Huh. The article I read didn’t mention armored cars loaded with money. It mentioned Patriots but that’s about it (and one could hardly blame them after what’s happened to Georgia. If you live next to the ghetto you need to beef up home security.) If I were them I wouldn’t mind having a few THAADs around either.

And few squadrons of Raptors and US special forces if possible… come on Sferrin, you know very well if it comes to the $hit only God himself can save them, cuz they would be the first one to pay the bill to Russia.

Something that strikes me about the conflict is the seeming failure of Russian airpower, we saw froogfoots dumping iron bombs and often missing, after the first 24 hours or so of fighting Georgian armour was still going very strong and even at the of the fighting (if it truly has stopped) georgian armour seems to have come away remarkably unscathed, at a guess perhaps 90% of all heavy armour survived from looking at all the pics and video of armour still moving about.

If someone had said to me last week how effective would Rus airpower be in this conflict i would have said extremely and would honestly have expected mass wiping out of Georgian armour by tankbusting froggfeet and hinds, instead it was rather a dissapointment. It also seems the Russians should have had many many chances to hit forces falling back (like Basra highway of death in GW) but failed to do so, was this a lacking of intel on movements of enemy armour which brings me back to again asking what type of J-star type assets for wide area survalance of armoured colums do the Russians have?

Then, why don’t you just write to the guy that stands on your avatar and explain him where his air force made mistakes? I don’t think that RuAF wanted to impress you, me or anybody else on this forum in the first place. As you could understand, they were not planning this and had to act according to their priorities. I think that RSM55 fairly explained actions undertaken by RuAF during these 4 days of war.
As for the Georgian armour I have seen completely different pics and videos (Russia Today) of numerous burnt T-72, but still no side is giving numbers. We can’t surely know, conclude or judge when so little (or contradictory) info is given.

I have a question: Are Su-24MPs still in service within the RuAF?

I’m also not sure its accurate to say the target set there was switched to civilian targets due to frustration on the part of NATO, was it not the destruction of some big oil refinery place there that greatly helped to force the serbs to stop. Either way i don’t buy it was a move made due to sheer frustration.

Had absolutely nothing to do with the prevention of Yugoslav army operating during the conflict.
Almost all of the mobile inventory of the Yugoslav army remained intact during the conflict.
When an F-15 pilot hit a train (with a TV guided missile) full of civilians, Jamie Shea called it a collateral damage. Also hospital in Surdulica, Southeastern Serbia was hit (courtesy of PGM) killing a dozen civilians and bridge in Murino (northern Montenegro) killing kids that were on their way to school. And I don’t remember CNN covering these and other numerous attacks on civilian targets so much as the strike of the RuAF on Gori where several apartments were hit.

Slightly off-topic…..

That link above points to an English-language page, down the bottom of which it talks about development of a new short-to-mid range Russian airliner, the MC-21.

I have seen loads of English-language translations of Russian aviation mags talking about the ‘MC-21’ airliner – but they are all wrong.

It is ‘MC-21’ in Cyrillic – which translates into Latin as MS-21 !!!

Even the Irkut website (developers of the MS-21) – has it listed on the English page as ‘MC-21’ 😮

Repeat after me guys – Cyrillic letter C is Latin letter S !!!!

Ken (who worries aboiut such things) 😀

Well, Ken, that is really strange, because the small photo on the left has been tagged as the MS21 (so properly), while down in text the plane is marked as MC21. Is it a mistake in translation or something else:confused:

As for the translation matter – you are absolutely right.

WOW, what an amazing thread.

As Scorpion has already said, it’s not so simple to judge this matter by pure characteristics of individual parts of these platforms (EF and BM in particular). As you all know it should consider much wider area of discussion but many of you have put so much emphasis on the radar part (especially on Irbis-Casptor/Caesar).

@Sens
You can do much better than this. Continuing like this you risk to lose your credibility (I know you may ask who am I to say that – well I am somebody who likes to sea the any (credible) proof before believing into something).

P.S.

Where the hell are Rafale and Gripen in all this story? They have been barely mentioned. The question of Loke was referring to all of them but this thread threatens to become “my is bigger than yours” classic treating Rafale and Gripen like orphans in this family.

[color=red]Jon James has been banned. Again.[/color]

No more entertainment:D

I wasn’t able to follow your analysis completely Hyperion, mostly due to the lack of free time these days. BTW, you are providing useful info on this matter (at least for me).
Let’s say Sarkozy “wins” this battle and you (HAF) exchanges Mirages for Rafales. When would Rafales be ready to overtake the role? Are there any specific requirements of HAF (like AESA) that would have to be taken into account by Dassault? What version would be delivered? (F3 I guess).