Hi Sanem, just saw your response. Don’t know, I gave it my best shot and distributed it to the PAF the best I could. They are very secretive and don’t take input from outside (as is customary with most armed services worldwide) but the best news so far is that there is a rumour that the block III JF-17 will be a twin seater and that one of the reasons for this is that its going to act as a UCAV / UAV controller. But that’s just net rumours that is more likely to be wrong than right.

I did write a paper that included a push towards UCAVs, but unfortunately the political party I wrote that paper for didn’t win the elections… But you can check it out if you like, section 4 deals with the air force:
http://www.insaf.pk/Wings/InsafResearchWing/tabid/225/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/11517/Defending-Pakistan-by-Meinhaj-Hussain.aspx

In a seminal book titled The Future of War: Power, Technology, and American World Dominance in the 21st Century, the authors George and Meredith Friedman argued that each category of strategic weapon systems have a life-cycle and noted that stealth manned aircraft, the pinnacle today of combat aircraft, represented a point of decline and senility for combat aircraft. The Friedmans argue that strategic weapons systems can be considered on the basis of a list of eight points. These eight points determine what stage a weapon system is in its lifecycle between strategically significant and “senile” or obsolete systems. They define a strategically significant weapon as “one that brings force to bear in such a way that it decisively erodes the war-making capability of the enemy,” while a senile weapon is defined as “the primary strategic function of the weapon has been obscured by the need to construct expensive defences against threats to the weapons platform.” They conclusively show through the historical record that strategic weapons systems have this lifecycle. They conclude that stealth manned aircraft along with aircraft carriers have reached a point of senility.

What that future will look like has been glimpsed and illustrated by a small number of highly influential authors; perhaps prime among them is Peter Singer in Wired for War. In this seminal work – I realize I have been using the term seminal all too frequently in this section, but the reason for this is that the information coming out in this new territory of knowledge is as critical to the field as Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations to economics. We are at the threshold of a revolution and the names you read now with amused curiosity will someday be written in gold in the pages of history, in fact they already are in those that are involved in this field. Continuing – in his seminal work, Singer shows that what we believe to be science fiction and a distant future is already here and in fact, some of this equipment is already manufactured and being used by the US military. Others are waiting to be operationalized. Yet others are hiding in secret black projects that are poised to reveal themselves to the world. He describes this new world of breakaway military technology as built on information technology and particularly a world of automated robotics. Such robotics are already in use by the US and Israeli militaries and are silently revolutionizing warfare.

Dear Andraxxus,

its the wrong thread, please feel free to start a more appropriate thread and we can attempt an apples to apples comparison. To compare, we need to make it REALISTIC – IAF vs. PAF, PAF fighting defensively within its airspace. IAF Flankers will not be flying with 4 missiles. PAF JF-17s will not be flying at max combat ranges with drop tanks. They are not designed to fly the same missions, and are not going to. Within the PAF-IAF scenario,
the IAF planes will be loaded for offensive operations over Pakistan, while the JF-17s would be lightly loaded to take out IAF fighters and attack aircraft.

This balances out IMHO, but you are welcome to disagree…

The P-80A was often overlooked as it entered service at the very end of WWII. Yet, if the war had went on longer the US would have had them in the thousands………Really, surprised we don’t see many Me-262 vs P-80 Comparisons????

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After the war the US got hold of quite a few Me-262s, after evaluating them they found that the Me-262s outperformed the P-80s in all but one parameter. If my memory serves me right, that one paramater was range or fuel capacity.

Pakistani F-16s shot down an Indian drone of Israeli origin (Searcher II)

http://www.f-16.net/f-16_forum_viewtopic-t-3196-postdays-0-postorder-asc-start-30.html

Also, Pakistan refused to claim any Soviet aircraft it downed that may have fallen over the border in Afghanistan. So the actual score is higher.

Good points Bring it On. I was talking about statements made by senior officials about how they consistently underestimated China, particularly the USN but as you said it can be part of psy-ops. Kopp has some good analyses mixed with wild projections but I didn’t mean him…

Coming back to the UCAV, could be similar to the USN stealth ISR+limited strike platform that’s been so hush hush lately. Probably similar plane-forms.

Notice that the USN platform is about the size of the Global hawk but shaped in the typical stealth wing-body plane-form, and judging by the Chinese UCAV, it seems to have a similar size to the Chinese “Global hawk” and again has that stealth wing-body plane-form…

I read in news that Pentagon claim China won’t field any new gen fighter before 2018.
It is still well done if they make it by 2020

The Pentagon has claimed many things in the past about China’s development, the common salient of those has been that they have almost always been underestimates and consistently proved wrong…

That is where the silly notion of “faith” comes in.

That may be the case with your faith but you can’t talk about something you haven’t investigated. Islam is not another version of Christianity or some other “faith” which requires “blind belief” in x, y and z without meaningful proof and evidence. But again, we’re detracting from the forum here, feel free to PM me if you want to continue that conversation.

exciting times. No vertical tail, must be for ISR and strike. South China Sea and Japan beware!!