During exercises, virtually hundreds of F-15/F-16/F-18s were *shot down*. I don’t remember having seen many silhouettes of painted (with the exception of a French Mirage F1CT). No F-15/F-16/F-18 painted on other fighters doesn’t mean that no kills against them were achieved.

It is possible that shooting down an F-22 is a common thing on exercises, we simply don’t have enough information..

a drowning man grasping at straws 😀
anytime someone gets a hit on a f-22, even when it was against ROE, it is the talk of the town and the forums are full, discussing it and dissecting every word

Originally Posted by pfcem View Post
No those who make the ignorant/disengenous/intellectually dishonest comments that our current (mostly 1980s generation) forces are more than good enough to defeat any perceivable threat for the foreseeable future.

Originally Posted by MSphere
Given the nature of present conflicts, I’d say that you have invested funds in a totally wrong direction. Stealth fighters would be very useful in a large scale conflict with China, for example, but a conflict like that is not very likely given the fact that you are two largest trade partners on this planet, like it or not. China has economic tools that enable to inflict MUCH greater damage to your economy with MUCH less effort than striving hard to shoot down few meaningless F-22s or sink a CVN or two.

again you simply show what you DONT know MSphere
so you defend the 1980’s plane is all that could be needed in the future, perhaps you should read some white papers

i’m not holding myself up as a professional journalist, there is a difference
as an aussie f-35 fan boy, i dont care what the development cost is, i hope they spend another 10 bn on it and get a better plane
our total development contribution is fixed at 144m which is offset and we get plane at fly away price
its nice being americas bittch

Then, You will find interesting that both India and malaysia, paid for the integration of the thales topsight-E to their Mig-29K and Su-30…despite the fact that a russian HMS was already available.

Even more interesting is the fact that France rejected the topsight-E because the RF positionning system of the helmet could interfere with other EM fields of an aircraft carrier…(the sagem gerfaut was then selected because it uses an IR system)

As far as HMD is concerned, the french community is rather divided.
IMHO, it should have been a top priority, and should have been integrated before the ASMP-A (The amount of money swallowed by this “useless” missile is indecent 😡 ) and the reco-NG pod.

ok that makes sense, i didnt know thales latest was ir
nothing wrong with thales helmets [after we bittched and got them upgraded] we got them on our tigers, we didnt go with their tiger self defense suit and integrated the hellfire and gave it to france for theirs
thales is quite large in australia, they get 10% of sales here
i know about malaysia as they are neighbours, they got the damaclese pod too

you guys can type fast i was answering Scorpion, seems there are more theories as to why than the kenedy assassination

well for a skilled person, how did he mess up the fuel and distance in the f-35 vs f-16 topic
he either didnt have the skill to see the error or jumped on it to make another anti-35 thread
it was an obvious typo from the Norway pp, the truth is he became a fanboy and lost perspective in my view

its been offered for “them” to pay and develop one if they want it, not the same thing
i know AdA hasnt payed for development and they still havent, its an “essential” for them but not till 2020
20 years too late

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/19/raptor_eurofighter_news/

“That hasn’t gone down well with the US air force, which would like to have a much bigger Raptor fleet and less nasty unmanned drones etc. The previous USAF chief, indeed, was fired by Gates last year in large part due to his open disagreement with his boss on these matters”

it, pipe, and, in, stick, it, your, smoke. Re arrange as required. 🙂

Subsequently the pentagon and the USAF fell into line, it’s somewhat career limiting to disagree with the big boss…as illustrated.

Perhaps next time you could toddle off and do the googling. Oh, and it would be great if you provided a few snippets of fact to back up your views as well. ;):)

its funny how 2 people will read the same story and then claim it supports their point of view

1, it said about congress
2 it said about pentagon
3 not mentioned was Lm profit, but they took out full page adds to support f-22

4 it did say the old boss wanted more f-22 and [snippet of fact] the new boss and he wants 60 more, but both would have known the reason it was cut,
block obsolescence not sprial as the boeing was and if that was chosen they may still be building them as planned to replace the f-15 fleet [/snippet of fact]
so its ..it doesnt matter how schitty they are going to be in the future, we want some now to replace the first batch of lemons that couldnt be upgraded