If Koreans are serious about KF-X then Europeans are the only option. The planned stage progression should probably be altered to make Stage 1 an indigenisation of Typhoon coupled with uprated engines (w/TVC?) from Eurojet. Leave the new airframe for Stage 2.

Care to go into more detail about this? You cannot claim the Mig-35 is “better” without stating something.

3D TVC is certainly a point in its favour…

Unofficial polish sources give results 8:0 for the Typhoons in those engagements.

But Fulcrum won the all important smoke-off contest. 😉

Russia considers NATO expansion to be a threat: http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/02/05/us-russia-defence-doctrine-idUSTRE6144LA20100205

At the same time NATO (and Norway) works hard to consider Russia a partner. It’s not easy to build a partnership with a partner that consider your actions to be a threat…

Oh please. Nobody is this naïve.

Scooter… Are you actually delusional mate? I have observed you on the forum over the years, and I actually had you as a educated man, not some fan boy so willing to swallow LM propaganda that you appear to have no gag reflex.

Why, after years, nearly decades of ‘promised’ costs, levels of technology, levels of capability, promised delivery times… why do you believe anything that comes from LM? Seriously?

We had to extend the life of the F-111 to meet the target date, still it couldn’t last that long, and soon we will be forced to buy moreRhinos to fill the gap… and why? Because LM cant deliver. Because LM LIED!

Of course LM lied and said they could meet ludicrous requirements in no time flat for a fiver — that’s their job. They would be doing their shareholders a disservice if they didn’t attempt to secure the most lucrative contract in military history by any means necessary. It’s the job of the Pentagon, USAF et al. to spot those lies. And it’s the job of the Australian government and RAAF to critically evaluate the information it is provided by both LM and US government sources in the knowledge that those sending it have interests that diverge from our own. America’s problems with F-35 are its own to sort out, the responsibility for Australia’s debacle rests here.

DoD wants a lot of things, DoD does not get a lot of things.

The unmanned bs is just another White Paper, “we don’t need guns” paper tiger floated by people who do not have to pay for anything or go into battle.

DoD will get this thing because unlike almost everything else it has done over the last decade it is actually relevant to the long-term strategic interests of the United States.

Manned or unmanned makes little difference at such aircraft sizes and certainly no difference to threat perception. The analogy to Star Wars makes no sense — LRS-B is a relatively conservative extension of existing technology and capabilities and presents no new threat to China, Russia, or anyone else for that matter.

Does this in anyway correlate with the topic ?

Umm, yes? As Tu22m pointed out, this story extends beyond the Air Force. And my suggestion — building off MadRat‘s — is that it extends beyond the military to encompass more systemic changes in Swedish society over the last generation.

Regarding the ‘breadth’ of the changes in Sweden, I recall this interesting article in Foreign Policy magazine, published back during the Stieg Larsson craze. Excerpts:

The story of Sweden over the last 50 years has been one of a steady loss of exceptionalism. In some ways the outside world has grown more “Swedish” — we all wear seatbelts, drink less, and believe in gender equality. At the same time, Sweden has grown much more worldly — it drinks more, works and earns less, and struggles with the assimilation of immigrants. The Swedes themselves no longer believe in a Swedish model, or, when they do, it’s very different from the heavily regulated “people’s home” of myth.

Last summer, I was on a panel with Pär Nuder, a Social Democrat intellectual and former finance minister whose description of the Swedish model was one of high taxes but minimal regulation; generous parental leave, but very high female employment; and a much greater reluctance to nationalize failing industries than is found in the rest of Europe, or in the United States for that matter. When Swedish car makers go bust, the state does not bail them out. Volvo is now owned by a Chinese company, and Saab by a Dutch maker of sports cars. Even the school system has been partly privatized, along with almost everything else that the state once owned.

[…]

The great loss of Swedish independence and distinctiveness was the country’s 1995 accession to the EU, which was forced on the country by the traumatic financial crisis of the early 1990s. At the same time, commercial television diminished the country’s cultural autonomy; it is difficult now to remember just how rigorously the old state monopoly eschewed excitement. (Was I dreaming one Christmas when I lived there in the early 1980s that I saw a special Christmas broadcast of the year’s most interesting weather forecasts?) It had always been a surprisingly Americanized country — if you want to see 1950s Cadillacs, go to the Swedish backwoods — but now it became once more a Germanized one, full of rather joyless consumerism. You could drive for a long way through the south of Sweden now without seeing anything that would be wildly out of place in Denmark, Holland, or northern Germany.

Would be interested in commentary from Swedish peoples here.