Fighter Combat - Tactics and Maneuvering

8
Unlimited-Aircraft
Tactics
Of course, with the increasing number of aeroplanes one gets increased
opportunities for shooting down one's enemies, but at the same time, the
opportunity increases of being shot down one's-self.
Baron Manfred von Richthofen
In previous chapters there has been at least an implied assumption that
the number of hostile fighters involved in the action was known to the
friendly forces, although frequent references have been made to additional,
unseen, wild-card bogeys. Assumptions such as this are necessary in order
to allow investigation of some of the fine points of ACM; but anyone who
has ever been involved in actual combat will realize that total confidence
in one's perception of a given situation is rarely, if ever, achieved. The great
Prussian strategist Karl von Clausewitz referred to this phenomenon as the
"fog of war," a fog that obscures reality from the combatants. In the
air-to-air arena this can mean imperfect knowledge of an opponent's energy
state, or uncertainty as to the type of weapons or tactics he might
employ. It can also mean that friendly fighters can almost never be absolutely
sure of the number of enemy aircraft they will face, either prior to or
during engagement. Is that enemy section really alone/ or is the entire
enemy air force lurking undetected in the sun?
Any soldier knows that during a war it is not always the ponderables that
count, but that a great deal depends on luck.
Lt. General Adolph Galland, Luftwaffe
Obviously, if the friendly fighters always chose to assume the worst
case, they probably would never engage and therefore be of little use. So the
standard procedure adopted by most combatants is to gather and analyze
all the information available about the tactical situation from every possible
source, and then employ tactics accordingly. In the early days of air
warfare, knowledge was limited to that supplied by intelligence reports on
the numbers and types of enemy aircraft and ground defenses in the area,