a good idea to count what it cost to get a target destroyed, that is what count in the end,
but a CM is not running into “several million euro”, around 1 million vs $700k for dropping a bomb,
and then some expense to cover pilot training and possible accident, overall not much of difference in expense.
It should be noted that 90% of all sorties is vs known coordinates

How did you come to the figure of $700K for dropping a bomb? Also, the aircraft will likely drop more than one bomb during its sortie (as opposed to a missile that will only strike a single target).

But even assuming for the sake of argument that everything you said is perfectly accurate, it just goes to validate the lobbying of cruise missiles by other states during the Libyan operation vis a vis the Rafale that was supposedly operating at close quarters from get go.

To quote TooCool_12F – “everybody except the french waited for cruise missiles to clean the things up”. If on the other hand, employing cruise missiles was cheaper or even equivalently expensive…

You don’t have to as it was a sarcastic joke. No need to overanalyze it.

However, it’s always very touching to see you downplaying all this chain of events. 🙂

Let me ‘up-play’ it for you then. 😎

:applause: WOOHOO ONE MORE FOR DASSAULT!!!! :applause:

Wonder what is it with Gulf states that their deals are always so costly.

Rhetorical question I assume. 😀 :dev2:

pity for you, facts are stubborn… everybody except the french waited for cruise missiles to clean the things up… you just keep reading commercial brochures and evaluate operational efficiency for a few jpegs from the internet…

Didn’t the French employ SCALP-EGs during the conflict? Why expend such expensive munitions if the Rafale could achieve the same results with a far cheaper AASM or GBU-24?

$7 billion for 24 aircraft. Dassault really hit the jackpot with this one.

I don’t for a fact, but neither do you. There is however something very telling about the fact that China made a switch from Russian supplied avionics to domestically developed ones, which is pretty much against the preference of the Russian defence industry. There was also a pretty solid report from a western military analyst (maybe it was Erickson or Fisher?) who went to a Chinese defence trade show and noted as much that China had surpassed Russia in its electronics and avionics. This was as far back as 5-6 years ago. (If anyone still remembers the source or has it archived it’d be nice to have. I seem to have lost my ability to find it).

Highlights Of CIDEX

Overall, there are several key findings that you can take away from the CIDEX 2010 show. How it has evolved and changed over the years is more or less mirrors the entirety of China’s defence, aerospace and high-technology industries.

1) Less Foreign, More Domestic Participants

One of the aspects of CIDEX that has changed considerably is that there used to be a substantial presence by foreign firms that were looking to sell their products to Chinese industry. This is not surprising in that CIDEX is one of only two exhibitions that take place in China that have the full endorsement and support of the People’s Liberation Army’s General Armaments Department (GAD) (The other is Air Show China that takes place in Zhuhai in November of every even-numbered year.)

In other words, in order to have the official blessing of the PLA, one had to be seen at this show. If you met a Chinese customer at this show it was considered to be a sanctioned relationship if you later entered into a contractual agreement because of the PLA’s endorsement of the venue.

But, over the years there have been fewer and fewer foreign firms appearing at CIDEX for what appear to be two reasons. One is that most of the relationships between foreign suppliers and Chinese defence-related enterprises appear to have been institutionalised – either in the form of those companies now having their own representative offices in China, or authorised sales agents who are more or less embedded inside the major military production centres and MROs who utilise their products. They provide the mechanism for making sales of foreign suppliers’ products without the foreign suppliers having to have a presence in China itself.

The preferred mechanism is for these components to be brought into China by way of Hong Kong front companies, as the rules for importing into Hong Kong are less restrictive than they are for shipping direct to the mainland. Once they have arrived in Hong Kong these components are then shipped on to factories on the mainland. As a general rule, if the company importing these defence or aerospace components has a small staff of a handful of people in their Hong Kong office, but then a large number of people employed on the mainland, this is the type of importing scheme that they are engaged in.

The other factor in this drop off of foreign participants is that Chinese firms are now producing on their own the same products that they were purchasing from abroad 4 years or more ago. An example is the rise in the number of Chinese firms producing the solid-state, flash-type memory hard drives of the type that are just now being sold in commercially-available laptop computers. US firms used to have the lock on this technology in the Chinese market, but no longer – and the US producers who used to participate at CIDEX are nowhere to be seen.

2) Chinese Defence Products Today: State-of-the Art

Chinese defence products were once thought of as being moderately capable copies of previous-generation hardware that contained attributes of Russian, European and Israeli designs. Some of those bloodlines can still be seen in their designs, but the products now being seen at an expo like CIDEX show that Chinese firms have capabilities that approach first world industrial, state-of-the-art levels of sophistication.

In the 1990s, when the Russian defence was in danger of drying up and closing its doors due to an almost complete collapse in any funding from their own government, it was China that saved the day. China bought billions in military hardware from Russia, but it also sent its engineers, designers and technicians to study inside of Russian industry to learn how the weapons it was purchasing had been developed in the first place.

This transfer of technological know-how, plus some enormous investments by the Chinese military into its state-owned industries (what more than one Russian has referred to as “uncontrolled and rampant modernisation”) has produced a defence electronics industry that far outstrips the size and capacity of that which existed in Russia when Chinese industry first began their cooperation with Moscow in the early 1990s.

Today the former students (the Chinese) have become the masters. Chinese industry now has the ability to produce components that the Russian electronics industry (after almost two decades of no investment by their government) is no longer capable of either designing or manufacturing. The initial failure rates on the production of transmit/receive (T/R) modules for the Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) radars being designed for the Mikoyan MiG-35 and the Sukhoi T-50/PAK-FA 5th-generation fighter, for example, were so high that it would have bankrupted any western firm involved in a similar programme.

Not surprisingly, this year’s CIDEX show saw groups of Russian specialists going through the halls and looking for components that they could source out of China to be utilised in Russian-designed weapon systems. Russian specialists will point out that they are now at a huge disadvantage to the Chinese in two very significant respects.

One is that the commitment by the central government in resources to the defence electronics sector is both sustained and serious. “They can take a field where there is nothing but flat land and wild grass,” said one Russian company representative, “and the next thing you know there is a full-blown factory or design centre there turning out a world-class product.”

The other advantage to China is the unfortunate reality of actuarial tables. Younger scientists and engineers who are needed in Russia to form the next-generation of weapons designers are leaving the nation in droves. A few years ago the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) estimated that 70,000 scientists and specialists from Russian defence institutes and military-industrial complex enterprises had left the country.

A documentary on the subject produced by Moscow’s NTV stated “the nuclear physicists, experts in electronic equipment, virologists and biotechnologists did not leave Russia empty-handed. They took secrets with them and presented their former foes with the weapons they had themselves developed.”

The documentary went on to claim “according to CIA data, in the first half of the 1990s thousands of Soviet specialists in the field of nuclear and missile technology left for the Middle East. They worked there in violation of the treaty on non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the MTCR. From the Arzamas-16 centre several people went to work in Iraq. Russian scientists worked in Iran and Libya. Forty nuclear scientists immigrated to Israel. Thousands of Russian specialists in the field of nuclear and missile technologies developed programmes to improve armaments in China. Our scientists are willing to work anywhere they are paid.”

The consequence is that whereas the age of the average defence industrial scientist or engineer in China is about 30 and around 40 in the US – it is 50 years or more in Russia. China’s industry is growing and advancing, while Russia’s will effectively be dying off before too long.

http://www.strategycenter.net/research/pubID.230/pub_detail.asp

What’s our best guess as to the flyaway cost of the Super Hornet Advance/International (new EW hardware, new MAWS, new MMI, upgraded F414, LPI datalink)?

or over Libya

with 6 AASMs onboard

If this is representative of a typical combat configuration, the F-35 should do splendidly. No need for an external hard-points at all. 8 SDB I/IIs plus two AMRAAMs. Low drag, high efficiency. With 8 SDBs onboard.