Are there any pictures/diagrams of the Carver design? I have seen nothing on this.

China has shifted policy from its Pakistan oriented diplomacy to one that includes Iran. Pakistan and the ISI are ultimately the main vein to the Taliban, true, but they are getting help from China and Iran. The latter has been the main supporter of the Northern Alliance prior to 9/11. Politics have changed and Iran is now in bed with the Taliban. What ultimately drives this trilateral alliance? Russia and U.S. pressures on the oil markets. China is going to great lengths to insure its supplies of oil. (Even if they have that “firework factory exploding” problem happening more often than in the past*.) A pro-U.S. Afghanistan is not something that brings sweet dreams to the folks in Beijing. Seems almost absurd that Iraq penned a deal for Chinese small arms.

* this has been used as a cover story for concealing a terrorist attack more than once or twice

What’s progress of this?

Cancelled. Really never amounted to anything because it was not asked for in the first place.

I thought it would have been interesting if Israel had of teamed up with Taiwan to continue its development of the Lavi, before Israel hoped into bed with the PRC.
A great opportunity missed?
And the J-10 may never have been?

Problem is the U.S. would have blocked said program. No engines. No weapons. No soup for you!

China has far more money, too. Taiwan didn’t have a chance.

The soviets bombed massive corridors along their routes during their phased withdrawal. I’m sure every available bomber had to be bore down onto the afghan theatre to sustain the removal of their troops. A couple years back I asked if anyone had details of how the Bear bombers were used during the withdrawals and nobody could find references to their use in literature. Details of the actual operations seem to be few and far between. Think about the monster bureaucracy that was the soviet union and how much paperwork their should have been.

Northrop should be trying to sell them a refit of the F-5’s into F-5G’s enhanced with 2010-generation technologies. No reason those little airframes can’t last for fifty years with some decent rework. I just don’t see Gripen running cheap enough for them in the long run unless they slash the fleet in size.

Forum policy, don’t read anything into it. We like to lock threads that get around 20 pages in length. Something about bandwidth or whatever.

Not bandwidth, memory. This server running the forum software caches the thread as it is accessed and that is a lot of memory consumed for but one topic.

I just keep checking in on the thread for the Rafale pr0n.