You have given Main Codestone to User ' elxloki '. <| sep |> I do this too . I ' m pretty sure I read to do this before buying mine . <| sep |> I believe they still put guns on fighter planes , but over time the sizeweight allotment for them has decreased in proportion to their decreasing importance in combat . I ' m not sure I can even recall to a battle between two aircraft that was settled by dogfight in recent years . Of course missiles have come a long way since Vietnam . The big change in making smart weapons guided by lots of computing power dates to the second gulf war . As late as Desert Storm in the 90 ' s we were still using dumb bombs . It was only in the invasion of Iraq that we saw what the modern military and modern weapons look like . You may be right that giving guns to pilots makes them better pilots , teaches them tactical awareness and better control over the plane . But their use in combat is already pretty minimal and can only go down in the future . A missile is basically a smart bullet that chases its prey down over a range of a hundred miles or more . Why would anyone use regular bullets when you have smart bullets ? Why risk your plane and your life in gun range of the enemy when you can shoot him down when he ' s a hundred miles off below the horizon ? I think this trend will only increase , and even more so when we remove pilots from the picture and most aerial combat is done via drones .