not make an aircraft completely invulnerable to enemy forces.
They collect vital intelligence for warfighters at every level in the chain of command, sometimes loitering silently above enemy formations far longer than any manned aircraft could.
Furthermore, these aircraft may have to fly over enemy territory and in any case are subject to attack.
But the new aircraft will be much more sophisticated, will be far less visible to enemy radar and will have sensors that allow a single jet to take on missions that now require several aircraft.
One can see the skilled players twisting and turning their flaming, dying aircraft to extract maximum value from the enemy, where a novice will spiral out of control and hit the water or ground almost immediately.
This includes anti-radiation missiles designed to destroy enemy air defences, advanced radars for its fleet of fighter jets, KC135 refuelling aircraft and Osprey V22 transport aircraft.
Vigilant Eagle uses a set of sensors linked to a billboard-size array of antennas on the ground that blast enemy missiles with enough energy to disrupt its circuits and drive it away from the aircraft.
The Navy is developing N-UCAS as a stealthy, carrier-based unmanned aircraft that would allow Carrier Strike Groups to operate effectively from outside the envelope of enemy missile threats and could act as a prime hunter against missiles and their launchers before and after launch.
That edge is the main reason why no U.S. soldier has been killed by hostile aircraft since the Korean War, and no U.S. pilot has been downed by an enemy plane since the Vietnam War.
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On board the aircraft carriers there are typically 70-80 planes for defence, attack, refuelling in flight, jamming enemy communications and radars, and for airborne surveillance and control.
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