yes… the era of F5/MiG21 etc… was the era of the cold war… that situation no longer exists. commercially speaking not many in the third world can afford nor need such huge fighter fleets… the days when somalia had dozens of fighter jets are long over… today the former yugoslavia all together hardly cobble up two dozen fighters… etc…

there will be a widening in the gap between the haves and have nots…

1- USA… just far away from everyone else put together

2- China
3- India
4- Russia

5- Israel

6- UK / France / Germany
7- Saudi Arabia / Egypt / Pakistan / australia
8- Italy / Spain /Sweden

9- lots of countries with about 30-100 jets (Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Indonesia, Malaysia, thailand, south africa, angola DRC ethiopia, ukraine, belarus, kazakhstan etc…)

10- lots of countries with 12-30 jets (central European states, many middle eastern and south east asian states)

11- rest of the world with no jets, maybe SuperTucano and trainer/light attack type for air policing / CO-IN

all in all the “market” size for new fighters beyond the F35 and the “domestic stealth” T50/J20 will be quite small. What’s lacking is an affordable and “exportable” 5th Generation type for the “wider world” with effective air to air armaments (METEOR).

A Chinese J31 fitted with a chiMETEOR on the market in about 2022 with “barter / investment” agreements in lieau of $$$ would sell nicely to the countries with 30-100 fighters who are not in NATO… perhaps a market with 300-500 plane potential?

Other than that, the offerings are either too heavy/complex/expensive to operate (russian, eurocanards etc..) or comes with political strings US (F16 line will end in 2018 and F35 is prohibitively expensive).

If Korea can come up with a light fighter / air patrol plane without US components it could be the “hyundai of the air” 😀 alternatively the brazilians could clean up with a UberSuperTucano selling to lots of countries wanting basic air patrol / CO-IN / recon capability…

I think the issue with this proposition is that airforces everywhere are downsizing… even China / Middle East / India / USA have been downsizing (replacing older generations with smaller numbers of new generation planes)… this trend will continue over the next few decades and increasingly many small/medium sized countries will only operate “token” fighter forces with 1-2 squadrons of fighters and smaller countries will begin to increasingly pool their resources and fighters or drop out of the fighter business altogether.

The 1970s – 1980s were probably the zenith for the numbers of jet fighters in the world.

no such thing happened in H3.

no radars were destroyed by Iran

No massive fighters were based there

Iranians did not disable a single Iraqi Air Base for a single minute during the entire war… let alone Al Waleed (H3 in western parlance) for 3 months! 😀

none of that above stuff is in the realm of reality. As I mentioned already, my father in law spent his military service there in the 1980s. It was very quiet and boring years… none of these things happened… they spent most of their time planting trees in the desert and drinking tea…

The Osirak planes did not overfly the area near H3… they flew in from Ar-Ar border post over all uninhabited / unprotected areas until 50km before hitting the reactor. All VERY far away from H3…

The 2 iranian phantoms that tried attacking in 1981 caused no damage at all and egresses BACK to Syria… (one of them was shot down, if memory serves me!). I saw the “wikipedia” entry about this “attack”… quite simply hilarious 😀 but then all the wikipedia entries about the iran-iraq war are written by iranian fanbois clutching copies of “iranian F14 units in combat” etc…:rolleyes:

The entire thing was part of the “cold war” between Iraq and Syria more than anything… and there were many other incidents in this “cold war” at the time including the later bombing of the Iraqi embassy in beirut, shooting down of syrian fighters coming into Iraqi airspace, and even shooting down some turkish F100F fighter encroaching into Iraqi airspace… That period saw a lot of such “incidents”… none of them were particularly large or serious.

this news may have provide a forecast for the Iraqis’ future direction…

Oil Drives ‘New Trade Axis’ Between Iraq And No. 1 Customer China

March 28, 2013 by Ben Bullard

China’s thirst for Iraqi oil is propelling an alliance between the two Nations that, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), promises to send 80 percent of Iraq’s future petroleum exports to China.

The agency’s chief economist said there’s “a new trade axis being formed between Baghdad and Beijing” at a time when American interests in Iraqi oil are as low as they’ve been in the 10 years since U.S. troops first occupied the country.

Couple China’s aggressive search for a generous petroleum reserve with the American oil industry’s reluctance to brave the instability of Iraq’s infrastructure, safety and political climate, and the Iraqi-Chinese “axis” comes into clearer focus.

“The fact that [Chinese oil company] PetroChina is expanding in Iraq is not to me a sign of their strength; it’s a sign of their weakness,” said a New York-based energy consultant.

That’s because, despite the massive public investment that went into the United States’ invasion and reconfiguration of the Iraqi regime, American companies have the luxury of choosing more attractive petroleum mining options elsewhere (including on their home soil), rather than deal with the postwar headache that Iraqi oil logistics has become.

China, meanwhile, has far fewer options, and currently lacks the technology to explore recent and unconventional extraction methods that are benefitting U.S. companies at home and in West Africa.

of course the “fluff” about petrochina/CNPC being “weak” is just sour grapes by the americans after losing out in easy to extract massive oil fields…

well there’s the gouging and troughing that comes naturally when a project becomes a “too big to fail” monopoly… In fact I’d say for many airforces (even small ones) it would be prudent to have a “dual supply” policy for weapons, just in case your “sole” supplier gets greedy… it seems many countries are finally waking up to this… and see LM magically slashing its prices lest they lose ALL rather than say 50% of their export order book… sadly the pentagon troughing is so high up that there’s no chance of the USAF being allowed to buy some F15SE or F16Block70 to put the heat up the F35s a*s…

with difficulty.

Iraq is looking for AH-1Z to support the Basra Operations Command, not Apaches.

I would have thought they’d be self-explanatory 😀

You could argue that the future AiM-120D + AESA on the F15SE would be superior to METEOR on typhoon/rafale for BVR?

Maybe F/A18E/F for CAS instead of Rafale (AASM vs SDB?)

for SEAD… maybe SU-35 with Kh-31… but I’d still choose Growler 😀

gun only dogfighter? maybe Typhoon with the 27mm Mauser instead of the MiG35…

tough choices.