they trying to buy every thing to appease all sides? what an expensive way to do it.

I know countries like Malaysia and Peru are willing to spend more money on logistics to decrease reliance on a major supplier for major combat aircraft but they usually just select two (US and Russia) and (US and France) respectively.
But three types.. that’s like IAF crazy.

lets just say that not many small/medium countries on planet earth have experienced the price of “disagreeing” with major world powers quite the same way that Iraqis did… and now they are terrified of getting up the wrong end of ANYONE lest the same nightmare repeats… you can even see it from the contracting for the oil fields (EVERY major country has a stake in Iraqi oil, Russia, China, UK, US, France… the permanent 5 on the UNSC!) and even down to contracting for building mundane things like hospitals, roads, railways etc… they are spreading the contracts around to all potential international / regional powers to give them a “stake” in not bombing Iraq to smithereens again.

Referring to L-159 perhaps?

no its not. they mentioned the “czech trainers” in the same interview separately. But with all political/budgetary war that’s been going on with the outstanding contracts… I wouldn’t hold my breath about seeing an iraqi contract for eurofighter/rafale anytime soon…

Horse meat is great… in Hungary its a delicacy actually 😀 I don’t understand the whole hulabaloo about it to be honest… if it was rat meat, then some disgust would be understandable…

I mentioned somewhere in the masses of blurb that in the mess that is iraqi acquisition the air force commander revealed that they are in advanced negotiations for a european fighter… in addition to all the other stuff they’re planning on getting…

thanks for that steve. didn’t know about the various diversions and things in that assault (however the actual number of soldiers participating in the khafji probe was indeed about 2000… even if it had soldiers seconded from multiple brigades in it). but yes, the end result from the small probing attack is that “its impossible to move without coming under air attack”. PS. AFAIK US marines lost 25 killed (including friendly fire, but this is from the wikipedia entry…). as the army / air defence got degraded further in the war, they were massacred on the retreat from kuwait as we all know…

but on the topic of “iraqi air force”… The Iraqi aircraft simply did not have the ENDURANCE nor the Situational Awareness to have offered much in the way of support to Iraqi ground forces vs the force that the allies had assembled.

They had 30 Su-24MK which were the only capable attack aircraft at their disposal (and not fully IOC’d yet anyway). The rest of the air force MiG23ML, MiG25PDS, MiG29 were simple interceptors working under GCI. the lighter attack planes didn’t have self protection capability and would have been sitting ducks (SU22, MiG23BN)… just the mirage F1s could have maybe mounted some attacks, but not too far from Iraq’s border…

The US/Allies used a massive number of “force multipliers” like tankers, EW / jammer aircraft / SEAD/DEAD aircraft on their strike packages covered by AWACS controlled F15s… Israeli, or Iraqi would not have mattered much in such an instance IMHO… unless the Iraqi “israeli standard” airforce had the freedom to operate in the same way the Israelis do… where the key difference lies.

it is due to the parties in parliament not agreeing on the 2013 budget. same with the russian deal and upcoming AH-1Z and future EDA tank procurements etc… everything is stopped because other parties want to reduce defence expenditure… kurds want the money given to the “PSA oil contractors” they have given 50% oil contracts to (and want Iraq to pay for it!).

The Iraqi army tried an attack into Saudi Arabia with three divisions, but was defeated on the ground at Khafji, 10 km south of the border, after taking heavy losses from air attack.

three divisions? It was one mechanised brigade… no more than 2000 Iraqi soldiers participated in khafji and despite the massive airpower used against them sustained about 71 deaths vs about 60 deaths for the allies… AND managed to make an orderly withdrawal with about 70% of the brigade intact…

khafji battle was simply a probing attack, not a true attack at all from the Iraqi perspective anyway (and it did demonstate to them clearly that they could NOT mount any serious attack into saudi without full protection from allied attack aircraft…something that was not forthcoming from the high command- they were desperately trying to save aircraft / send them to iran etc…).

After this probe they knew they didn’t have the logistics or freedom to operate under such massive air bombardment to try any real attack into saudi arabia at that time… had they had some air support OTOH, they could have sent a larger force in which would have been able to penetrate deeper into the saudi heartland and cause mayhem in a true assault.