qwertyDetails are scant at the moment, but £1.1bn has been committed by David Cameron at Farnborough to boost ISTAR and fund RAF Typhoon AESA.
There is talk of more investment in drones, but is this new investment or support for existing systems like Watchkeeper and Reaper I wonder?
It is also supposed that Sentinel is being kept in service beyond the original 2015 out of service date:
Hopefully this is only the first of a number of defense related common sense attacks to hit No. 10 Downing Street. Do we have Czar Putin and the Chrimea/Ukraine crisis to thank for this?
qwertyThe US are saying that the “deliveries of F16s are on schedule” and the first 2 will be sent to Iraq in September.
Lets wait and see.
The MOB of the F16s (Balad and Ali AB are both under government control).
Meanwhile, Belarus has denied that it sold any jets to Iraq. Yet the Iraqi defence committee said that the first of 10 “sukhoi” jets from Russia arrived in Iraq today, with more “close support jets” from Belarus expected in the next few days.
In other words some very second hand Belorussian Su-25s? According to the Wikipedia ORBAT ten aircraft is almost half the Belorussian Frogfoot fleet. At least it’s exactly the aircraft the Iraqis really need.
qwertyMaybe the aim was always to split Iraq up, or maybe it became the aim after the puppet strings malfunctioned.
The way things are developing, trying to keep the state of Iraq intact is like pouring oil into a bucket of water and expecting the content to mix.
qwertyAs for the Kurds – I reckon they’re being opportunist. Yes, they took over bases (& equipment) & towns abandoned by the Iraqi army, but they’re fighting ISIS, not allied to it. ISIS wants the oilfields, & so do the Kurds. Be sensible: you don’t want to fight the Kurds as well as ISIS.
The only reason Maliki still has the semblance of a cordial relationship with the Kurds is because the Kurds have better soldiers and more of them. As for the equipment, what were the Kurds supposed to do? Leave it there for ISIS after the Iraqi army ran away? As you said, they did the sensible thing any I’ll believe the Kurds are conspiring with ISIS when I see the proof.
qwertyI hope they send as few aircrafts as possible to the Iraqis. They will just end up in the hands of ISIS anyway.
Don’t think they will do the ISIS much good….
I kind of agree with Tu22m. The Yanks would be better off sending those planes and the military support they planned to send to the al-Maliki regime to the Kurds. The Kurdish Peshmerga seem to be the only disciplined military force in Iraq that doesn’t run away from a buch of thugs driving techincals. It was amazing to see the kind of gear the Iraqi army just abandoned as it ran away. They had armored cars, APCs and even Tanks and they just abandoned that equipment and their arsenals and ran away. You could drive a T-72 up to one of those ISIS technicals and crush it without having too much to fear from an RPG-2 or even an RPG-7. If the new citizens militia really manages to beat off the ISIS the abject humilitaion of al-Maliki and of the Iraqi army will be complete.
qwertyExactly that, if RoE is clear and you can track your opponent, you could have a clear edge with BVR missiles to dictate the engagement. ‘Could’ being the key word here as the F-16A example most likely did occur over Lebanon 1982., but the newer MiG-23MFs were probably unable to use the BVR missiles to their advantage due to the heavy jamming of their communications with their GCI controllers and/or destruction of GCI sites. Add to that probably too many inexperienced pilots flying those MiGs and superior technology on the other side (e.g. better radars, RWRs, missiles, especially AIM-9Ls compared to the Syrians who didn’t have R-60s then even, etc. on US supplied fighters, AWACS support, jamming equipment, etc.) and the end result was pretty much inevitable.
IIRC, in Vietnam the BVR Sparrow use was possible mostly in situations when Combat Tree equipped Phantom was available to perform IFF.
No set RoEs, no matter how well thought out, are gonging to survive contact with the confusion of combat. Sooner or later you are going to have some pretty severe blue-on-blue incidents unless you have IFF systems that can pretty much guarantee you aren’t shooting at your own people and that is very, very bad for morale. The USAF outnumbered the NVAF over Vietnam pretty severely and thus the odds of blue-on-blue kills in that kind of an environment is very high in the absence of proper IFF systems so there was a very good reason for those RoEs specifying visual identification before launch. The Soviet air force or any other air force back in the 1970s and early 80s would have had the exact same kind of problems with the MiG-23 in BVR engagements unless they had a reallly good IFF set-up.
qwertyThe export MiG-23 with MiG-21 radars and fire control were simply expensive MiG-21’s.
True, the potentially interesting thing about the MiG-23 was that it had something approaching worth while BVR, but I don’t think BVR was really mature enough back then. Engagements in Vietnam for example tended to turn into WVR fights most of the time even though the F-4 had BVR missiles due to IFF issues and poor maturity of the BVR system. Many of the complaints of USAF F-4 pilots about the Sparrow in Vietnam seem to be what a lousy WVR missile it was since F-4 pilots were apparently discouraged from using it at longer ranges. According to one source I read some 612 Sparrows were fired in Vietnam with a Pk of 10% and only 2 BVR kills. The Performance of the R-23/24 BVR missiles on the Soviet MiG-23s must have been similar, on the dumbed down WARPAC MiG-23s it would have performed worse than on the Soviet version and on the extra dumbed down export MiG-23s it must have been next to useless while the MiG-23 versions with MiG-21 radar could only carry WVR missiles. That along with the fact that the MiG-21 was less expensive and more maneuverable, easier to make, operate and repair made it a quite viable fighter until the late 80s when BVR came of age and by that time the much superior MiG-29 was available so why buy MiG-23s?
qwertyOld Royal Thai (Siam) Air Force Ki.43 (with charging elephant roundels)…
Rare birds! Got any more?
qwertyArgentine FMA IA-58 Pucara
[ATTACH=CONFIG]223315[/ATTACH]
qwertyThanks again everybody for the links, you all saved me a lot searching.
qwertyFor some reason I’m becoming rather interested in post war use of WWII aircraft. The Ha-1112 served into the 1960s as a coin aircraft and a trainer and the Heinkels were only retired in 1973. That has to make them the some of the last WWII bombers to serve operationally in any capacity (troop transports in this case). Another interesting bird is the Avia S.199, it is pretty ironic that the Bf.109 eventually became the first combat aircraft of the air forces of the state of Israel.
qwertyTry these
and
http://www.scalemates.com/books/book.php?id=100050
as far as I’m aware nothing has been published in English other than magazine articles or the odd mention in books on the 109 and He111
It might be worth tracking down this issue of the much missed Classic Aircraft Mag.
Septic.
Thanks a ton, dude. That’s exactly what I had in mind.
qwertyI was under the impression it was a limited upgrade in order to keep them safely flying for a few more years though I could be wrong.
Yup, that’s what I figured too, it’s hard to beleive the Croats are still flying around in fighters with mostly 1970s vintage electronics. What got me thinking was that I saw that the five new machines are ex Yemeny and they received the full monty upgrade didn’t they? But like I said Euro 10.5 mill seems an awful low amount for five Fishbeds and a major overhaul. I mean a refurbished C-47 from Basler costs $6.5 million. Can you really get a used and refurbished Fishbed for $1-2 mill? If that’s the case, as soon as I earn my first couple of millions, I know what I’ll spend them on :cool:.
qwertyHow about you just mix the BAe Hawk 200 and Hawk 128 and the beefed up gear from the T-45 and bingo, you have an aircraft perfect for COIN, anti tank and anti helicopter missions for less than the price of an apache while having 5 times the range, more than twice the speed and a far higher payload.
Sounds nice and it probably is but the Hawk is a jet as is the JL-8 suggested by Sens. An aircraft isn’t automatically a better choice for a COIN aircraft because it is a jet. Apart from being more maintenance intensive, more expensive to operate and more expensive to buy than a turboprop a Jet aircraft needs much higher grade facilities. The thing that makes a turboprop aircraft like a Super Tucano or a PC-9/21, or our hypothetical modernised Skyraider interesting is that it can operate from forward bases off of very short and rough airstrips in countries that don’t have a highly developed infrastructure available all the time. The USAF has the logistical muscle to transport a regiment of engineers, a fleet of bulldozers and all the materials to build a top-of-the-line airbase into areas like the Amazon jungle or the mountains of Afghanistan so they can operate F-16s and A-10s out of it. This kind of an operation is quite beyond the means of most smaller countries. They have to make do with more primitive airstrips. According to Embraer the Super Tucano is specifically designed with rough conditions in mind. So whether or not a Hawk, a JL-8 or any other jet trainer would work out depends the infrastructure available in the theatre of operations.
qwertyHow about you just mix the BAe Hawk 200 and Hawk 128 and the beefed up gear from the T-45 and bingo, you have an aircraft perfect for COIN, anti tank and anti helicopter missions for less than the price of an apache while having 5 times the range, more than twice the speed and a far higher payload.
Sounds nice and it probably is but the Hawk is a jet as is the JL-8 suggested by Sens. An aircraft isn’t automatically a better choice for a COIN aircraft because it is a jet. Apart from being more maintenance intensive, more expensive to operate and more expensive to buy than a turboprop a Jet aircraft needs much higher grade facilities. The thing that makes a turboprop aircraft like a Super Tucano or a PC-9/21, or our hypothetical modernised Skyraider interesting is that it can operate from forward bases off of very short and rough airstrips in countries that don’t have a highly developed infrastructure available all the time. The USAF has the logistical muscle to transport a regiment of engineers, a fleet of bulldozers and all the materials to build a top-of-the-line airbase into areas like the Amazon jungle or the mountains of Afghanistan so they can operate F-16s and A-10s out of it. This kind of an operation is quite beyond the means of most smaller countries. They have to make do with more primitive airstrips. According to Embraer the Super Tucano is specifically designed with rough conditions in mind. So whether or not a Hawk, a JL-8 or any other jet trainer would work out depends the infrastructure available in the theatre of operations.
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