Bibliography and reference material on Grumman Tomcat aircraft.
Info on other Grumman models available here.
The F-14 Tomcat is a highly sophisticated naval aircraft which was designed to replace the F-4 Phantom. Over the years, it grew in capabilities and complexity; it is a big aircraft sporting various weapons systems that allow it to intercept enemy or hostile aircraft hundreds of kilometers away from the aircraft carriers that transport them.
As an aircraft, is magnificent, but given the strategic shift that the United States saw during the first years of the new century, towards a global action against Islamic terrorism, Tomcats and a significant part of the U.S. aircraft carrier based and oriented navy may be at risk of following the dinosaurs. The fact is that while these are excellent aircraft and the aircraft carrier force of the United States is in itself very powerful and sophisticated, there is little use for such an enormous and expensive navy while the threat today may come out of a subway entrance, or in the form of a car bomb.
Only the future will tell what will happen, but it is likely that there will be a gradual diminution of the number of carrier-based aircraft such as the Tomcat, a reduction of their costs and probably, a shrinking in the overall size of the U.S. navy due to new requirements and a very simple fact: the U.S. cannot afford much longer to run into such a huge financial foreign debt, and will have to rationalize its government spending. In other words, survival against terrorism does not require so many aircraft carriers and expensive airplanes like the Tomcat and thus, they risk becoming redundant, while at the same time, they are seen as proof of imperialism by those ideologically opposed to the United States around the world.
