No regarthing teh air war... No side WON. Teh British never ever detented Air Superiority. Target were being hit hard from the air till teh last day.. now in any military book that can not be considered Air superiority. If the enemy attacks with impunity, well, it is a problem, right?
So I belive the Air war is more inclined to the argentinians, becouse of the amount of damage they inflcited on the task force.
Dammage unprecedented in a modern war, and not surpased till our days.
NATO ship defense policy changed, the phalanx system was developed by studiying the vulnerabilities of the "state of the art" Anti Air frigates of 1982. suposedlly inespugnable in 1982... Well that sounds like a victory to me...at least a mopral one
Argentinian fighters did not have the range and endurance to fight the Harriers. Besides the Mirages are High Altitude interceptors, and the harriers are low level multipurpose aircrafts... of course the Harriers never climbed to meet the Mirages.. and the few times the Mirages tried to tangle at lo altitude ir order to atract the CAPs to them to aloud the bombers to reach their targets, they payed the price. But it was a calculated risk, to atrack, the CAPs... Later the British did not engage the Mirages and decoy tactics didn´t work any more.
The other piont was that the Magic 1 missiles we had were crap. They would not track and engage over 70% of the time (the Shrafir was onlly marginally better), so it was determined that it was pointless to try to engage the enemy. Our best tactic was to drop bombs and get out...