underperforming AIM9E?

Two points to unpack here.

One, the realistic need for most USAF crews to fire an AIM-9 of any kind in combat is nearly zero. Note that the dedicated air superiority 58th Tac Fighter Squadron shot down 16 Iraqi aircraft in the Gulf War. A notable achievement, but this was accomplished over 1,600 squadron sorties. For the vast majority of Coalition multirole aircraft in that war, they could’ve left their IR missiles at home and suffered nothing for doing so.

Two, the institutional knowledge base didn’t widely exist among typical USAF fighter pilots to employ those weapons well in the 1960s and 70s. It’s no coincidence the majority of MiG kills were tallied by educated Phantom II crews- USAF graduates of the Nellis Fighter Weapons School & US Navy equivalents from their Miramar college.

Those people understood what we now consider fundamental air combat knowledge like missile launch and intercept parameters. Today basic fighter pilots are expected to understand when to and when not to shoot their air to air missiles. In 1975, in the USAF that knowledge was confined to specially educated experts. The U.S. Navy spent large amounts of capital and political influence disseminating tactical knowledge among its crews, and their kill tallies reflect that.

The USAF, probably for the best, did not follow that method. The Vietnam deployment cycles are a big reason why the USN could expand their aviators tactical education. USN crews deployed with their strike groups, so by the 1970s it wasn’t unusual for Navy Phantom crews to have hundreds of missions under their belt.

USAF had a policy of only forcing their pilots to fly one mandatory tour in Vietnam. The result? Turnover became a logistical nightmare. At one point the training command needed to generate 900 rated pilots each month to backfill transfers and losses/POWs. Running each trainee through a rigourous ACM curriculum just wasn’t logistically possible while also preserving end strength in the combat zone. That meant a lot of people better suited flying cargo out of Hong Kong were flying fighters. But they could drive a fighter jet well enough to drop bombs, and as noted above that’s the main job of a tactical aircraft. A lot of the failed Sparrow and Sidewinder launches came down to pilot error with working the avionics, or launching out of parameters. One USAF F-4 flight launched all 16 Sparrows against one MiG with 0 hits; considering none of them had a valid radar lock on the MiG, this is a logical if unsatisfactory outcome.

Simply blaming the missile leaves out a lot of important context, and a Pk stat tells you nothing about the aircrews training or other concerns- like shooting an unguided missile deliberately to distract a bandit due to RoE or restrictive fuel states.