F-5 Tiger II

You know me, I gotta do a new individual aircraft post every now and then. This one is one a fighter that is widely known and is one of my personal favorites. The F-20 had a lot of potential, and would have been a great plane, but I am talking about the F-5 here. I think that the Tiger is one of the best fighters that any air force can have. It is versatile, reliable, and has a great weapons load and performance. 7,500 lb. of ordnance is pretty good for a fighter this size, and with a top speed o Mach 1.65 (1,090 mph) it is pretty damn fast. Some people might say it is underpowered, but it is a light weight tactical fighter, it doesn’t need engines that produce 25,000 lb. of thrust. You can load just about any type of weapon onto an F-5 and have a effective platform for air-to-air combat, strike, CAS, FAS, recce, percision strike, etc. It used to be that the F-5 only carried IR missiles, but now it has medium range AIM-120 missiles in the Singporean F-5S upgrade. The Taiwanese upgrade, will also include AIM-120, but instead of removing one 20-mm cannon as in the Singporean version, the guns are both retained. How would you like an F-5E with 2xM39A2 (280 rpg) plus 2xAIM-120 and 2xAIM-9 or even four AIM-120 with the two wing tanks omitted. What do you think of this hot little fighter?