Knowing your opponent is one of the key differences between competitive fighting and the good old fashioned sort you may find behind your local bar. Fighters size one another up, establish strategies based on strengths and weaknesses, and approach their fight with a tailor made game plan specifically designed to pick one enemy apart – often using methods that may not be as effective against another opponent.

This form of combative chess isn’t always easy to find on the battlefield, where troops may have an understanding the equipment or strategies employed by the enemy, but countless intangible variables remain. However, there is one battle space this form of opponent specific planning remains paramount: dog fighting in the skies high overhead.

The United States employs a variety of fighter jets, some better suited for dog fighting than others, but all capable air-to-air opponents in a potential future war with a near-peer level national military. America’s enemies could find themselves squaring off with anything from an F-15 to an F-35, and if they hope to make it out of the interaction alive, you’d better believe their strategy throughout the engagement will have be tailored specifically to the kind of aircraft they square off against – and vice versa.

As I headed into my first official “fight” as a mixed martial arts fighter, I had to do a lot of the same quick math a fighter pilot might need to when spotting a potential opponent on radar. Because it was in a tournament, I didn’t know who I’d be facing until twenty minutes or so before the fight, but in that time I made a series of adjustments to my strategy based specifically on what I saw across the cage waiting for me.

He was a stocky guy wearing an under armor shirt that held his gut in check, telling me immediately that he didn’t cut weight for this fight – making him either confident, or stupid. I also knew that he had attained a blue belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu – a discipline I’d trained in myself. Experience told me that BJJ belting can be notoriously slow and arduous when compared to more marketing oriented disciplines – and although I had successfully beaten blue belts in the past, there’s no denying that most guys that earn any belt in BJJ do so only after putting in some serious time on the mats.

The stocky build and cocky approach of a successful scholastic wrestler and a Brazilian jiu-jitsu blue belt meant he’d devoted the majority of his training to submission oriented ground fighting. I didn’t know this man, but I knew this opponent. I’d faced him a hundred times before in gyms and fields across three Marine Corps duty stations and years of being a punk kid with a chip on his shoulder prior. There are only so many kinds of fighters – long limbed jabbers, stocky wrestlers with leverage on their side, sure fisted brawlers and fast footed dancers. Climb into enough cages, and you start to categorize opponents based on what they’re capable of – and how that compliments or opposes your own capabilities.

As two opposing fighter jets approach one another in contested airspace, that same type of strategizing immediately goes into effect. America’s two 5th generation fighters, the F-22 and F-35, for instance, may share a generational designation, but as combatants, they employ very different strategies tailored specifically to what they each do well. The slower, more lumbering F-35 can’t out-maneuver even a capable 4th generation fighter like the Russian Su-35 in an up close and personal dogfight, for instance, so the Joint Strike Fighter fights by staying outside the operational range of its opponent and relying on stealth to prevent them from getting a good sense of where the fight is coming from.

By using advanced detection, remaining elusive, and employing weapons platforms that can engage enemy aircraft from the other side of the horizon, the F-35 relies on what fighters like me have long referred to as a “reach advantage,” allowing it to engage with opponents where their own strengths can’t be brought to bare.