This is why Ive always felt that air forces buying the Tucano or PC-9 are getting ripped off. These so called fighters have a top speed of about 300 kts and a vne of 350 kts. Whereas late war prop driven fighters could go 450 kts and redlines at near supersonic speeds. We have indeed gone backwards in airframe design.

I suggest you look up the kill ratio of Mirage III in real wars. Somehow, it didn’t get torn apart.

The only “real war” the Mirage III was involved in was the isreal/arab 67 and 73 wars. In both wars the best fighter it was faced with was the mig-21 which was underpowered and not an easy jet to handle. Also in 66 the Isrealis got their hands on a mig-21 from a defected pilot to test out its flying characteristics. In my opinion the Isrealis use of the Mirage III was a liability that could have been exploited by the arabs. I chalk it up to good training on the Isrealis part that they came out so well.

Sri Lanka has Kfirs too.

I forgot, they have 9 kfirs.

wilhelm- I dont understand why you like the Mirage III series so much, it has awful turning capability and would get torn apart in a dogfight by just about anything with a jet engine. FBW makes all the difference, it works wonders for a tailless delta and turns it into a very agile fighter.

Which countries are using the Mirage III/5/50/Kfir/Cheetah at present?

Any idea of numbers?

Almost none, they have been retired by just about every AF that used them, mostly by unloading them to Pakastan who is desperate to fly anything that will go Mach 2. I think the only AFs still using them are:
Egypt – 50
Argentina – 14, all are going to be replaced by F-1 next year
Pakastan – 150
Colombia – 24 kfirs
Ecuador – 13 kfirs, 12 cheetahs

thats it, no other AFs are using them

When the Mirage initiates a pitching moment it uses its elevons to force the tail downwards by killing lift, something most modern fighters, including the Rafale, F-22 etc does as well. The Gripen(and Eurofighter) on the other hand uses its canards for pitch wich adds lift, the elevons are used as trimming devices, adding lift

The carnards on the Gripen do not provide neutral lift, if that were so, that would mean the CoG was put squarely over the wing making the aircraft unstable. Even FBW aircraft have to be aerodynamically stable, if you put barn door sized canards way out in front of the aircraft, sure you get hypersensitive control with minimal changes in AoA of the canard, but it would be impossible to control the overall AoA of the jet as the wings would be powerless to counter the influence of the canards.

Also, the canards on the Gripen only needs to make very small(not severe) pitch changes during maneuvers, creating minimal drag.

The canards on the Gripen have very small area and do have to make large pitch changes to make sharp turns, especially at slow speeds. Im not saying that canards are bad, if that were true they wouldnt demonstrate good turning ability. But they are not the magic silver bullet that gives jets hypersensitive turning rate like one might think.

Im sure the guy in the article was refering to using cheaper strike aircraft like the AMX as opposed to thrashing your frontline fighters for small tasks like blowing up a truck. Same thing happened in Vietnam, a ridiculous amount of expensive hardware was used to destroy trucks and machine gun nests. It just makes sense to use a simpler aircraft for these roles.

Possible difference if the F-8E had used French parts in them.

how about if they had just redesigned the wing rather than go through all the modifications to make its original wing work as a carrier fighter?