From what I understand, these guns were desired by pilots but the results in practice were mixed. And apparently ground crews hated dealing with the gun pods.
The problem with BVR is there's zero room for risk and zero room for error and BVR missiles are pretty random/shotgun weapons. If BVR missiles are only effective 1/3 of the time you're better off going non-BVR and using your logistical might to put 3x the number of planes in the air...
In one of the most permissive airspaces possible.
Contrast that to Ukraine where we see CAS aircraft opting to lob unguided rockets from distance and bug out, lest some layer of the IADS knock them out of the sky. As near as I can tell, helicopters have more or less vanished.
We have to be careful taking too many lessons from a decades long counter insurgency effort forward and applying them to peer conflicts.
> If BVR missiles are only effective 1/3 of the time you're better off going non-BVR and using your logistical might to put 3x the number of planes in the air...
Or would you be better of launching 4 missiles from standoff than risking a much more expensive airframe and pilot in close range knife fighting?
The AIM-9X is a WVR missile, I'm not talking about BVR at all.
A gun is almost utterly useless in modern fighter aircraft, especially for air to air engagements, especially in a world where the AIM-9X and its opposing side equivalents exist. You will never, even WVR, even if you graduated TOPGUN, get into a position where you can use a gun against an opponent with an AIM-9X on the rail.