The actual oficial number forecast is for 48 new naval fighters for the Brazilian Navy distributed on two distinct fighter/attack squadrons. “VF-1” will replace its A/F-1B/Cs (A-4Kus modernized by Embraer for the Navy) with the new fighter and will remain in São Pedro d’Aldeia Naval Air Base near Rio and a new “VF-2″will be established in the north of the country probably in Belém to tend to the needs of the new Northern Fleet being set up in the next 20 years.

regards,

Hammer

It’s an extensive package including simulators, training ToT in a whole range of areas (from composite components to AESA radars!). 🙂 The Rafale was for more than twice the cost of the Gripen. Final order is expected to run from 120 to 200 fighters just for the Brazilian AF with 48 further Sea Gripens for the Brazilian Navy, if that ever materialises.

Regards,

Hammer

The full story on Flight Global regarding the Brazilian Gripen NG purchase, written by ME! 🙂

Regards,

Hammer

http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/saab-wins-brazils-f-x2-fighter-contest-with-gripen-ng-394289/

What if things go even more south with Iraq? Could there be any chance of these F-16’s winding up in Iran? (Wouldn’t that be ironic…) I wonder if the U.S. has considered that scenario.

Of course there is that chance, remember the Mirage F-1s, the MiG-29s and the Su-24s that were flown to Iran in 1991? 😉 But the choice of newbuild F-16 airframes for Iraq starts to make sense if one notices that the current orders for F-16s seem to be drying up recently and that without orders it becomes hard to keep the Fort Worth line open into the near future… Without F-16s the US may be relegated to offer F-18s or (yikes!) F-35s to some other “less than stable/controlable international partners”. Fedaykin, you are a very reasonable guy, you very well know that offering yhe latest F-16 model with older technology weapons is a clear way of severely defanging the system. Period! Having said that this strategy is absolutely reasonable and defendable FROM A US POINT OF VIEW, while being at the same tima TOTALY UNDEFENDABLE from an exclusively Iraqui point of view.

Another interesting way to look at it is the system/weapons commonality angle. If a new war spurts out overnight in the middle east region iin the next gfew years this 36 strong f-16 fleet can be quickliy reinforced by USAF sourced F-16s to be flown by previously trained Iraqi air force pilots… Also hundreds or thousands of USAF stock veteran AIM-9/AIM-7 missiles can be delivered overnight to Iraq to give their airforce a major warfighting boost vis a vis their neighbours… This last reaoning has always been the mindset of South American airforces with US sourced aircraft.

Comments?

Regards,

Hammer

Congratulations Latenlazy, Blitzo, Y-20 Bacon and thobbes for hosting such a fine and high level discussion here in this thread. Goldust was the exact opposite and sorry Freehand but your and some other posters single minded ironic coments only made his boring and repetitive comments all the worse… 🙁

Bear with me that before writing this particular post I spent a number of hours reading all the 350+ messages of this extensive thread and after this I think that there is little number of unaddressed items I’d like to bring up here for your comments:

1) To start, lets not forget here that the only reason Taiwan has really so far refrained from asserting its full independence has been due to the fact that it still counterclaims the full ownership of the Mainland territory and of its people. 😉

2) A Hong Kong-type peaceful absortion of Taiwan into mainland China is also my best understanding of the future trend here. It seems much more reasonable now (and even more in the future) as Mainland Chinas has become several-fold more affluent and “capitalist” then it has been any time in the past. Hong Kong itself now even serves as consistent proof that the Beijing leadership is trustworthy in maintaining its “one country two systems” economic policy. At least until now…

3) I agree that mainland military superiority is such that an invasion of Taiwan would be very swift and be over very quickly.

4) No one here has mentioned that China has been developing Taiwan invasion plans since the first Republicans fled to the island… So they probably by now better than anyone they know almost everything they need to know to do it correctly, with or without an US military reaction to it.

5) On such a long term project the number of communist sleeper agents residing in Taiwan should comprise a significant slice of the island’s population by now, no matter what they profess to their neighbors in public.

6) A communist Taiwan province would open up a significant number of “political/government employee” job opportunity for those Tawanese willing to change sides after the two countries fusion.

7) I doubt we’d see any major show of “shock and awe” in this scebnario for two reasons, The mailand chinese would be in essence bombing their own terrutorry once the Tawanese government fell and also because to be able to answer a US-led “international rescue” the attacking forces would jhave to immediately relocate to the island and to use it to their favour. And I mean no destruction of air bases, ports, military garrissons, fuel depots, streets, everything. In the end just bombing Taiwan to the stoneage would only help the oponents in the inevitable followup campaign against Taiwan former allies.

8) The taking of Taiwan in one piece in essence implodes the “first island chain” which in one stroke completely changes the whole geostrategic configuration in the region to the benefit of the now unified Chinese…

9) The most significant issue left out of the debate is the question of “initiative”: which side would start this scenario? Would it begin with a clear unilateral independence plea from Taiwan or would the mainland Chinese preempt this expected public declaration by moving in first? This makes all the differenc as caching the other side un prepared gives the initiating side a major tactical advantage. As was said before is it even possible that a pro independence political group in Taiwan would dare to comit to such a move without having full US approval for doing it first? If the other way US lack of siupport was guaranteed could this be used as a reason for Taiwanese to jump the gun and in doing so to in effect coax the US administration into assisting them against the US’ prior desires? Such issues change all the variables in this potential conflict, don’t you all agree?

11) No one has mentioned a role for comunist Special Forces prior to the start of a shoting war, just remember the Afghan war and how long US SF had been already in country (and in action) by the time the first US Tomahawk exploded in Kabul?

12) Someone here has mentioned the possible “sinking of Chinese tankers” by the US Navy, personally I don’t think this would ever happen, you guys still remember the long lasting and very newsworthy effects of the Exxon Valdez tragedy, right? 😉 I’m sure Indians, Bangladeshi, Srilankans, Thai, Burmese, Indonesians, Malaysians, Singaporeans, Philippinos, Bruneians and even Vietnamese governments would all quckly switch sides irrespective of their prior connection and feelings to the Chinese if they were hit by a major oil spill of devastating effects to their coastlines and maritime communities… Lets not forget this very significant geostrategic limitant to any US plans in that region.

13) Australia has a long standing paranoid fear of foreign invasion. First in the 1800 it was the pending attack of the Russian Empire, by the begining of the 1900 it was supplemented by the certainty of a Japanes invasion, which now has given way to deep fear of an impending Chinese attack (this despite the pesky and very contradicting fact that today China is quite possibly the largest importer of Australian commodities/minerals…). Having this in mind the big question is would Australia follow its trtaditions and intervene in a China-Taiwan crisis despite the size of its possible economic downside to its exports? Hard to say… Brazil also a large exporter to China (of minerals and soy beans) as well as most other South American and African countries on the contrary would almost certainly stand against any foreign retaliation to China for fear of loosing their hard currency income overnight.

Could the comunist Chinese even use North Korea in one of its cyclical aggressive international flair ups to momentarily distract the US and its key allies in the region during the pre invasion period of Taiwan?

14) The comunist Chinese certainly keep constant track of any “troublemaker” person or group in Taiwan, so I suspect these would be rounde up and immobilised before any war-like move “for their own security” and eventually sent as discretely as possible to some compound deep inside the mainland as soon as possible so preventing any effective ionternal countereaction.

Any comments?

Regards,

Hammer

Excuse me guys, buy I believe this thread is still being looked at in a very narrow and shallow manner, please no offense intended… 😉

The post-war years in terms of fighter reequipment is characterized by a monumentous rythm of technological advance in terms of speed, range, overall survivability and systems power and complexity as well as unit cost. For instance a modern “assumption” may only ve become an “assumption” rather recently. For exemple, the idea of using a fighter model launched in the late 1940s for four decades was at the time an absolutely preposterous concept, since it would be absolutely and certainly obsolete in under 10 or 15 years! No midlife update as we universally have now was even conceivable.

The geopolitical realities of the early-mid Cold War have absolutely no parallel today. Then the “Final War” was a certain undeniable fact, a done deal, just waiting the right moment to spark. Now, especialliy in Europe, Air Forces have to go to quite large geopolitical stretches to be able find adequate/suitable “enemies” in low-key (low-menace) places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo or Lybia… The traditional “survival of the nation imperative” is now absolutely gone from anybody’s head and similarly have gone away the necessary funds indispensable for major military system reequipment, modern fighters “y-compris”.

Having said that, let’s look at the gross realities of scope. The US aerospace industry (or the WHOLE US industry, if you wish!) was hit by no enemy bomb whatoever in WWII, quite the contrary it got a major major boost, technology and funds-wise, during all that period making it the most competitive aerospace industry in the planet.

European countries, on the other side, came out of WWII poor and economically and industrially undone. There is no possibility of comparing the two. Aeronautics technology R&D flourished only in the UK during those years, while all other countries lived through a terrible “drought” that would prove to be almost unsurmountable. Sweden was the honorable exception to this rule and France would not be here were it not for having (quite surprisingly) gotten a considerable help from direct US defense investment in their aeroindustry.

But there’s still more: scale-wise, even without the profound damage of WWII, the economic sum of all the European countries, winners AND losers, would account for a hypotetical united “European country” still smaller than what the the real USA was then… None of these countries alone would ever dream to be able to compete with the US in gross number of fighters ordered and/or sold. If even today’s perfectly formalised European Union is incapable of unifying its foreign, defence, or industrial defense policies in order to have a single fighter development requirement and substitution timetable, why would we think the immediate post-war till 1980 Europe would be able to get it’s own game together? Fragmentation of these policies is in effect the real reason why the European fighter industry could never match its US counterpart.

The F-104 success in NATO was mostly due to the fact that Lockheed was willing to pass almost all manufacturing to their European partners namely SABCA, Messerschmitt/MBB, Fiat, Dornier and Fokker. To these companies and their governments this was quite possibly the only “train” available to them to try to regain SOME space in the whole global aeronautic industry.

Intra-European cooperation allowed for some very welcome modern fast-jet design development experience but in order to maximise the return for partner countries local industries there eventually was no space to accomodate new industrial partners from potential “client countries”. This is why planes like the Jaguar, or the Tornado, or the G-91 never sold well in Europe.

Smaller more periferal and thus poorer countries had to resort to receiving preowned US fighters handed down at politically driven bargain prices this was the case during many years of Portugal, Greece and Turkey these last two in special ending up with a number of nearlydefunct F-102 interceptors…

The NATO block F-16A/B sale is virtually a repeat of the earlier F-104 strategy, Lockheed really learned from it`s successes! European partner Countries were not just buying and affordable allround good modern fighter for their airforces, they were just, once again, lighting the “fire” that would sustain their local (high tech & good jobs) aerospace industries for decades into the future. Armament compatibility is really a key aspect because as all hade learned in the Cold War if the situation ever heated up their own weapons stores would last only a number of days before new units broght in from the US caches located across the Atlantic were flown in.

And there is more: France, for instance, could never realistically expect to match such sort of operational (but in reality, economic!) advantage the US brought to the table…

The NATO countries that bought the F-5A/Bs (Norway & Spain) for instance new they were getting a second tier fighter, but also knew thay that was WHAT ALL THEY COULD AFFORD and what their local industries could build, nothing more then that.

Summing it all up I don`t see how this history that I just described here could lead anyone to believe that the F-35 “is the only game in town” especially for air forces that NOW and in the forseable future don’t have a real Cold War type threat looking at them in the eye (and who, by the way, are quite nose deep into a cripling economic crisis with no imaginable way out).

Note that all recent air wars that were fought since the first Gulf War in 1991 have not NEEDED Stealth fighters to arrive at a favorable result for the winner. They are certainly “nice to haves” but no one can say in all truthfulness (like for instance the VERY relevant advent of Tomahawk cruise missiles!) that they were or still are indispensable or a prerequisite for aerial victory. The way I see it, the stealth aircraft’s formost advantage is for the airforce that knows that they will be the ones STARTING the next war, the ability to count on the fact that you will always have the initiative. To be able to sneak with absolute discretion into the enemy’s air defence environment well before their missiles start flying is a key motivator for stealth purchases.

Now in all sincerity how many countries you know that can justify this NEED for assured preemtion, besides the USA or the UK and France in a rather distant 2nd and 3rd place. I personally just don’t see that many clients drooling for 200 million dollar (oops! Please excuse me, I meant to say “63 million dollar” 😉 ) a pop next generation fighter jet… For me the 4++ generation is here to stay.

Do I make sense?

Comments?

Hammer

Also in this scenario there is one issue I couldn`t figure out by myself… HOW would the Mirage IV that were based in continental France get (even with the heavy assistance of KC-135Fs) get to the French Polinesia launch base? Would it be better their route be east-bound via Djibouti? Or West Bound via the Caribbean? Any ideas? Would they broadcast this bomber move on the media for dissuasion purposes? Or would they alternatively try to keep it a complete secret to attempt to maintain some sort of surprise factor for the attack?

Comments?

Regards,

Hammer