It’s over 20% of total spending, & a much larger share – indeed, a very large share indeed – of spending on weapons.

Although I agree that US military aid to Israel is still significant, it is not as significant as it once was. As a fraction of Israel’s total defense expenditures, US military aid peaked in 1986, and has been declining ever since. If you go by the official exchange rate, as a fraction of Israel’s total defense spending US military aid dropped below the 15% mark in 2008. If you go by Purchasing Power Parity (PPP – a more true measure of relative purchasing power), it dropped below the 15% mark in 2006. This is a trend that has been accelerated over the past five years, as Israel’s economy has come to fully absorb the Russian immigrants who arrived in the 1990s.

The clout that the US has over Israel has as much to do with the two nations’ political alliance, and economic ties, as it has to do with the amount of military aid that Israel receives. Politically, Israel is as reliant on the US as it ever was. I find it difficult to believe that Israel would ever purchase a Russian-supplied airframe – for a wide range of reasons. Other options however, may not be so far out of the question.

To succeed on such a path, the Israelis would need to have a US partner – both to provide political cover from Lockheed Martin and its proponents, and to help share the financial burden. I am not suggesting that it will happen, or even that is likely to happen. What I am suggesting is that Israeli developers should be expected to look at all of their options – and to bide their time accordingly.

There is no pressing need for Israel to take delivery of the F-35 in 2015, as the Pentagon has been trying to convince them to sign up for. None of Israel’s neighbors will have an equivalent capability in that time frame. A 2020 target date would probably work just fine. So long as Israel is not offered the option of installing an Israeli EW suite on their own fighters, the F-35 doesn’t necessarily look all that attractive to them. It’s an airplane offering less combat range and payload than the F-15Is and F-16Is that Israel already flies. The Israeli leadership might very well choose to wait this one out, and reevaluate their options in another few years.

The opinions of an ex-Defense Minister who was always an avid supporter of the Lavi are less surprising than the observation by Flight Global’s Stephen Trinble that:

[INDENT]I spent a week touring Israel’s aerospace industry last November, which included a sighting of the only known survivor of the Lavi program. One of many things I came away with is a sense that Israel wants to return to the ranks of the world’s developers of manned combat aircraft, rather than a niche supplier of systems and UAVs.
http://www.flightglobal.com/blogs/the-dewline/2010/07/ex-lavi-chief-calls-for-new-fi.html[/INDENT]

Trimble’s observations are not the musings of an elderly politician dreaming of past glory. They reflect what Israel’s industry has in mind here and now – today.

In most cases where an enemy could put up some sort of fight, such as N. Korea or Iran, a few weeks/months of bombing is going to be more likely than a massive insertion of troops by the US.

Weeks of bombing with what? If you slash the JSF buy, what do you think will be left?

The US fighter fleet is aging rapidly. We have kids flying airplanes that are older than they are. The Quadrennial Defense Review is not about what assets the US will have to fight with next year. It’s about what assets will be available for the next twenty years. Ten years from now, the USAF will be putting all of its budget into its next strategic bomber. It will be twenty years before the next fighter platform – beyond JSF – could possibly be fielded. By then most of the F-15s, F-16s and F-18s that are carrying out the strike missions in Iraq and Afghanistan today will be either retired, or will be standing on the edge of the scrap pile. These airframes are not intended to last forever.

Although I’m not surprised to see this coming (the Obama Administration had to pay for its bailout plans somehow), I am surprised that they came out with this so early. We are talking about an erosion in US force projection capability that, once it starts, will be difficult to reverse.

Also not discussed was what the impact this cut in procurement will have on the F-35 unit price. Something that a lot of JSF partner nations (including the UK) will be keen to know. There are major ramifications for what is being proposed here.

No the issue is very much access to the source code for Britain. For most other nations, after seeing what Britain went through to obtain the guarantees, they knew they were unlikely to get it, but Britain were given assurances at the very highest level to keep us in the program back in 2006.

Yes, the UK is a special case, and whatever was promised to the UK will be delivered. But have you noticed that no one in the British Ministry of Defense has protested or gone crying to their lawyers? Everyone is jumping to conclusions that the RAF somehow will not receive what had been agreed upon. If that were true, we would all know it – and not from a bunch of fanboys on the internet. This is a whole lot of fuss over nothing.

Let the MOD take care of this. As I said, the UK will receive access to everything that was agreed upon – nothing more, and nothing less.

Not just likely to survive, certain to now that the ADVENT Phase 2 contracts have been awarded

ADVENT has nothing to do with the JSF. The ADVENT program is aimed at the next big USAF project (year 2020 or beyond), which is expected to be aimed at a bomber mission. It has nothing whatsoever to do with whether the F136 gets funded.

He rates the performance of the aircraft by its performance on an airshow.

The conclusions drawn in the article were based on a variety of sources in the Russian aerospace industry, which have been pointing in this direction for some time:
http://www.flightglobal.com/blogs/the-dewline/2008/11/dispatch-from-zhuhai-chinas-j1.html

Two years ago every important source told me, let’s wait two years and see what comes of China’s new J-10 fighter.

Now everyone I trust says the Chinese pulled it off, and the J-10 has proven a tremendously successful program.

The air show performance really had very little to do with the conclusions being reached by the article’s author. To quote one of the responses from Stephen Trimble, the senior editor at Flight International who posted the article on behalf of his Russian correspondent:

This is what Vlad’s sources are telling him, and, as my colleague the past five years, I’ve learned Vlad’s sources are well worth listening too.

It doesn’t come down to whether you are impressed by an air show performance. It comes down to whether or not you want to believe the Russian-based sources that the article is based upon.

Let me put it this way. When Lockheed Martin tells me that the F-16IN (the version that they are hawking to India) is the greatest thing since the invention of the wheel, I have a little bit of skepticism. When Russian sources praise the Su-35 as the super-fighter of the next century, I take it with a large grain of salt. But when Russian sources tell me that one of their arch-rivals for jet fighter sales has produced an airplane that “will beat F-16C or MiG-29/SMT easily,” I have to take that recommendation very seriously.

Interesting way of looking at it. Is the MKI that much more advanced than the MKK China already has? (aside from manuverability, of course…)

Although Russia has exported extensively to China, there has always been a certain level of mutual distrust. The Su-30MKK’s supplied to China were not manufactured at the same facility as the Su-30MKI’s supplied to India.

Aside from the canards and thrust vectoring nozzles, there are undoubtedly other differences under the skin. After all, India has been a long time customer for Russian weapons (and doesn’t share a common border with Russia). I don’t foresee either China or Russia inviting each other to participate in their respective 5th generation fighter programs. The Russian arms sales of the 1990s and early 21st century appear to have been a brief interlude in a long history of suspicion, punctuated by the occasional border dispute.

They Koreans already had a “hedge” against a possible grounding of their F-15 fleet due any unforeseen problems with the F110 engine: their F-16 fleet, all of which are equipped with F100 engines.

It is rare that a customer will choose to fly a fleet of mixed engines. Korea was the first customer to put an F110 engine into an operational F-15 airframe, and it came as no small surprise when they made that decision back in 2002. Apparently, however, their experience with the F110 has not been rosie.

There have been numerous reports that the Koreans have run into difficulty trouble-shooting the F-15/F110 combination. They get no help from the US Air Force when they run into any kind of fault codes or anomalies – since the US doesn’t fly this engine-airframe combination. It looks like Korea has decided that they would be better off returning to the proven F-15/F100 pairing, which the US Air Force has already proven-out and continues to support.