I don’t get your point.
So, what was the best thing for Dassault to say ?

We know that buying fighters has a huge political dimension, why do you try to dodge that part ?

If we look at the past, specially what happen in Korea, don’t you think your sentence should be “Dassault and the French press have developed a nasty habit of saying the truth” ? 😀

Is the “truth” getting them contracts? And they should know that there is a political dimension to such deals, but it is not like France is not using this factor as well. If you can not go to court and challenge a deal, you should shut up, throwing dirt is not going to help selling planes.

Swiss air force very clearly recommended the rafale as the best option. The better performance allowed to do more with the rafale with less aircrafts than with the gripen. It is the swiss operational evaluation itself that came to that conclusion.

If the gripen was considered more efficient within the same budget swiss air force would have recommended it.

Swiss politics decided to look at the price argument only without looking at the overall operational effectiveness.

Swiss politics looked at the needs of the state budget and the whole Swiss Armed Forces, not just the Air Force. And the leaves them with 25% money saved to spent on the needs of the army or save within the budget.

Apart from that from a certain number of airframes on, the “do more with less” argument simply fails.

Say you want:

3 CAPs with 2 planes at ready 15
and 6 planes available for daily training missions

12 planes won´t cut that, 16 might do.

And that might be one of the reasons, why Rafale sold badly so far. It is never the fault of Dassault.

If they do not take Rafale, they should cancelthe whole think and take more SU-30s.

The exact whereabouts of every French aircrafts in the beginning of the war is not known.

What we roughly know is :

– before the 19th march, French aircrafts were flying recce missions in Libya,

– the 19th march, French aircrafts bombed targets near benghazi and “French warplanes attacked an air defense site in Tajura, about 10 kilometers east of the Libyan capital of Tripoli on Saturday night.” : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfvaoWyjZGo

– the 28th march, “The French military has released a video it claims shows French fighter jets bombing a Libyan ammunitions depot south of Tripoli on March 28th.” : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcka0pJL6X8&feature=player_embedded

Well did they attack before or after the 110 cruise missiles hit on the 19th?

US aircraft were hitting SAM sites, on their first sorties in theatre as early as the 20th as well. Even old F-16AMs started doing this on the 24th, according to reports from Norway.

I think it is very difficult to draw any conclusions of the capabilities of different planes from that campaign. Just consider that the RAf deployed later and the Brimstone was a unique capability, so Tornados were used in different roles.

I am not aware that EF failed an operational requirement so far.

The up-graded F-5 might be the solution. If you want to kill an new fighter program, you pick a winner that satisfies no one. The taxpayers, will be happy if the 3.1 billions are saved, and happily pay a few hundred millions for a service-life extension of the F-5.

The Air Force might be happy to avoid the plane they did not want and have a new competition in 10 years.

The Army might be happy, as the available money is not completely spent on planes.

Does it no get boring to discuss topics so far from reality? The Rafale served well in Libya, but I would also no go as far to say that the early use, shows a special quality. Libyais huge and threat level was very different. Afaik cruise missiles were used against target in the Tripoli area, even down town, in the beginning of the war. Rafale did not attack in that area early in the war.