There hasn’t been a lack of reports on problems with Russian equipment on the Chinese boards. There are constant claims of crashes with the SKs/MKKs.

The FC-1 articles and one on Shaanxi and the Y-8 harped on the fact that commercialized Western methods forces companies to desgn, make and service planes better.

This is a constant drone. Western methods of doing things are better. Commercialization with attention to detail and the customer is better. This is the result of experience from people who operated a 5,000-strong archtypical commie force based on numbers (and supposed battlefield “reliability”) for a very long time.

Without elaborating on anything said so far, I only want to throw into that discussion the fact, that whatever esp China is capable *today* is only a fraction of what it will be capable in a couple of years. The continued and ever boosted involvement of China in the Western economy will inevitably lead to Chinese industrial capabilities that are only one, or maybe even only half a generation behind what the best the West has to offer.

By “Western” don’t think of Europe and the US only. The most powerful influence in China’s commercial manufacturing comes from the capitalist states of East Asia: Japan, Taiwan and S Korea.

The greatest example is the Chinese shipbuilding industry which is currently at third place and behind only S Korea and Japan. Much of the equipment for building those ships come from Japan and S Korea.

China’s electronic and chipmaking capability comes from Taiwan and Singapore.

Project management and financial planning (which are critical in today’s projects whether civilian or military) comes from Hong Kong and the Chinese of SouthEast Asia.

Throughout most of China’s growth which took off after Tienenmen Square in 1989, the US and Europe kept an embargo on China. China’s push towards Western standards comes from massive interactions with the Westernized states of the East Asian Rim.

And technological advances in the West, and here esp in the U.S., since Europe basically doesn’t contribute a poop in military R&D, are less and less reflected in the West’s real warfighting capabilities. Having a handful of spit-and-polished weapons doesn’t mean a thing, when (i) you don’t build enough of them to do anything meaningful, and when (ii) your society is lacking the will to get its hands dirty and do what it takes to physically erase the enemy. War-in-the-air and war-from-the-air is fine, but current Western armed forces are licked by a couple dozen handful of RPG and AK47 guys! (But I’ve been here before).

This is a political will problem rather than a military capability one.

If the US military had attempted to do in Iraq like what the Russians did in Grozny, there wouldn’t be much AK47 guys left.

If USAF did today what it did to Hamburg and Dresden, you really would have a country beaten into submission. There is little doubt that the US could kill 10, 20, 30 or 50 percent of all males capable of carrying a AK47 in Iraq if there were no political fallout from the American public.

Much was made of the quality of F-7MG 0142 at Zhuhai airshow in 1996. The stories then described it as having a western make and finish.

The F-7PG was then and still is now unlike any other Mig-21 derivative. I recall an article saying it was surreal looking at a Mig that seemed like it came off an assembly line in Spokane.

From the Sunday Telegraph:

http://www.news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/05/30/nmod30.xml&sSheet=/news

The Ministry of Defence is seeking to sell off dozens of Eurofighter aircraft before it has even received them in an attempt to avoid further embarrassment over the escalating cost of the project.

If this is true, it would really be a mess because the other countries of consortium aren’t going to sit around while the British attempt to sell off theirs.

Germany and Italy were complaining even before this report. If everyone in the consortium is out to cut their losses what commitment to the plane is there?

The chances of Singapore, S Korea and Norway buying the planes are almost nil. Unless the terms are extremely good.

The EF would have to be sold off at a massive discount to make it worthwhile because Singapore is dependent on US security assurance and mostly buy US and Korea already has signed off on the F-15K with offsets being delivered to S Korean companies.

Norway is part of the JSF partnership in spite of recent grousing (and the EF would face a plane in the Gripen that costs only half as much if Norway did turn away from JSF.)

I really don’t know about the report. This is too extreme in view of the likely reactions from the UK’s EF partners and the low probability of (moneyed) buyers at any rate. There is absolutely no upside in declaring that Britain will attempt to sell its EFs.

I guess the Italian lease of the F-16 was a warning sign.

I think that’s the way to go 😉 …. if I progressed a little further with my project I will show You some “what-if” pictures !

I will be looking forward to those 😀