You can buy training services from the UK, or France or Italy or many other nations cheaper than you can purchase and maintain your own fleet of under-utilized training aircraft.

You need a certain level of yearly student throughput to justify having your own training capability. And smaller Air Forces simply don’t have sufficient student throughput.

But if you desire trainers to satisfy a misguided sense of national pride, that is another matter.

Lets look at this in another way

Are you going to have a very expensive (to buy and operate) all F-35 fleet; or you could have a combination of a smaller F-35 fleet for high risk operations, plus a low cost supersonic fighter trainer for QRA, air policing, CAS in permisive airspace and of course LIFT? Isn’t using F-35 for peacetime QRA and air policing also a misguided sense of national pride? Belgium is looking at getting like 34 F-35; is that the best solution or something like 18 F-35 plus 36 low cost supersonic fighter trainers (from the T-X competition, or the FA-50 maybe) be better?

24 T-50s for Iraq cost them $1.1 billion. Unlikely to be cheaper for Bulgaria.

Iraq takes delivery of first South Korean jets

12 FA-50PH for philippines cost $425 million, and 16 T-50I for indonesia cost $400 million.

botswana

Botswana Defence Force Air Wing

in june 2016 the country has confirmed negotiations to buy between 8 and 12 Gripen C/D units at a potential cost of $1.7 billion. but after much deliberation it is decided that gripens are actually too advanced for the requirements of BDF air wing. the available budget of $1.7 billion would be used to modernise the whole air wing instead.

brazil
– 3 kc-390 to replace the c-130b ($300 million)
– 12 emb-314 super tucano ($220 million)
– 1 emb-135bj legacy 650 vip to replace the gulfstream iv ($34 million)

korea
– 12 kai fa-50bw fighter aircaft to replace the cf-5a/d ($500 million)

switzerland
– 6 pilatus pc-24 utility jet to replace beech 200 king air. 2 to be fitted with ISR equipments ($80 million)
– additional 7 pc-7 mkII to add to the current 5 ($40 million)

italy
– 10 leonardo aw139 helicopter to replace bell 412 ($160 million)
– 12 leonardo aw009 (pzl sw-4) to replace as350 ($15 million)
– 16 tecnam p2010 basic trainer/liaison/border patrol ($6 million)

a total spend of $1.4 billion.

There you have it, a thoroughly modernised air force for less cost than the proposed saab gripen buy.

if it were me, and its Estonia, i’d probably make it

12 x F/A-50 Golden Eagle variant for attack
6 x T-50 for training
6 x KT-1 for basic training

Replace the helicopters with Surion and Dhruv

this would likely be a bit more nato comptabble

Well, the total estonian defence expenditure for 2017 is only Euro 477 million…

To have korean and indian equipments, the modernisation budget for the airforce would need to stretch to at least usd1 billion.

For air policing duties, the L-15, fitted with NATO compatible missiles, radios and IFF, there should be no issues for integration into NATO air defence structure, as per the Polish MiGs.

As for the chinese helicopters, they are basically copies of eurocopter squirel and dauphin.

I don’t understand why is IAF so critical of the tejas. Why are they expecting a supercar quality and performance out of basically a fighter equivalent of a Maruti Suzuki? Even if the tejas is only 80% of their expectations that is more than good enough. You could always trump quality with quantity, and at around 20million a pop you could get more tejas than a f-16 for example. And I believe there is only a marginal performance difference between the tejas and the gripen. Looking at how the Indian bureaucracy moves at a glaciers pace, it would be a surprise if the new single engine fighter competition would be signed before 2020, and first examples delivered before 2025. And that is like 10 years wasted when they should preservere and concentrate on the tejas.

The UN put forth a framework for the investigation that everyone agreed to but then the western authroties just scrapped it.

Ehem… Who veto’ed the mh17 resolution in UN?

As for flying in war zones, remember a Singapore Airlines jet was flying just about 5-10minutes behind the MH17 during the incident. I personally has flown over Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan for flights from Europe to south east Asia, it is a normal route for most airlines, not just malaysian.

Bolivian Air Force is looking to replace old T-33 trainer aircraft

Would be a good topic to discuss.

New tucanos? Additional k-8’s? Used pc-7’s? L-39ng’s?

Even the Scottish is undecided if a second independence referendum in the near future would be good for them. The EU on the brink of collapse is not the best thing for Scotland to join, and they will have to shoulder more share subsidising of poor EU economies.

In the near future the UK imo should try and get closer to the other commonwealth countries (Australia, NZ, etc).