Yeah I agree, I don’t think you should put the Serbs in the same category as the Arabs, they are a lot smarter. With the exception of the airforce and integrated air defenses, the Serb army was not that badly damaged at all due to very intelligent use of camoflauge, I read an article about this but I can’t find it now. I think they still have something like 1200 tanks left. A complete listing of the army’s equipment would be interesting to see, if anyone has it.

The latest version of the S-300 costs 900 million US. The S-400 has no price set but we can only assume it is even more expensive. For that price, you can buy a good number of brand new modern fighters. What do you think will be able to mount a better defense, an S-300 system or three squadrons of modern fighter jets?

Re: Balistic missiles
If I’m not mistaken Serbia already has modified SCUDS with 400 km range, and an indigenous SRBM called the K-15 Krajina with a 150 km range.

Ok then, what is the monthly pay of a Greek pilot and what is the monthly pay of a Dutch pilot?

Hi I don’t think you can say American or Russian equipment is better, the fact is they were design to operate in different environments and each are better in their respective environments. So what you have to look at is which one is better for Serbia? An F-16 for example is designed to operate as part of a package, with AWACS, jammers, etc. Serbia does not have any of that, so if they bought an F-16 and if they send the F-16 in to battle by itself, it will not perform very well. If however they send the F-16 in battle as part of Nato for example, then the F-16 will perform very well, because that is what it was designed to do.

In 1996 36 Mig-29’s were refused by the Serbian leadership so you can’t say Russia wasn’t trying to help. The reason Russia did not provide help or parts was because Serbia did not (or could not) pay for them. The situation would have been exactly the same had Serbia had western equipment. If you can’t pay, you don’t get the parts. Look at Pakistan with their F-16’s, most of them are not flyable due to lack of parts. I do not see how you can put even 1% of blame on Russia.

Also I don’t think it’s fair to judge Russian equipment based on Soviet equipment built in the 60’s and 70’s. During the Cold War, the Soviet strategy was to build quantity over quality. They figured that they could defeat Nato by building equipment super fast, and this strategy probably would have worked due to the USSR’s huge industrial capacity. However, Russia no longer has the ability to build equipment so fast, so Russia is turning toward a quality over quantity approach. Recent Russian equipment is of a much higher quality than equipment designed 20 years ago. New Russian planes are built to have a low maintanance cost, cheap to operate, exactly the opposite of how Soviet equipment used to be. In other words, recent Russian planes are no different than “western” (whatever that means) planes.

The PAK-FA will resemble the F-22 in design quality more than it will the Mig-29.

Another picture:

Please let’s not talk about killing muslims, nobody cares. This is a military tech forum, not a let’s whine about poor innocent muslim terrorists forum.

The G-4M:

The biggest improvements over the G-4 is the ability to carry the R-60MK a2a missile and the AGM-65 Maverick a2g missile. Also it can carry the domestically-built “Grom” a2g missile (it is still not clear to me whether the original G-4 was Grom-capable, or only the J-22, can someone clarify this?) and the payload has been increased to 1950 kg. These are the big improvements, other than that there was a whole bunch of little improvements like a photo recon pod, a new HUD and navigation-aiming system, and I don’t know what else.

With an older plane, say a 3rd gen plane like the F-16, if the F-16 wanted to launch a missile at the enemy, he would have to establish a radar lock, and then fire the missile. The enemy would detect that someone has gotten a radar lock on him, and know that a missile was coming at him well in advance. With the F-22 however, the enemy would not know there is a lock on him due to the F-22’s LPI radar. So the enemy would not know there is a missile coming at him until the missile itself is close enough to be detected by radar, and by then he would only have a few seconds to perform evasive maneuvers. So yes he still has a chance of evading the missile, but a much smaller one.