White House Approves Fighter Sales to Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait

The package reportedly includes 72 Boeing F-15E Strike Eagles for Qatar and up to 40 Boeing F/A-18 E/F Super Hornets for Kuwait. Bahrain’s package includes Lockheed Martin F-16 fighters.

http://www.defensenews.com/articles/white-house-approves-jet-sales-to-qatar-bahrain-and-kuwait-corker

Apart from UAE, would this signal the end of any hope of selling the eurocanards to the gulf?

I was hoping for Liberator.

Not sure that something that could be used to wipe out hundreds of thousands / millions of civilians could be seen as some kind of liberator.

Read the article…

One of two things is happening here. Either the F-35s are regenerating their missiles as suggested by FBW, or the “27 kills” aren’t for a single F-35 but rather a flight of F-35s or potentially even a mixture of F-35s and other aircraft.

This isn’t some kind of conspiracy on the part of the USAF to claim the F-35 has “supernatural powers,” it is just a poorly written sentence that leaves its exact meaning unclear.

My bad for not realising the writer was not referring to a single F-35. Like you say, though, was a bit of a vague way of saying what he said.

Govt seeks 134 million euro waiver from France for Rafale deal

http://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/govt-seeks-134-million-euro-waiver-from-france-for-rafale-deal/story-DgoAO9sZW5g44rSkl0t8OO.html

What is the nature of the guarantee requiring this advance payment?

JF-17 appears to be off the table (thank goodness). More importantly, we are broke right now. People are going to be royally pissed if the govt spends hundreds of millions of dollars on combat A/C. Even our disabled war-vets protested the lack of support recently. Not supporting your vets is literally sacrilege in any nation. China could give us for free fighters similar to F-7BGI. Even the F-7GS armed with PL-5E were gifts.

So, unless the the Chinese gives us further upgraded J-7G variants (hypothetical F-7GSI++) or US gives use some 2nd hand F-16 along with training and support for free, I don’t know how the SLAF is going get new fighters. They better not spend $100+ million on fancy new jets or I myself will be pelting a few eggs and vegetables at our politicians. A far more re-conciliatory move would be to use that money to compensate disabled LTTE combatants and war-widows. There are thousands of war widows in the north alone.

Do you propose that the fighter component of the air force be shut down for a time? That reminds me of the Brits (I’m one of them) scrapping fixed-wing carrier operations for a few years.

Know next to nothing about stealth but I thought that canards were not good in terms of trying to reduce observability. How come some people judge J-20 less observable that PAK-FA?

I’ve attended election counts, from close of voting to declaration, & Tony’s right. Fixing the count itself is just not on.

I also have friends who’ve run polling stations, who’d be happy to describe the other checks. Among them are precautions against meddling with the ballot boxes, such as the expected arrival times of ballot boxes, notifications of when they leave the polling stations, etc. Ballot boxes are sealed before the start of polling, & representatives of parties (or accredited campaigns) can be & often are present, checking that the boxes are empty before the voting starts. The apertures for inserting ballots are closed at the end of polling, & parties may & often do add their own seals then. You’d have to intercept the boxes, open them, change enough papers to make a difference, re-seal the boxes with matching seals (people who added seals will be there when they’re unsealed) & do it all fast enough that they’re not suspiciously late getting to the count. And do all that thousands of times, all over the country, without anyone noticing or any of the thousands of people involved leaking it.

I lived in a one party state with a dictator in charge once. To humour western democracies the experiment of multipartyism was tried on one occasion. The opposition were trounced everywhere. In my constituency 104% of the electorate voted for the dictator’s party candidate. Moral: you don’t need to alter ballot papers – you just need to add loads with an ‘x’ next to the ‘right’ candidate.