Let me give you a few more then, at which point you will perhaps stop being obtuse.

1. Chinese value saving money for future and living frugally. US residents value borrowing money to reach higher level of life.
This alone should clue you in to the massive difference of potential outcomes of any financial scenario, to the point of having polar opposite outcome.

2. Chinese do not value individual life but they value groups, clans and family ties. US residents value individuality to a far greater degree.
This causes massive difference in ability to perform large scale mass production projects (infamous "would take me 9 months to hire people to do the project in US and took me 3 days to hire the same people in China" apple moment). It also causes significantly diminished ability to work R&D in both short and long term (look at military development, which still cannot even copy old russian jet engines, much less develop functional ones on their own).

Point is, they have their own strengths and weaknesses based on their cultural approach that are VASTLY different from ours. To assume that these aren't important for the outcome of long-term development is like saying that Asians had as much chance of becoming the colonisers as Europeans did. Yet we know very well that nature of China caused it to both have one continuous civilization for thousands of years, but that civilization was incapable of evolving as fast as Mediterranean (and eventually European) civilizations did.

That wasn't what I claimed. I was answering the claim that missile has a controllable lock on after launch functionality. It does not in strictest sense. Launching it without actively designating trajectory to the target means it will lock on to anything it first sees and chases it, regardless of IFF. Not really optimal. You can't actually feed it a target manually without specifying target before launch. It's either "whatever you see first after launch" or "fly to the area of this target I'm locked on and await mid life update/fire up active radar in the area and do your thing". You cannot mix and match, at least not in any of the known production versions, unless you have classified data at your disposal stating otherwise.

It obviously has a lock on after launch for medium and long range in technical sense however, as just like any other missile with radar range much shorter then flight range it will rely on inertial guidance to fly into stated engagement zone before requesting mid life update from host aircraft or firing up its radar in attempt to locate the target. And it obviously can be guided during the inertial stage with various mid life trajectory updates.

You're not aware of basic facts now.

1. AIM-120 has a very well known weakness in short range launches. To be specific, it's utterly terrible at them, to the point where there is a clear gap between AIM-9 and AIM-120 where neither missile is effective. This gaps wasn't considered a major issue until Luftwaffe got their hands on MiG-29s and their R-73s and R-77s (Russian equivalents of AIM-9 and AIM-120 respectively) and basically pissed their pants at just how terrible their missiles were in comparison. Brits ended up rushing their ASRAAM project to fill the gap and US has been on/off wavering between buying those and upgrading AIM-9 to fill the gap. AIM-120 appears to be basically unfixable at short ranges for some reason as it hasn't even been suggested as the missile to upgrade to fix the gap.

If I remember correctly the problem was claimed to be either rocket motor that doesn't have sufficient thrust to weight ratio to give missile necessary air speed and maneuverability for window immediately after launch (and has the same problem in the end of the long range launches in terminal phase maneuvering), or the control fins bleeding far too much speed at high angles of attack needed to maneuvre the missile or both factors working together. Both of these are however conjectures rather then facts, as both thrust and turn rates should still be classified as far as I know. It is however known that AMRAAM has not performed terribly well in launches that don't fit its stated "medium range" window, i.e. close range or long range launches.

2. Easiest defence against any radar guided missile is always to run, however that also means that you cannot do anything in the theatre. That is why long range radar launches are essentially a game of chicken - who will turn around and run first, abandoning his launches missile(s) to be useless.

3. Finally AIM-120 has no anti-radiation tracker to lock onto enemy radar. It has a small terminal stage close range radar sitting in the nose cone on a servo, that has to be cheap, expendable and be able to run off battery power (and by extension, pretty crappy).

They are relevant in the simple point that their very basic values, such as "who is more valuable, daughter or mother" are vastly different.

How can you possibly expect the same end result based on same starting point and stark differences in even basic values assigned to very core things of our existences, our family members?

Let me give you a couple of examples of cultural difference between China and Western Europe.

Your wife goes on a long work trip. You, the husband are going to be left without her for sexual relief for quite a while. What will wife do about it?
Guess which option belongs to European wife and which one is the choice of the Chinese one:

1. Tell her friend to look for her husband potentially cheating.
2. Organise a friend or a prostitute to visit her husband in regular intervals to make sure he's satisfied.

Situation two:

You, the husband, see your mother, your wife and your daughter drowning. You only have a chance to save one out of three. Which one, according to your wife you SHOULD save?

1. Daughter
2. Mother
3. Wife

Answer: #2 is Chinese option. #1 and potentially #3 are Western European ones.

Issue is that just because start of the road is the same for them, assuming that they will end up at the same goal is quite strange. East Asian countries have a very different culture, with very different approach to even most basic of things. Expecting them to end up at the same goal is rather ignorant to say the least.

Propaganda. You still need to be convincing to your own civilian population that you are in fact a force for good. Currently too many people alive still remember WW2 or have passed their experiences to their children and as a result too large portion of the civilian population will not swallow a wholesale ethnic cleansing.

So the obvious thing to do is to take baby steps. Remind yourself of world in the 1990s and look at the world today. Imagine selling some of the things of today's world to population back then. Imagine how you'd likely get tried for treason if you pushed for them too seriously.

Public opinion is fairly slow to change on such issues, but they do change over time.

While correct, going to range where missiles are "unevadeable" is not terribly smart unless you're flying a night mission, as that is in LoS range. Regardless, if you're that close, you may as well go full passive and use IR chaser tracking like AIM-9. That is the second air to air missile in F-22's arsenal and it typically carries several for close combat.

That said modern air to air doctrine dictates that you do not want to go into close range combat as main advantage of high tech aircraft is their superior guidance systems and ability to avoid enemy missiles through superior jamming ability. Both of which require range. Take a look at Libyan conflict which pretty much established the "every group of fighter/attack planes should have one electronic warfare aircraft escorting it". The role of that aircraft is almost exclusively to jam enemy fire control radars.

Finally, as far as we know, AIM-120 does not have lock on after launch functionality - it needs to have a preprogrammed flight course to target for long range flight and lock on is apparently (as far as we know) required to generate one. It's likely that LOAL functionality could be incorporated, as missile is essentially lock on after launch de facto for long range launches, as it's guided by aircraft for it's long range run to target and only becomes self tracked when in range of its own small terminal range radar.

Notably this is yet another reason why F-22 is so utterly without a task to perform in modern world. Vast majority of very old and cheap multirole aircraft such as F-16, Mirage-2000 and Tornado are perfectly functional because of the electronic warfare escorts. It's simply easier to just track and jam missiles from that dedicated electronic warfare aircraft and use cheap and reliable older multirole aircraft that are fully functional and can run active sensors to add to group's theatre awareness then use F-22.

This is of course if you care about Geneva Conventions in the first place. Guantanamo Bay, creative classifications and other legalese shenanigans showed that these conventions no longer realistically apply to modern warfare beyond PR level.

AWACS is sitting at long range and firing active search radar from single direction. To get a proper coverage of area, you'll want to have as much data from as many data points as possible which are interlinked and share radar data. This makes both active jamming and stealthiness much harder to execute. This ranges from flying hugging ground to actually flying stealthy planes to avoid detection.

Incidentally, that is exactly what both NATO and Russian tech developed into back in the 1980s and 1990s.

The real problem is that plane simply has no tasks in these wars. The closest it could come to seeing action is maintaining some no-fly zone somewhere, but even those tasks are typically better handled by non stealthy aircraft that can afford to keep their search radars in active mode all the time to add to radar coverage of the area.

So you're not blaming the fact that most motivated and best people leave, and those who know that jobs are shit and are good will never take them?

It's not at all occurring to you that offering a demanding job at a slave wage is not the best way to get good employees?

You must be an true modern US big business manager. Or stupid. But those two are synonyms.

That's not really hard to "learn" when you're oceans away from everyone who could even remotely oppose you.

Thing is, wikipedia at the very least 100% confirms my take on it. Hence, either GP has a much better source, or he's talking about things he just doesn't understand.

No offence, but pulse form of radars is not "new". It's what came with early PESAs. That was in 70s, 40 years ago.

Regardless, you're still talking about search radars anyway. Fire control radar needs to have power to burn through jamming. You're not going to do that with a 60 watt radar against military grade multi-spectrum jammer. Modern ships use radars that are rated in megawatts for this, aircraft usually push into tens of kilowatts range.

It is certainly true that most search radars can operate in low power mode to reduce visibility. It is completely and utterly unfeasible for that kind of power to do anything to a modern jammer. And it is even more unfeasible to expect a fire control radar to get any kind of result with those power ratings.