Jet Fighter

A Jet fighter aircraft is a military aircraft designed primarily for air-to-air combat against other aircraft with a powerful jet engine or engines, as opposed to bombers and attack aircraft, whose main mission is to attack ground targets. The hallmarks of a jet fighter are its speed, maneuverability, and small size relative to other combat aircraft.

A jet fighter's main purpose is to establish air superiority over a battlefield. Since World War II, achieving and maintaining air superiority has been considered essential for victory in Jet conventional warfare. The success or failure of a belligerent's efforts to gain air superiority hinges on several factors including the skill of its pilots, the tactical soundness of its doctrine for deploying its Jet fighters, and the numbers and performance of those fighters. Because of the importance of air superiority, since the early days of aerial combat armed forces have constantly competed to develop technologically superior fighters and to deploy these fighters in greater numbers, and fielding a viable fighter fleet consumes a substantial proportion of the defense budgets of modern armed forces.