When was the last european fighter that respected its schedule or predicted price? For sure not when the EF or Rafale appeared. I don’t buy the 70 bil. sh*t, but even with a 35 % increase in price, the F 35 will still be less expensive than EF/Rafale…

What does it matter? Those two have been managed badly as well, the Rafale less so than the Eurofighter.

That still doesn’t suddenly mean the F-35 has been managed well or that magically it retroactively hit all its milestones on schedule. It didn’t.

& how well the F-35 program (as a whole) is actually doing

Right.

http://www.star-telegram.com/business/story/1764028.html ?

And STILL with all the talk going on here NOBODY have given any credible source crediting the Eurofighter Typhoon with >5,000 kg (11,034 lbs)

I’ve never seen a 5000+ kg figure either. 4955 kg seems to be standard quote.

If he wants to start his own thread dedicated to debating his pet theory “Stop MMRCA, Adopt Tejas Mk.2 (whenever)”, that seems completely reasonable. In any case, I’d much prefer actual productive, interesting discussion on the (real, actual) MMRCA competitors.

I agree.

Discussing the Tejas alternative as a byline has its merits, but the way this discussion has taken over this thread and the whole discussion has become very, very tiresome quite a while ago.

Please open a separate thread for the “Tejas for MMRCA” campaign.

Hot air. Last decade got me persuaded that there is a large gap between what American military talk they can do and what they actually can do.. And frankly, you would be surprised how few US soldiers would actually be willing to go and die for something as distant and foreign as Taiwan. I certainly wouldn’t. Fighting China is entirely different from fighting Iraq.

My take is a bit different. I have no doubt that the US military would go to Taiwan if ordered to. They are properly trained and indoctrinated after all. But I have grave doubts that they’d get the order.

Rather, the rest of the G8 would give press conferences about the self-responsibility of the ROC and talk about Asia’s self-governance, while transporting that “the Taiwanese history is a very complex one”, playing down any need for immediate action until no action makes sense any more.

Nonsense. Chinas new wealth and power is based on exports at first.

Exports make about 40% of China’s GDP. And of those about 20% go to the US. So China’s GDP depends on the US for about 8% in this flat calculation. Expect them to recover some losses with shifting inventory and putting more focus on other markets and you’d be at 5% US influence.

India and USA just signed an end user monitoring agreement. Now i think that pretty much seals the MRCA competitons fate.

It might, but the direction depends on what they agreed on.