How good is it in what role? As an AJT, as an air superiority fighter, as a bomber, what?

The USAF will probably not buy it.

India build an aesa radar, please! They don’t have the foundries. They can only buy parts from other countries and put them together. Anyone can do that. If India is so good at designing things why don’t they design some soap and deodorant for their smelly population, I would think that should be a higher priority than an aesa radar.

This is much more complex tech than a Pentium cpu. I just don’t see how a country of 5 million can even come close to undertaking the design and development of something like that, when there are large and rich European countries that can’t even do it.

It’s unlikely Israel actually designs all of these components themselves, they just import the components from someone (probably USA) and then just put them together. This means that they can’t sell these radars to just anyone, because a radar built using US-supplied parts can only be sold to customers approved by the US.

To my knowledge only USA and Japan have designed aesa radars using domestic technology. Russia is also building one for their 5th gen fighter according to Jane’s but it’s not finished yet. UK has built them but not entirely with domestic technology, they imported some parts from the US.

The stuff built by countries like China and India were just very crude prototypes built only for testing new technologies, this is not something that can actually be used in a plane.

BOOO! Russia sucks!

He shouldn’t have landed, what’s the worst that could happened?

Although the US fighters flew with certain restrictions that handicapped their effectiveness,

Anyone know more about these restrictions?

their Russian- made AA-10 “fire-and-forget” Alamo missiles

Huh? There’s a fire and forget version of the AA-10 now?

Bad choice. Belgian F-16’s, even the ones which were recently placed in storage, are near the end of their service life. If Bulgaria wants used F-16’s, it would make more sense to go for American F-16’s, they should be able to find many which were flown much less than Belgian ones.

The reality is that whatever Serbia can afford and what Russia can afford to give away would do little more than give NATO and the US a bloody nose.

to organise a small countries air defenses to take on the world’s largest, richest and most powerful military alliance would be an act of radical futility.

You’re assuming NATO is willing to fight with all their might and accept heavy losses, which is not true. The reason NATO attacked was because they knew in advance their losses would be extremely few. If NATO thought that they would lose dozens of aircraft, they would have never attacked in the first place because the public in western countries would have rioted for an end to the attack. That’s why if Serbia has a few S-300’s, NATO would never attack them. If you have the ability to give NATO a “bloody nose”, then you’ve already won, because NATO will never attack.

SCG is no longer close Russian allays. Current political establishment, even if T. Nikolic wins Serbian presidential election (anyway that post is largely ceremonial) SCG will not make shift towards Russia

So they will buy the Patriot over the S-300? The much more expensive, but far less capable Patriot, which shoots down friendly aircraft, and intercepted only about 4% of Saddam’s scuds? I hope the people in charge of Serbia’s military acquisitions are not that dumb.

Besides, being friendly with the west doesn’t mean they won’t buy Russian. For example, Greece is much closer to the west than Serbia is, yet Greece is still a huge purchaser or Russian equipment.

That decision was largely influenced by unacceptably low performance of Russian weapon systems during 1999 conflict.

Because Russian AD equipment equipment which was designed in the 1960’s didn’t work well against 1990’s jet’s and sead techniques, means that Russian equipment sucks? The fact that 30-40 year old equipment which is far past its service life malfunctioned means that Russian equipment is unreliable? How dense are you? Do you think American SAMS designed in the 60’s would have worked any better, or wouldn’t have malfunctioned? Do you understand that there is a limited time for which any piece of technology works, and after that time it must be overhauled or replaced?

Mig-25’s were used in the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict. Azerbaijan operated a moderate-sized fleet of them, Mig-25PD’s and Mig-25RB’s. More than one was shot down in 1992 by the Armenians.