Cmon fellas, retired does not mean unflyable or destroyed. The USAF keeps a number of them in temperature controlled storage and available if necessary. At least two were used a year back for a test. The fallacy around here sometimes is thick.

Refurbished Gripens would be a nice fit, especially if they need a compliment to their existing fighters. The Super Hornet is a compliment to the others but on steroids. The MKM would need to be especially good in price. The Rafale and Typhoon more or less displace the need for their existing Flankers, unfortunately overlapping other capability they have.

F-15S equivalents would perhaps be impractical?

Rafale was designed to listen for LPI signals. They use more sensitive receivers with more granular direction prediction. Situation awareness tips the favor every time. No doubt within a certain window of opportunity the Su-35 is lethal with certainty. The question is who operates with more discipline and has the better awareness. That will lend itself to the winner ignoring all other factors. But then explore operational tempo, logistic footprint, weapon ordnance available, etc. The other factors tend to be tipped to Rafale’s favor, too. The Russians have some serious weapons on the drawing boards. Deployment has been lacking.

By the time they did a complete DARIN III upgrade it probably cost less to build something like a Tejas. You basically are settling for something between the Gripen or M2K. If it needs more capability than that then they may as well buy F-16’s at that point.

Mercurius is correct. I don’t get the rhetoric and disingenuous argument directed back at him. The only detection systems that work well against stealth are by staging cheap coded signal emitters at known locations and listening for reflections of those signals that are unnatural. In simplest principle it’s not unlike LED lighting in the aisles of theaters. The real world problem is that each emitter can be attacked by less costly means that erecting each one within the matrix, it’s only good for deployment in friendly territory, it is ungodly complex to sort the myriad of coded signals, and it’s prone to spoofing.

Not really. For the USSR, MiG-21 was a tactical fighter, later adapted to fighter-bomber, for frontal aviation. Su-15 was a successor to the Su-9 & Su-11, single-engined interceptor contemporaries of MiG-21.

PVO operated MiG-21bis. The Su-15 and MiG-21bis had little in common. The Su-15 used engines similar to earlier model MiG-21 variants prior to the development of MiG-21bis. Sukhoi couldn’t get enough engines for the Fitter families, but there were plenty of engine capacity available for Fishbeds. Fishpot production hinged on engine supply that was itself problematic. It only made sense to use available production engines. MiG-23 suffered issues with engine supply, too, for similar reasons the Fitters suffered.

Lightning II is bigger than F-16 and more in the class of Rafale or Typhoon. With that in mind it’s obvious Lightning II is cheaper.

I was under the impression that the OP meant to compare what jets of the Cold War could accomplish versus today’s fighters. The Cold War fighters would be hard pressed to keep up with modern fighters. Today’s fighters can start day one flying 3-4 sorties and sustain a tempo equal to day one tempo for a Cold War fighter.

The Cold War fighter would literally race to a merge. Today’s fighters would stay back and lob missiles from much greater distances than the Cold War fighter. Let’s not forget yesterday’s fire and forget missiles were heatseekers. Today’s version are command guidance with several options for terminal homing.