sealordlawrenceah excellent.. VC 10 has to be one of the most graceful birds ever.
I second that, without doubt the best looking airliner ever built!
sealordlawrenceOut of curiosity what is the main difference between the export and home variant.
If anybody in the public domain knows that I would love to hear but I dont hold out much else.
sealordlawrenceIn any case a F16C block 50+ is no Rafale… so we’re still comparing apples and oranges. F16C block 50+ would be better compared with M2k-5 MkII. It would be interesting to see how much dassault would take for 30 used M2k-5.
So? If it works out cheaper and you get more aircraft some might consider it a better deal.
sealordlawrenceI feel that the question should be ‘Are HM armed forces broken?’ the answer to which is yes, unfortunately.
Years of accountants running the show, political leadership with the backbones of mollusks, middle management and the pc brigade gaining a foothold in the MoD, have reduced the forces to a shadow of their former selves.
And the result is clear for all to see, effective defeat in Iraq (without even the honor of one last push like the US is giving) and the same not being inconceivable in Afghanistan. Unfortunately the British government is learning the hard way that it is not possible for one to ‘punch above ones weight’ in military affairs.
sealordlawrenceSaying there indigenous defence industry is a bit strong, OK they can’t replicate technology at the state of the art but since the revolution they have managed to keep an ever aging fleet flying, produce upgrades and reverse engineer technology.
Iran has actually turned down defence deals with Russia and China due to technology transfer issues.
The achievements are pathetic, period. If they had managed to make new build tomcats or even Phantoms fair enough, but F-5’s, and it took them over 25 years. Give me a break.
sealordlawrencescorpion82 and sealordlawrence
I agree with your remarks. I never said the typhoon and the f22 are useless, I just said that they are in my opinion “less usefull less often” since air superiority is of less importance in todays war against terror. And even in the case of a future war against a more potent adversary, I still think that a SH, F35, rafale, F15 are highly sufficient with the combination of NCW (god’s eye view), massive use of standoff weapons which gives an overwhelming advantage against any probable/existing ennemies.
If my memory is correct, this has been theorize under the name “air power”. Simply put, it is the fact of striking almost simultaneously all the vital/commanding facilities to enjoy an asymetric edge over your adversary. After that You enjoy an impunity and a god’s eyes view of the battle feld which enable you to conduct highly reactive /intensive strikes whereas your ennemy can’t implement any strategy to reverse the trend as he is paralysed and unable to communicate with its own troops . In this context, a military aircraft is part of the whole military operation network. The F35, one of the sole post cold war programme, is a case in point. It has been designed according to this theory. Pure performance was of less importance to focus on diffrent aspects: survivable, persistence, versatile, lethal and highly connected to the global militay network.
The f22 and to a much lesser extent the typhoon (which have more potential to evolve has a swing role tactical fighter;) ) were designed with a cold war philosophy where two sides of equal strenght would fight each other in a symetric confrontation. But today, with the USA beeing the only superpower it is highly unlikely that a forseable adversary wouls chalenge NATO’s global military stenght. (I doubt that a european country would confront alone such an adversary)
We should not forget that factors of performance for us such asTwR, SC…(which are very expensive in a world of budget constraints) should be confronted to their contribution to the war effort.
A SH will never be as sexy as an F22, but It is much more adapted to assymetric wars. Fortunately, the rafale which is a pre-cold war aircraft appearded to be well tailored to modern conflicts. A common (navy and air force) versatile platform with good persistence an survivability.A kind of F35 precursor. (I read it from military analyst from A&C).
regards.
You are working on the basis that the operators of the Typhoon and the F-22 will always be engaging inferior opponents. That is a fundamentally flawed concept. In order to strike at the various installations you mention you need to be able to get to them, slightly difficult if they are surrounded by a well trained and equipped air force. To be perfectly honest with you the only thing which is giving the Rafale a real edge over the Typhoon in the stakes you are discussing at the moment is slightly more advanced A2G integration program anyway and the decision by the french to procure the 125kg bombs and triple racks. Remember that the F-22 will utlimatly be able to carry 10 SDB’s.
sealordlawrenceLesB, thanks for your post, another great incite! I love hearing about the intended strategy for all the sexy kit we see on these pages. As said by many many others, thank go nothing ever came of it!
Incidently tripwire was eventually replaced by gradual escalation. The idea behind tripwire was a deterrent, mess with us and get fried basically. Gradual escalation was intended to give leaders time to come to some sort of ‘other’ conclusion (although it has never been explained to me what that ‘other’ was supposed to be) whilst just Germany got fried.
sealordlawrence“Those infidels I tell you, its all their fault. Becaaaaaaause they are infidels!”
Comical Ali, aka Baghdad Bob aka Phrozen Flame in his day job circa 2003
😀 😀 😀 😀 😀
sealordlawrenceNot impressed by the above analysis:
Many European navies have made a transition to fewer but more capable ships and there has been a shift from a predominanty Atlantic/ASW orientation to a more global one, involving provision of humanitarian assistance, overseas troop deployments and land attack. So, the emphasis is different, but navies are not considered less important.
Japan has had a significant fleet since WW2. China’s fleet, while modernizing rapidly, still largely relies consists of old(er) designs. Other Asian navies are taking greater responsibility for the defence of the sea lanes in their national territorial domains (Why are European navies expected to provide naval defences against the growing power of PLAN? That would only make sense in a situation where there are still colonial interests. Shouldn’t independent nations defend themselves?)
Warships IFR is a good publication for interviews with senior western officers and for photographs but not alot else. When it comes to reporting anything that is not European or American its accuracy is atrocious and its analysis is amongst the most bias you will see in any military themed publication. If you read ot for long enough you will come to believe that Navies are the most important armed service one could ever possibly imagine and that they should be responsible for everything but that all western navies are on the brink of becoming under funded under staffed river patrol fleets.;)
sealordlawrenceWell pakistan was born from India, so I suppose everything ultimately ends up being Indias Fault. Like it or Lump it, it is true.
I thought the Chinese had just gone out and bought a Russian AWACS instead of the Israeli thats what i remember from all the reports. The Israels wanted to but couldnt so the russias said buy our A-50s
Officially the KJ-2000 et al are indigenous, as to how much foreign input their is is anybody’s guess. My own humble opinion is that Israel may have slipped some backhand tech to China after the cancellation of the original deal.
sealordlawrencehttp://www.f-16.net/news_article2521.html
They seem to confirm that those would be used F16, and I don’t see how those could be block 50+. It doesn’t seem as such a bargain anymore, except for the fact that the EUR is so high against the USD.
Nic
Why couldnt they be Block 50? It is not rocket science to upgrade earlier block C/D’s to Block 50/52 standard, Turkey is doing it as we speak. This could be part of a Lockheed plan to offer upgraded second hand F-16’s as a budget option under the F-35 in the coming years. It could make for a good marketing strategy with both high and low end products.
sealordlawrenceAnyone here noticed any responces from Iran? any overtures? I wondering if they are quitely thinking about upgrading their airdefence after seeing what happened to the Syrians
They have been thinking about it for years, but as we have seen their indigenous industry is not far short of a joke and they are not exactly at the top of most countries customer lists when it comes to arms deals at the moment. However there was a parade in Iran the other day at which the president declared that any country that attacked Iran would feel nothing but regret and according to the BBC they unveiled a new long range missile but all I saw were the Shahabs and battle fiel ballistic missile that we have known about for years.
sealordlawrencetphuang
Yes, I believe China cannot come up with a radar that fits Pakistan’s requirements, because China is at least 10 years behind the West as a Chinese general admitted recently:Wednesday, September 19, 2007
China’s military tests sophisticated real-time data system
13 hours agoBEIJING (AFP) — The Chinese military has begun a two-day drill ….
“We are trying to catch up with the advanced countries. It’s a very complicated system, as it involves every military unit,” Xu Guangyu, a retired Chinese general, told AFP.
“I think we need at least ten years to catch up with the world’s most sophisticated nations,” he said.
………………..http://china-defense.blogspot.com/
tphuang I will have to give up on you now – I find it useless having to repeat arguments already made. For example, I have explained before, that Pakistan is having to ask unreliable West to supply avionics for JF-17 at much higher prices, that Pakistan would have loved to buy from reliable friend China at reasonable prices, had China’s M.I.C been able to supply.
But the simple reality is that China CAN NOT, rather than China refusing to supply them to Pakistan. There is a huge difference between the two statements, which, for some reason, you refuse to understand or acknowledge, and continue to live in your fantacies.
Good luck with fantacising in your virtual world tphuang, but it would not have any bearing on the reality, that China is presently in no position to compete with the West, in high tech Air defence technologies, for at least 10 more years.
OMG you look ridiculous now! That comment is clearly in reference to data links not radars! hahahahahahahahaha.:eek: :rolleyes: 😀
sealordlawrenceDuring the Shahs time the US did help setup facilities for Iran to maintain its fleet of american planes. They also helped setup other facilities for research and development. I think this is a continuation from that, they may call American the great satan but they do love American hardware 😀
As long as it is 30 years old and simple even for its age.:D
sealordlawrenceIn todays war against terror I understand the criticism against the F22 or to a lesser degree the typhoon. Too much money have been invested in performance which don’t bring a lot of added value on the battlefields. Some money could had been saved to support the war effort on the ground.
I know Supercruise or awsome vertical climbs are “cool” for air enthusiast as we are, but in the real life of military operations, I would ask more range, more smart ordonance and better situational awarness. I think that today people who need CAS don’t really care about supercruise…
As a rule of thumb a large scale military development and procurement program takes approximately 20 years from inception to service. That product (whatever it may be) is then expected to serve for at least 20 years, in many cases now we are looking at double that. The operational needs of a country can change beyond all recognition in that time, indeed they can over night. The best one can hope to do is to take vague guess as to what might be needed in the future and then work towards that. To say that Typhoon or the Raptor are useless today and therefore should not have been procured is just stupidity. Indeed just taking the two examples you gave one can easily suggest that the current Russian strategic bomber patrols already justify the existence (whether they do or not is a different matter). The fact of the matter is that one does not know when one may have to engage a nation with a competent air force.
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