I am not sure that the NATO ground invasion of Yugoslavia wouldn’t have been that successfull, the Northern Serbian geography is nothing as bad as the one of Kosovo and everything south from Central Serbia which is all hardass mountains and forests. Sure they might’ve taken Belgrade and such but taking the rest of Serbia would’ve not been easy at all, especially when you would have the whole population revolting against NATO and policing Serbia would’ve been just about impossible. I mean if we rebelled against Ottomans for 400 years, Germans through 2 World Wars and others, there is no reason it would’ve been any different. At least we were not surpressed under a brutal dictator(like Saddam or Kim Jong Il) or fed with propaganda(like North Koreans) to want to be “freed” by anyone like the Iraqis, well maybe not now.

Also we learned a lot of things in this war and that is that we cannot afford the number of fighters we’d need, and even if we did those are still extremely vulnerable to superior enemy fighters. Therefore we would need at least 200 Mig-29SMTs in order to make a speed bumb for such an alliance like NATO, and even then we cannot afford those and at the end we’d still probably loose unless we had a really big technological advantage. We learned that our SAMs are our everything, despite all our older SAMs being inefficient against such a modern enemy, they were always operational, cheap to maintain and buy and of course hard to detect and destroy by NATO.

If we had a few S-300PMU1/2s around and good radar coverage we would’ve taken down many NATO aircraft.

Yes but the reason countries like Indonesia, India, China and others are buying Flankers is because they need long range, the Mig-29M usually competes with lighter single engined fighters like Gripen, M2K and F-16 but it’s still much heavier and of course more to operate. I am sure that if the Mig-29 was single engined it would be extremely popular like the F-16 and M2K on the export market.

I think it would be best to have a single engined, single seat, good radar(any Zhuk), and besides R-77 and R-73 add all kinds of A2G weapons to it.

I think MiG could also rework the Mig-AT heavily and produce a single seat version of it, but of course better engines, longer fuselage for more fuel and etc.

isnt the Su-33 wired to carry all kinds of AShMs?

macedonia still operates all 4 su-25s. i fly regularu out petrovec airport and can truly say that they are still in macedonia. so pls check ur claims before you make them

ohh my bad, just read it in the news that they will return all of them back to Ukraine soon cuz they plan only to have transports and helicopters.

When the Iranian army displays on TV a Shihab missile with a sign on it saying “Israel should be wiped off the map”, excuse me for not feeling too comfortable or peaceful.

I agree and “we will destroy America too” bunch of crap, at least Israel and US dont say this sort of thing as much as they are probably thinking about it to do it to Iran. I dont think US can actually battle Iran at the moment, it’s troops are way too stretched out all over Iraq, Afghanistan and bunch of other places.

However IF US gets Iraq and Afghanistan under control, then Iran may very well be in trouble as it is right in the middle between the two.

As for Israeli going after Iran, I don’t think thats exactly safe, especially if Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia were to respond in a bad way to Israel, then you got an all out war in Middle East.

Also one question, if Israel was going to bomb Iran with it’s Airforce, would they go over Jordan or Syria to cross Iraq and over Iran?

Arthur- Not to drag this out, but your letting opionions get in the way of facts. To use the example of the Sturmovic, I garantee if the germans were able to employ AA flak guns over their battlefield, the IL-2 nuisence would quickly have been iradicated. Both the IL-2 and Su-39 are very effective against small arms damage-thats it, nothing more. And to say that the AMX is a light plane pretending to be a fighter is to ignore the fact that fighter is not its main role. As Flogger mentioned its in the same class as the Skyhawk, a light strike aircraft. Youll notice that the wings of the AMX are much larger and less swept than a normal fighter as its main role is to comfortably carry heavy loads at low level. So I have no doubt it could effectively carry a 4000 kg warload.

AFAIK aircraft like Su-25/39 and A-10 are very effective at hitting armoured columns and not just that but hitting many other big and heavily protected targets and they have shown this in Afghanistan and of course GWI. Now you made the arguement that AMX is better than Su-39, please go ahead and argue that claimn with us, what is it that makes AMX so much better than Su-39?

Macedonia doesnt operate their Su-25s no more, they returned all 4 of them back to Ukraine I believe. I believe both Slovakia and Czech Republic both will retire their Su-25s, at least the Czech Republic is replacing them with L-159s.