am i right in guessing that the right engine is the WS10?

😮

looks like there are two of them (730) in some sort of fixed defensive instalation.

the twin, counter-rotating rotors on the UAV is also pretty interesting.

all in all, a very important find.

A few posters here have mentioned that for airliners there is only boeing and airbus. Try flying a 747 from an air port with a basic terminal facilities and tell me how wonderful boeings are. The flash expensive western airliners are very nice if you have also spent a bit of money on infrastructure and have nice long runways. In a place like china I’d prefer an Il-96 or even Tu-154 to any western made aircraft. When it is 30 below zero degrees outside and there is no airstairs where do you put your coat and over boots in a 737?

havent been to china much lately have we? 😀

i have only been to some coastal cities in china recently so i cant speak for the whole country, but in general, the infrastructure (including the airport, although the one in beijing is only average) in the places i have been is as good as i have seen anywhere in the world, and far surpasses those of many developed western cities.

your arguement, however might apply to some of the smaller chinese cities, but then it would be the same anywhere in the world. that is why there is a need for small to medium sized planes (more because of the runway then boarding procedures) that neither boeing or airbus seem to be that interested in.

the A10 is a CAS platform. so was the original Q5.

this new twin seat verson is almost certainly going to be a PGM delivery platform with LGBs and maybe ARMs and TV guided missiles as well.

for such a role, two crew members is better then one because of the extra workload involved.

It is quite true that airfields and hangers were hit, but if there was an concerted effort to wipe out the Iraqi Airforce they would have been hit every night and day repeatedly over and over. They weren’t. They were suppressed while the US gained air superiority… once they had that any aircraft that actually got airborne would be hunted and killed as quickly as possible.

why bother hitting runways and hangers at all if you can easily shoot down any planes that got airborn?

i think the main reason that the iraqi AF was not totally distroyed was because the coalition dodnt have the resources to spair in the first gulf war.

the bulk of the munitions used were still unguided stuff, and the majprity of the planes employed did not have stand-off weapon capacity. US SEAD capabilities were also not as capable as today. given all that, the coalition might not have wished to risk repeated attacks on well defended targets like airfeilds.

remember that this possible conflict we are discussing is to happen now or in the near future. so a better way of looking at it might not be ‘did the US do that before’, but rather ‘would the US do it if they could’.

one could validly argue that while US military power has progressed greatly since the first gulf war, so has iranian military strength. that is true, but when you balance out the improvements made by both sides, i think it is still obvious that the US has managed to increase its overall lead.

so i think it is well within their abilities to make an effective effort to close down most if not all of iran’s military airfeilds in the opening stage of any conflict.

Why crater runways over and over again when you can simply wait for tehm to get airborne and get them then?

because its more dangerous to let the enemy get the chance to come up and engage you, esepcailly if they have BVR weapons. such a move would also ties up alot of assets for CAP that could otherwise be used for CAS and/or precision strike; it would also give some inititive back to the enemy, which is never a good idea.

And which large fighters has it ever “grounded”?

and which AF has the US fought in the last 20 years that had large fighters? kind of an unfair demand mate. 😉

[/QUOTE]Knowing how a tactic works is not the same as being able to counter that tactic. The advantage of surprise is not given away lightly but is not strictly needed with the overwhelming advantages the US holds over most countries of the world. [/QUOTE]

i’m just pointing out that the world now has a better idea of what the US is capable off as opposed to 15 years ago. iraq was taken completely by suprise to the extent that their military was just not geared towards taking on the US’ new toys.

not the case any more, at least iran has the advanatge of knowing about stealth and long range precision strike and all that, and had a chance to propare for it.

Old Soviet? I pretty much remember British AAA ringing London during WWII and in WWI AAA such as it was ringed many things that were to be protected from early air attack too. Even today airbases have air defence units that use guns, missiles or both… hardly layered rings of them but they are there nonetheless.

The Soviet influence was the mobility of air defence units and that started well before Desert Storm.

going back a while arent we? even the US used ringed air defence in WWII and beyound.

the soviet moblie air defence mostly developed as a result of the poor showing of their kit in the arab-israeli conflicts. however, they still beleived that they could protect important instalations from air attack. that is the key weakness. too much emphysis was put on trying to protect fixed instalations and that provided a faulse sense of security to the iraqis. they were just totally oblivious to the possibilities of their most heavily defended assets being taken out so quickly and so effortlessly. as such, there was nothing to replace those key C&C centres and communications nods after they were distroyed.

by the time they got their act together, the airforce and air defence were already beyound repair, and i think that is why iraq sent a large part of its AF to iran.

If a Flanker can use any base a Fulcrum can use what is the real differnce between them?

but the flanker cant tho, that is the difference.

That assumes a chain structure. If it is more of a net structure (like the Internet) then parts of the system can be taken out but the system as a whole continues to function albeit at a reduced performance level.

well i was thinking of the key arms of the military as the links in the chain. like the C&C structure, the combat force, the logistics units etc. cripple any one of these would remove an army’s ability to fight. but obviously some are more easy to kill then others.

Any organisation gains strength from its parts working together to meet a common goal. It is the difference between a rabble made up of people and an army. Using secure fibreoptic comms or even reverting to runners to pass orders would make targetting difficult. If the used radios the signal traffic alone would make it an obvious target. Without easily interceptible communications it is much harder to isolate and stop.

well fibre-optics would be my first choice, but the problem of that being that it takes alot of time and resourse to set up such a system. and by setting all that up, you increase the chances of being detected.

the US might have the ability to pick up and jam any radio transmissions at will, but can it monitor and jam all radio traffic in iran? if you also develop some form of code, it will make the process even easier and safer, as even if the US picked up the message they would not know its true meaning.

The US can make mistakes. It can be defeated on the battlefield just like anyone else. You just need to pick your fights. Generally the US will pick fights it is confident it can win. It is not always right. It thought the Kosovo campaign would be over in less than a week. Their most common mistake seems to me to be they believe their enemies think the way they do.

however, if you are trying to defend something, you dont have the inititive. the US can choose when and how to attack. you may only react to that move, so you are not choosing which battles to fight, are you? with the resources available to both sides, the US can easily overpower any level of protection iran can throw around fixed instalations.

Prepare alternative sites but don’t use them. Use fake or dummy aircraft to make the US think it has already taken care of the problem. Aircraft in operation at times of heightened tensions would be armed and patrolling for “real”. Other aircraft would be ready for dispersal at short notice.

well its all really a matter of degree. can you do that with the flankers? yes. can you do that with the fulcrum? yes.

but its easier to do it with the fulcrum as opposed to the flanker isnt it?

The same people that used human wave attacks will not care about 60 odd men being shot. Matyrs for the cause. Think of the negative publicity. What sort of democratic country have these Americans made where an Iraqi cannot protest the presence of a foreign military power in their country? I can see the newspapers. Innocent unarmed Iraqis gunned down by nasty evil imperial Americans. The next protest the guard unit might not be so keen to open up, or the next or the next. Add in nationwide protests in every Shia city and what will that do for logistics moving through Iraq to support an invasion of Iran?

come on, surely your not that naive? 😮

anyone breaking into a military instalation at a time of war is not going to get a whole lot of sympathy from anyone that isnt already on their side, especially when the consequences of such action are already clearly maked out.

Look at popularist movements in Ukraine and other former Soviet republics. Do you think they were natural? With a bit of money or a bit of religious fanaticism such activites can be easily bought. Do you think it would be in Irans interests for such activity to occur in Iraq and Afghanistan?

im a little unsure as to what you are trying to say here. :confused:

When the mob get angry at not being allowed in to step on Iraqi soil and push down the gate do you think base security will be focussing in other directions? They will be contacting higher ups to find out what to do and shifting as many men to the gate and to secure important documents and materials on the base in case there is a breakdown.

come on, some smoke granades, rubber bullets and water cannons can easily repluse an angry crowd without having to resort to lethal force. then there is probably a whole host of other, more exotic crowd dispursal methods the US could try out, like the taser that shocks groups of people at a time, microwave stuff etc. hell, iraq might soon become a testing ground for all of the new american crowd control gismos.

the last resort would be real bullets. and no matter how worked up crow gets, when people start putting real bullets into the people next to you, you turn and run for it.

the americans dont even need to kill people, just shoot the legs would be enough.

anyhow, the chances of an unruly crowd pushing their way past the front gate of a major US airbase is practically zero.

No, it would look too organised with multiple attacks straight up. You would need a very large gathering… peaceful at first but as the numbers grow a few agitators to stir things up and wait for a security guard to make a mistake to really get the crowd going. Even a sniper to shoot someone in the crowd for the news camera crews if the guards fire warning shots… stuff like that. Might be proved later on that a guard didn’t do it but that doesn’t matter… it is turning a crowd into something very different… a mob that is the goal.

when was the last time you saw footage on the news of anything from the ‘other side’ in iraq?

with all the kidnappings and beheadings, western reporters dont tend to venture outside the ‘green zones’ without a convoy of US troops. you only get one side of the story these days. so no international outcry.

also, its one thing getting a crowd worked up and throwing stones at the checkpoints, its a totally different stroy about trying to get them to rush the place or to climb over the fence, especially when tairgass and rubber bullets start coming their way.

No I mean for the Iranian backed side to use any Iraqi nationals inside the base to help them. Like the VC used Vietnamese cooks and cleaners in US bases to pace out the distances between things inside the base for targetting purposes.

i seriously doubt that many iraqis will be around military bases, certainly not airbases not after the suicide bombing from last year.

having someone ‘leave a door unlocked’ is out of the question, but the targeting info is quite possible. however, chances are they will only have morters, not that effective against harderned shelters.

Then buy Su-33s and put them in the basement (carpark like) floors of hospitals. Exploit your enemies weaknesses.

the ‘charm’ tend to wear off when the other side start waving pics of fighters being wheeling into hospital car parks.

also, the whole point of dispursing your fighters is so that they can attack where the enemy least expects them. ‘picking the fights you can win’ in your words. if the US knows where you are hiding your planes, they are effectively useless. as soon as they come out of ‘shelter’, the US would shoot them down, cos they would be monitoring those places. you might as well use the planes as landfill like saddam.

And in the role to DETER (note emphasis of deter as opposed to defeat) a US attack a modern Flanker/F-14 heavy plus Mig-29s, FC1s and eventually their new light fighter… probably followed by a new heavier fighter perhaps based on the Flanker or perhaps not makes more sense as it not only deters better but will be more useful operationally too. It is a good basis for the future development of Iranian aircraft building and aerospace industry. We have to remember that if we take their claims as factual they don’t have a nuclear weapon program… though they probably would be better off in the long term if tey did have a nuclear weapons program.

come on. i thought we’ve been though this already. the US is not going to be scared of white elephants it knows how to defeat. it will be more intimidated by weapons and tactics that they werent trained to deal with.

Any aircraft in the air will stand out like a turd on centre court at Wimbleton. Vehicles on the ground on the other hand have to be seperated from civilian vehicles and other flotsam. A SAM with passive search and passive homing will only give away its position when it fires. Equally if it moves straight away then between the time the sensor that spotted it passes that information on to something that can actually engage it it can get lost amongst other potential targets. When the GPS bomb armed F-16 gets there it will not have anything to shoot at, or might be shot down by the same system from a different place or another system covering the move of the first.

there dont tend to be alot of civilian traffic in the middle of the desert in the middle of a war. similarly, there arent alot of civilian traffic in cities during an air raid alarm. so mixing with the civilian traffic isnt that easy.

air aircraft taking off might stand out on an AWACS radar screen, but then so will a SAM launch. dispatching something to the area would take about the same time for both. but the difference is that a single small fighter is alot easier to camoflage and alot harder to find then a SAM battery (im assuming this will be a heavy long range SAM since US fighters tend to fly high, above the range of the smaller stuff).

If the stakes are high enough to outweigh the potential costs. The mix of the delicate position the US is in in the ME at the moment. The Stretch of US personel, the potential problems of all out war with a country of 60 million people I really think they need more than a smoking gun.

well, i just think small fighters that can be easier hidden will raise the stakes a little higher for the americans then heavy fighters that would need to stand and fight.

Besides they have already cried wolf once. Will the American people be fooled twice… and what effect will that have on NK for the cry of Wolf for the third time?

well could the iranian planners afford to assume that the US will not attack? in that case, whats the point of a nuclear detterant?

The greatest threat to troop transports will come from MANPADs.

troops transports will not operate beyond friendly territory, difficult for soilders to get behind enemy lines and attack helos. also, with MANPADS, you are always reliant on chance. with fighters, you can take a little bit more control.

MANPADs also arent very good against high flying fixed wing transports, whereas fighters are.

The Mig-29s that Iran has have a limited range of R-27 variants it can carry, and it can only carry two, one on each inner pylon. This leaves four more pylons for R-60s or R-73s. A Flanker can carry up to 6 long range model R-27s plus 4 R-73s. Firing multiple missiles at a target improves you kill probability… one SARH, one IR, one passive radar homing, one set for home on jamming. etc etc.

well those are old Mig29s, new SMT versons are R77 compatable, and can carry 4 of them i think. not that more less then 6.

AWACS are enormous emitters. Rather than a brute force approach fitting a passive radar homer like an AS-17 with a 2 metre long solid rocket booster, or even a 3 metre long booster with a turbofan engine and fuel to fly 200km and then fall away could be made. Look at the Hawk trials. Sounds crazy, but if it is crazy and it works… it isn’t crazy. AS-17s look tiny fitted to Flankers. It could easily be fitted with a substantial booster and still be smaller and lighter than MOSKIT.

you are forgetting about US fighters. if there are known enemy air threats, AWACS wont operate without friendly fighters nearby. something the size you discribed sounds like an easy target for modern AAMs.

You also need to keep reality in check. You can’t to defeat the USAF and USN. What you plan is what you are going to do to them while they are blowing up various things in your country. You also plan to operate as normal if they don’t attack.

but normal operational needs will always come second to real operational needs. the F14, Mig29 and Fc1 would serve iran well enough. there is just no need for the flanker.

Vengence is nice but if it comes at the cost of even more body bags from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran and the cost of oil goes up yet again I think they will just cope with a strong statement in the UN. They seemed to have lived with a harsh regime in power in Iran with the Shah, they seemed to have coped when their Shah was overthrown by someone who had the gall to nationalise their oil so Iranians actually benefited from the oil under their country I think they can cope now.

that was merely an example to show you that if the americans can find a cause worth fighting for, they dont tend to care all that much about the casauties.

So as long as Iran doesn’t fund any attacks on mainland USA they can have Flankers? I doubt the US would ever try to invade NK or Iran. Bombing from 20,000 ft seems more their style when they can help it. If the goal is regime change then they can’t help it, but if it is punnishment for some act of “terrorism” then bombing is more likely their chosen duelling pistol. (It is favoured because bombing doesn’t come with a pair of weapons… only the US gets weapons…)

the main reason the US is so affraid of body bags is bacause america’s leaders tend to fight wars that the american public are indifferent to. body bags changes that indifference to opposition.

if the US was attacked, the public resolve would be there and body bags is not such a big worry.

They have a department called National defence which seems to have a budget greater than the UK, France and Germany military budget combined. Yes, I think they are interested in their immediate security.

i think the number is higher the all of NATO and china’s defence budgets combined. 😉

but that is way overkill for mere self defence.

there are various theories as to the real reason, ranging from war being too profitable to easy forgo, to US desire to ensure that they get the resources they need to maintain the life that they have become accustomed to…

but lets not branch off further. the fact of the matter is that the US ‘defence’ spending goes far beyound what is needed or reasonable for merely defence of the US homeland.

Guerilla tactics rely on hit and run. Elusive attackers that hit hard and fast but disappear before any counter can be mounted. Air operations are not like that. A harrier might be able to operate from a roof of a building or a car park but when traced to its landing place it is very vulnerable without protection.

good point. but who said it will stay where it has landed? fighters with CAP weapons will not be able to effectively engage the plane once it has landed. and a few MANPADs and/or SAMs will make sure that any attempt to use their guns is a very bad idea.

unlike CAP or wild wasle missions where the weapons needed are small and light, to have fighters doing holding patterns with thousand pound LGBs waiting for a fighter to attack and land is not a very good option for the americans as it would tie up alot of their strike and tanker assets.

all this means that a fighter should have half an hour at least after landing until something can come and attack it. enough time to get it loaded on the back of a container carry or other large vehical and driven to a different location.

They don’t need to cover Iran. It is actually in the US’s interests to get the Iranian aircraft on the ground in the first few hours… and also radars and any comms systems. Once the major airbases have been hit and any easy targets destroyed then the US will want the Iranians to get airborne. Without radar or comms they will be much easier to kill in the air than on the ground.

only if they are scrambling up and waiting around to engage US fighters or to form some kind of organised air defence. going after transports and helos and landing straight afterwards and disapearing will be a different kettle of fish for the americans.

Except most targets can be dealt with using a LGB or other PGM. Other stores stations could carry AIM-9X and AMRAAM. Hardly sitting ducks.
Even if they can’t scramble fighters they can warn the strike package early enough for them to become aware of the threat an act. They may not even have to ditch their A to G load.

did i not say that they would not be going after fighters?

the idea is to cause max US casaulties, so if you going to try and shoot something down, why only go for the single pilot fighters? transports with dozens of troops on board are far more attractive targets, and plus they cant shoot back.

I don’t think 150,000 soldiers can pacify an entire country that really wants them out. Acts of extreme violence would be so counter productive in Iraq and around the world the consequences don’t bare thinking about. Needless to say Imperial and America will be used so often together you’d think it was their new name.

where did the 150,000 number come from. besides, the world only get outraged over unarmed civilian deaths. if anything, the US seems to be trying to exaggerate enemy ‘combatent’ kills in iraq.

This is a myth. NATO was very very far from being ready for a ground war of even a limited scope. There were essentially two options for a ground war: 1. Iraq style thunder run across the Vojvodina plain from Hungary (a new NATO member at the time) to Belgrade to remove the pesky Milosevic regime. This option was untenable as it would have required hundreds of thousands of troops and an invasion of the whole country. NATO simply couldn’t have mounted the necessary political will in all of its member states to manage this. Especially as the US wasn’t overly keen on deploying ground troops and invading a European country (which hadn’t threatened it or any of its NATO allies).
2. A more limited operation aimed at ‘taking’ Kosovo and then agreeing peace with the rest of Yugoslavia. Seemingly more viable except that it would require moving large amounts of troops through Greece and stationing them in Macedonia (both countries who were largely against the air campaign and much less likely to support a ground campaign). This would not only risk causing very risky tensions between NATO members Greece and Turkey but also would have caused political strife in Greece and probably between Greece and NATO. Any ground invasion would have risked the support of non-NATO Europe, damaged NATO’s credebility and respect, caused no amount of problems with Russia and China and in the UN and would have been difficult and cost casualties. Basically, apart from the UK, no other NATO member considerred it to be a serious option.
From Yugoslavia’s point of view a ground war would have been, politically at least, potentially quite positive. A chance to cause casualties to NATO, a greater chance of civilian casualties caused by NATO (and therefore a bigger victim card to play) and the chance that political differences within NATO could cause the alliance to wacer if not collapse.
The real reason Milosevic backed down was that the Russians quite candidly said that they would stop supporting him politically and that the US said it would start bombing more and more civilian targets until Yugoslavia was destroyed beyond repair.

well there never were much concrete evidence to back that up. IIRC, the US and NATO were beating the war drum and ‘proparing’ for a ground offensive.

if i also remember correctly, milosovic was deposed, and while i cant be sure of whether it was before or after the pull out of kosovo, i think it was before.

if that is correct, then it was the civilians that had enough and ended the war, and the US/NATO ground offensive propaganda would certainly have been a key factor.

I don’t know this from personal experience but I imagine that from 15,000 feet an F-5 under camo netting and a FLANKER under camo netting look pretty much similar – i.e. you can’t see either. You can’t see a BTR-60 from 200 yards if its concealed properly, I doubt very much that you can see a camoflaged FLANKER from 15,000 feet. This basically means that when looking for hidden and displaced fighters you’re relying on TI and radar – which make the size of said fighter a much smaller element of the equation.
Esentially what I’m trying to say is that to assume, as you seem to, that you can hide F-5s but you can’t hide FLANKERs is an excercise in painting the scenario in black and white.

as i said to GarryB, these days the US tend to reply on UAVs like preditor and global hawk as well as spy sats to do the bulk of their intell gathering. and im afraid camo netting isnt going to hide anything from the SAR and high definition thermal imaging gear that those platforms carry.

to effectively conveil something in the modern battlefeild, one needs to put a solid room over it. that means buildings, and there will always be far more smaller buildings then larger ones.

Furthermore, I seriously doubt the vast difference you seem to think exists between the ability of smaller fighters and larger fighters to operate from ‘shake and bake’ air fields. however, I am not enough of an expert to make this judgement so I will leave this last question open for discussion by the better informed.

my logic is not as much to do with the planes themselves as they ground they are trying to land on.

the bigger the fighter, the greater the weight and the pressure on the surface. all it takes is for one of the wheels to sink a feet or so to have the wheel support contact the ground. if that happens, you’ll get off lightly if you just damage the handing gear and put the plane out of action for quite a while (since spares and equipment will be a problem in wartime). if your unlucky and this happens when you are just starting to slow down, the plane will spin out of control and most likely explode killing the pilot and mark out the landing zone to the enemy.

even if you land successfully time and again, the surface will be of different density, making it a very bumpy landing. beside the discomfort, this will put alot of strange stress and strain on the airframe and may cause damage that way.

To suit my own arguements or to reflect reality?

In Desert Storm there was no attempt to annhialate the Iraqi airforce. If they tried to fly to Iran they let them go. If they found them on the ground they tried to hit them, but they didn’t go hunting for them… they hit command and control and air defence radar sites instead with the sensible reasoning that without command and control any fighters that do get airborne will be easy meat for the fighters waiting for them. When you suggested the US could destroy every target they wanted in when they wanted (like wipe out all airfields) you were overstating their capabilities. The reality is that a huge number of light fighters with old gen missiles without centralised control and situational awareness provided by force multipliers is just cannon fodder.

first off, in 91, the US was only starting to use PGMs and long range PGMs were something of a rarity. thats why they favoured to save them for the ‘head’ targets, as such they didnt have the resources to totally destroy the iraqi af. but that didnt stop them trying either, and there WERE plenty of missions against airfeilds and landed fighters.

today, with PGMs becoming the mainstay weapon of the US, they have the ability to not only hit all the targets that they need to as well as have plenty of capacityspare to hit other targets like airfeilds, and do a much more throgh job then they were able to more then a decage ago.

I do, but how can the USAF afford to put a hole in every piece of solid ground in Iran and keep putting those holes there often enough to prevent what? Simple blind fighters from getting airborne? If I was in the USAF I’d say let them come and shoot them down when they do come.

well im not convinced of the flanker’s ability to safely operate from unpropare land. their first choice would be highways of sufficient length and strength, and those are not that numorous, espcially around the few bases flankers will be operating from.

also, you are way overplaying the effects of surgical airstrikes in this day and age. the only reason it worked to such devastating effect in the first gulf war was because it was new and revolutionary, and no-one was expecting it.

now that the cat is out of the bag, the effects are majorily reduced, just look back to kosovo, did sergical air attack have nearly the effect it did in iraq in 91? was the serbian C&C structure broken? did the airstrikes hammper their ability to operate fighters?

combat evolves, and everyone with the neccessary funds have adapted their military to be able to operate under sergical air attack.

just as the defence have evolved, so will the offence. with offence, the objective has always been to find the weak link in the opponent and exploit it. with C&C structures becoming ever more fluid and mobile, the US has had to work to greatly reduce their cycle time to be able to hit targets of opportunity more quickly, but clearly the previous weakest link of fixed high value targets has, or is well on the way to disappearing. and it is the military planners’ jobs to find other weak links to exploit.

make no mistake, gaining air domonence is the single most import eliment in the airpower domonated, ‘zero casaulty’ warfare that they US prefers to fight, and you cant do that while there are enemy fighters buzzy about unchecked. with the ability to cripple the AF by destroying its C&C structure now unreliable, the US needs to find other means to eradicate enemy airpower, and what is the most obvious remaining weak link? airfeilds. and the US would be fools not to recognise that and exploit it.

What you cant destroy you jam.

just like in kosovo and iraq 03 huh?

How many sentries do they have? And airfield is a very large thing by its very nature. Draw a 5.5km boundry around that and that is the area these sentrys have to cover. How many men do they have there? Can they afford to have them all on sentry duty? They will be very unpopular if they jam the cellular network. I doubt the phone call would be direct to Tehran.

come on, the US doesnt live in the stone age you know. they merely need to set a sufficiently big cordon around the airfeild and put up a fence. all they would need to police that is to have a couple of guards with thermal gear scan the perrimetre for any human heat signitures within the restricted area, and also to have gaurd stations speard out enough to be able to intercept people fairly quickly after they have been spotted.

hardly takes a huge leap of imagination or an overwhelming amount of resources to do.

They seem to have very few operational MANPADS, but they also seem to have had a bit of success with rather shorter range weapons. (RPGs have a range limit of about 900m where the self destruct fuse will stop them flying further).

i cant remember any incidences where RPGs have been responsible for damaging planes at airfeilds. the only incident i can recall involves mortors.

Besides you are talking about Sunnis, I am talking about the Shia majority. Have 5,000 Shias protesting at a base and then someone throws a grenade or they just overrun the base and smash things with their bare hands.

well, they might not be so keen to seek blood when the guards at the bases are also sunnis. and even if they are, they US has hardly employed a subtile approach when dealing with crowd problems before. and a certain clip of news footage showing tracers zipping past running civilians at head heigh tends to spring to mind.

Exactly, and the Iranians can’t afford an airforce powerful enough to oppose the USAF.

so instead of buying fighters that can do hit and hide missions, you buy huge a$$ air domonence fighters designed to take the enemy head on and are a pain to hide?

500 light fighters are not going to be cheaper to operate and maintain than 300 Flankers. Especially if they make the Flankers themselves under licence. A mixed force of 80-100 Flankers plus maybe 150 smaller fighters makes much more sense. If Australia with 16 odd million people and no oil can manage 70-80 F-18s plus a dozen or so F-111s a country of 60 million can manage that.
(If they make them themselves then they can introduce their own changes and features to suit themselves).

is there any reason that iran cant also get licencing deals for Mig29s or FC1s? then there is also their indiginous fighter, which they can of course make indiginously.

anyhow forgetting the economic side, why would iran want flankers in the first place? the Mig29 and FC1 are also BVR capable, and im sure they can make their indiginous fighter BVR capable if they can make or import a missile for it; in terms of cost the lighter fighters are far more attractive; in terms of mobility and stealth once they are on the ground the smaller fighters are far superior; in terms of the kinds of places the planes can land the smaller fighters (the Mig29 in particular) is superior to the flankers; in terms of manoverability, the flanker is hardly head and shoulders ahead of the Mig29, and the other two contestants shouldnt be no slouches either; both the Mig29 and FC1 can also be multirole fighters…

the only areas where the flanker would have an advantage (range and payload) doesnt matter here, since to expose oneself for any great amount of time to the US would be suicide. the only option is to take off, shot down some troop transports and then land and be transported away by road or hide.

The US would respect something they know less about. They would need a much more urgent reason to attack than they would otherwise. Why do you think NK is talked to but Saddam was bombed?

what are you talking about? NK hasnt been touched for a great number of reasons. their huge, and untouched army; their alliance to china, not most importanly, i think its because they have the bomb and the means to place it where US troops are.

how is that of any importance here? or are you saying that NK has a hidden flanker force that is scaring the americans off?

But you said their concrete runways would all look like the moon 30 seconds after the US attacked…

well 30 seconds is not a quote i beleive, ;), but anyhow, i was merely pointing out that even if some flankers did manage to get off the ground, their chances of servial are still well below that of smaller planes.

Shot out of the air by what? If the USAF has automatic air superiority over Iran why waste money on cruise missiles when dumb bombs can do the same job cheaper?

well i think your kinda loose the elemint of suprise if you jam the enemy radars senseless or let them see a thousand plane formation heading their way.

with cruise missiles and stealth bombers, the enemy warning and reaction time is greatly reduced.

I can invade any country I want. So can Mexico. Invading with a chance of prevailing is another matter and I seriously doubt the US could do that with any country with a population of 60 million at the moment.

you think iran can seriosuly take on a nation of 250 million people with dozons of times of their GDP and decades more advanced tech and win?

the trouble with the US is not their ability but their will. if iran was behind another 9/11, do you think the US would hesitate for even a second before they invaded?

lets not mistake a lack of popular and political will for war with the actual ability of it.

Yes, the US is going to send in troops… right. They didn’t do that in Kosovo, why do you think they will use ground troops in Iran? If there is any attack it will be an attempted surgical attack on nuclear facilities only and any air defence systems that might interfere with that operation.

well actually it was only the threat of a ground war that made the serbs cave it since the air strikes were doing very little.

and anyhow, you already make out the point that sergial strikes have very little hope of disarming iran, so why would the US bother?

A ground war is the only certain way for the US to ensure iran has no nuclear weapons. and if the US is to attack, then that is the way they need to attack.

it doesnt really make sense to propare for attack by someone by not proparing for the only likely means that they will attack you.

Where did I say that? I am saying the opposite. It is better to present a strong face with F-14s and small fighters now and a heavy fighter and small fighters in the future for normal self defence from neighbours and to complicate any US attack. If they are attacked then guerilla like tactics are their best option against the US, which will certainly never attack unless they are sure they will win with minimal losses.

F14s might scare ametures, but the US military knows all about what 25 decade F14s can do. so the deterrant idea doesnt work.

as for neighbours, well as i already said, there is no one that needs to be remined of iran’s power or anyone that has the ability to threaten iran. its like sugguesting that the US needs to flex its muscles to show the latin american countries who’s the big kid on the block.

finally, what do you think the US would be more concerned about? ‘paper tiger’ intimidation fighters that will become all but useless after the outbreak of war or planes that are actually suited to fighting the guerilla tactics you were refering to?

Yes, the reason the US armed forces is so powerful is because it operates completely independantly. You will never see a USAF fighter anywhere near any other US asset that might need fighter protection. AWACS aircraft are always positioned over enemy airbases with no escort or fighter protection and it is the same with US transports, which operate on their own.

please. the whole point of gureilla combat is that you are the one who controls the fights. you can choose when and where to strike while your opponent needs to be ready everywhere. and as strong as the USAF is, it cant provide 24/7 fighter escorts for every single none-combatant ac that operates in enemy territry. that is why the US makes such an effort to kill the enemy at the offset of the conflict.

the best the US would be able to acheive is to have CAP fighters covering zones. but these planes cant be everywhere at the same time, and there will be weak spots to exploit. even if there arent, it will not be that difficult for iran to secretly amass a small number of fighters (say 5~8) to be able to overwhelm a CAP patrol or 2~4 fighters.

also, having hundreds of fighters on CAP missions means that these fighters are not on ground attack missions, taking some pressure off you own side.

I agree, but sending small fighters up one or two at a time to face the whole USAF is a bit of a joke.

what makes you think you’d be facing the whole USAF? can the whole USAF just materialise out of thin air in a moment’s notice?

you can just have most of the fighters hidden with spotters (with radars, optial gear or even their eyes) speard out around it. once one of them has seen a lone helo or bomber or transport, the word is passed back and the fighter scrambles within half an hour, but it will only be pick up after its has taken off, if the US is lucky.

if the spoters are close and one their job properly, the US wont have the time to divert a CAP fighters to intercept. easy kill, and then its just a matter of heading to a pre-planned landing zone where a hiding place or transport is waiting.

even if the US fighters finds and kills the raider after the attack it would still be a victory, as loosing a B52 or plane full of soilders is going to have a worse affect on US resolve then loosing a fighter.

Why bother with an airforce at all? I mean they haven’t used their F-14s at all in the last 30 odd years… talk about useless. Why does China bother with an airforce? Why does NK bother with an airforce? Why does Russia bother with an airforce? Maybe gearing your armed forces to fight the US is what really defeated the Soviet Union and no one wants to make that mistake again? It is obvious that nuclear weapons is what defeats the USAF.

so only the US has an airforce? :rolleyes:

russia has a powerful AF only because it was left over from the USSR, china and india are building power AFs because of their rocketing economies generate the money to do so. i have no idea why you have NK up there since their AF will most likely operate in a similar way as i have described.

also, not all of the world’s nations have the US as a possible threat, so they dont need to try and deal with the US.

I’ll take one… 🙂

cool, my first sell. 😀

now, about the payment…;)

Rubbish. The F-117 is a specialised aircraft. It is likely that it will be sent against a serious target like an air defence system that is still operaitonal or a nuclear related facility. That greatly reduces the number of potential targets and flight paths.

and iran can have fighters form a 360 degree ring around all their ‘serious’ targets? :rolleyes:

that is about as useful as narrowing the location of bin ladden to the planet earth.

What sort of foreign object grills cover the air intakes of an F-5s engines?
What sort of low pressure tires does the F-5 use for unprepared strips?

the F5 dont have those, but the near iranian fighter based on the F5 might, and then there is also the Mig29 option.

but anyhow, as i said before, i seriously doubt the viability of reliying on dirt fields as a airfeild.

They are using national guard and reserve units now to maintain current operations. The rate of US citizens signing up has decreased dramatically. A ground invasion of Iran would require the draft…

unlikely but by no means impossible.

Most Iraqis want the US out. The shia majority are only keeping quiet because they know they are the majority and will benefit from the brief democracy Iraq will have. Add in a slow long drawn out war with iran… they have been there before and know what that is like.. and they will kick the US out of Iraq.

it will be the americans fighting in iran, not iraqis. somewhat unlikely to generate the level of popular discontent neccessary, especially when something like falluja didnt even manage to do that.

So these bombs and guns blowing the Flankers to bits… why can’t they hit slightly smaller targets like F-5s and Gripens?

to hit something you need to find it first, and F5 sized planes are easier to hide then flanker sized ones.

So if they are going to just hide what is the point of having them in the first place?

no, they are not just hiding but waiting for the right opportunity to strike and have at least some chance of success and servival.

Rubbish. There is no need to kill all of the attackers. Just defend the target you are defending is enough to succeed in your role.

your the one taking rubbish. how can you succesfully defend something if you let any attackers get to it? like 25 F14s is going to scare off 1000 F15s, F16s and F18s. :rolleyes:

So really they are their own worst enemies. They don’t actually want Iran to develop nuclear weapons but they are giving it no real option to do anything but develop nuclear weapons. They can claim they are not as much as they like… it didn’t help Saddam.

finally, something we agree on. 🙂

I am not contradicting myself. The USAF and NATO believed it could defeat the Serbs in Kosovo in less than one week. It actually took about 3 months, and even then it took the Russians to get the Serbs to the table to sign. The USAF might think it can hit any nuclear facility target US intelligence can point out to them. I am suggesting that US Intelligence doesn’t know enough and the USAF is being a bit egotistical in its assessments.

kosovo is actually a poor example, as it was actually the US’ turn to be caught off guard. after iraq, they were so impressed with the results that they thought they can recreate it at will. but they forgot it was largely due to the elemint of suripse that allowed them to do what they did.

but ater the world got to know the US tactics, countermeasures were developed and the US was caught off balance.

but it served as a warning, and it appears the US have taken notice.

That is a lot of targets for SAMs.

do i see a little contridction here? before you pointed out that the USAF dont send units off to fight independently, but now what happened to all the EW ac and wild weasles that will keep the SAMs busy? then there is also the stealth and cruise missile attack that came before.

Better the devil you know. The F-14 is proven in their hands. The Flanker is an unknown. Besides they don’t trust Russia any more than they trust the US. They can buy military stuff from one but not the other but that is not a good reason to trust them.

so the F14 is just going to soilder on indefinately? no matter what you say, 25 is a rediculous number, and 25 F14s can do next to nothing in a real war against any of iran’s enemies.

So how does a dispersed AF with small fighters avoid air combat?

by avoiding fighters and picking on unprotected transports and helos.

but of course, one needs to avoid being discovered in the meantime, and being small tend to help.

Except the insurgents in Iraq are the minority and the majority actually don’t like them very much. In Iran you will pretty much have everyone against a US invasion… and the Iranians do have a history of human wave attacks.

just more dead people then. human waves dont work in modern warfare.

Intelligent use of SAMs to create SAM traps might be an option but you will not be finding helos or transports flying around unescorted to attack.

please, not even the USAF can provide fighter escort for every helo or transport, even if they convoy them.

if they do, they’d loose the bulk of their ground attack force, and spread their numbers so thin to make them extremely vonerable to massed enemy fighter attacks.

Certainly even if they did how would you know? Turn on that radar and how long will it last?

lots of guys with binoculars and radios would be the most obvious solution.

Modern SAMs that use electro optic sensors and can engage high flying targets (like Pantsir) will make life rather more difficult for US airpower than previously seen. They will need to use RPVs in great numbers to defeat the SAMs and against lots and lots of RPVs a Flanker with 10-12 AAMs makes more sense than a Mig with 6-8 missiles.

why only one Mig29? why not two or three?