MV-22 its a difficult one…

The Navy has a severe lack of ships and current building plans to get to a 313 or so ship navy are according to congress not affordable, the Navy for all its aligility still needs its basic roots which is ships. The size of the ships that make up a fleet of 313 ships is a different story and debate.

MV-22 has flown in Iraq and Afghanistan but not without issues.

Yes its not as clear cut and citing an example of MV-22 kicking up a dust storm whilst trying to land is not a good example, or the low flight ceiling or the instability of the aircraft if one of the engines or significant proportions of the propellars are hit. Mainly because it offers a potential which if realised would provide the Navy unparalleled agility. The MV-22 does carry more, flies farther and faster than the next biggest helicopter however it is still fragile, and whilst it may be fine flying troops in and out in a theatre where SAMs are either too old to be of use or nearly non existent, you have to wonder if it would fair just as well fighting a conventional war against a well equiped foe.

Also how much is the reduction in payload capacity with the adition of a all quadrant gun system on the V 22?

You could make the V 22 safer.

But all of that will cost money and take time…

good enough to be a point defence interceptor like the MiG-21.
still boggled by why HAL decided to make the Tejas that small..

Well the intention was to make the Tejas a replacement for the Mig-21 so the size did make sense, what does not make sense is spending ages to make the plane and get it into service.

Cut the MV-22 for one, if the X2 or eurocopter hybrid X3 technologies prove to be worthy it makes less sense to keep the MV-22.

This may all be hot air anyway as it sounds like Gates is forcing the Navy to do some soul searching and the fact that they are having a hard time with getting the Navy fleet the size they want may mean a cut in the marine corps.

Would not be so bad to reduce the marines to 25,000 men or so but all special operations type people, covert beach landings etc if that is needed (and yes i can see some occasions where the US Navy will need this capability).

Let the army and the airforce do what is needs to and if the Marines feel they need aircraft from CAS etc surely thats a sign for further integration of the Army, Navy and Airforce rather than creating another force that sits seperately but yet straddled to all of those services.

How many the retired or retiring aircraft does the IAF turn into drones?

The longer they take in downselecting the MMRCA winner the more likely it is that the aircraft selected comes into service in an obsolete state.

The only way around this is for the IAF to give more money than the slated 10billion to put on a bolt on upgrade package before the aircraft comes into service.

MMRCA makes less and less sense as the circus goes on…

Seems rather inefficient to upgrade such an old and obsolete system doesn’t it? Wouldn’t it be appropriate to acquire more Tunguska systems, with the added capability to fire SAMs? And the tender was released in 1997?! why has it taken 13 years for such an incremental upgrade to an obsolete system?!

why do you say incremental? and what are the main differences between shilka and tunguska?

Who ever said that there is the need to wait till 6th generation? The screenshot, that I posted, shows the way of using the future anti aircraft UCAVs wich I agree with (because none is currently in service) and that screenshot was taken from the presentation, that describes the Japanese vision of the future 6th generation manned fighter. Is it clear now?

It was a generic comment, not targeted at your comment, saying why do we have to wait for the X-47s and so on why cant we modify retired retired F-16s to do a similar job?

Guys all these arguments of home grown vs imported are irrelevent, simple fact is no matter how the Pakistani army got its missiles, including its land attack cruise missiles it has them, they have long range and they have a whole stack of nuclear bombs that can go on them. Enough infact to deter India from launching punitive strikes against terrorist camps in POK and elsewehre so they are doing the job they were intended for.

Economic status is irrelevent. Infact I was say that they have managed to amass such weapons with so many hurdles is a big reason to not take them too lightly or make a mokery of them. I would say inversely that they have been very clever to get what they have with the limited resources they have.