>'Operationally, the AIM-120 has achieved 10 BVR kills from 17 shots – a Pk or “kill probability” of 0.59 (59 percent) against benign or “dumb” targets.'

Fyi, frequencies are not probabilities. That was one of the points that, as he neared the end of his life, lead Ronald Fisher to say that mass confusion over stats would be the downfall of the next set of nations:

"We are quite in danger of sending highly trained and highly intelligent young men out into the world with tables of erroneous numbers under their arms, and with a dense fog in the place where their brains ought to be. In this century, of course, they will be working on guided missiles and advising the medical profession on the control of disease, and there is no limit to the extent to which they could impede every sort of national effort." Fisher, R N (1958). "The Nature of Probability". Centennial Review. 2: 261–274. http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/maths/histstat/fisher272.pdf

Here is another good paper from him on that: http://www.phil.vt.edu/dmayo/PhilStatistics/Triad/Fisher%201...

Chapter 9 here also covers it from a different perspective: http://omega.albany.edu:8008/JaynesBook.html

ikr, but there is no much more operational data beyond that. also, not my quote, and the point was just that at some point you need a fallback weapon

I had never seen evidence of the "guided missiles" part of Fisher's prediction before. In medicine it is obvious...so maybe I am just not familiar, is there mass confusion in weapons research too?

don't know about missiles but if we include rocket science in general there is plenty literature on how they cheated statistics to get the shuttle going https://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/roge...

> The AIM-120 has been tested in over 200 test firings, with a reliability of about 85 percent, so statistically speaking, about one of those four AIM-120s will be a dud.

I didn't realize it's that bad. I guess action and sci-fi movies make you believe military equipment is much more reliable than it really is.

well don't take my comment as a slam to miltech, it's actually quite good once you consider it's gonna need to work at supersonic speed with all the forces entailed, targeting and intercepting a supersonic target, while being subject to all kind of electronic countermeasures, starting from beyond visual range and flying for an extended time before target acquisition via remote radio controls.