I thought Su-34 was intended as an interdiction aircraft similar to the F-111, F-15E or Su-24. The armor for the crew has me rethinking that however. Just what was it designed to do? The Russians have done their best to confuse everybody about the thing, even back when they referred to as the Su-32 and photographed it on a carrier landing approach even though one could see it lacked the modifications for that.

Confuse whom exactly? The export variant is still advertised as Su-32FN.

Regarding the carrier landing approach, ‘one could see that it lacked modifications for that’? I guess this ‘one’ somehow missed noticing that it was a completely different plane called Su-33KUB, the only thing common with the Su-34 being the side-by-side seating arrangement chosen as being more convenient for a carrier trainer then the usual tandem.

I don’t think he’s saying that Northrop wouldn’t have made it (I’m sure they would have given time and I think its advantages in RCS signature and longer range would have made the F-23 more potent in the long run). What I think he’s saying is that even though the YF-22 was closer to the end-product, it still (in the context of post-Cold War military budget cuts) only managed to get produced in 187 examples (which was a pretty stupid decision given all the money invested in its development).

The (however much) longer development of the YF-23 to the production standard F-23 would have brought additional risk of having the whole thing canceled altogether by the time it was ready for production (like e.g. the Comanche).

An Mi-28N made an emergency landing in Syria apparently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Crisis

If you are talking about a “War Of Aggression”, that does not apply since Israel was the nation that was consistently attacked and not the aggressor.

OT, but seriously? What happened in 1956? And then in 1967?

Overly dramatize? They were just collecting radar intelligence data that they use to program their RWR receivers, standard procedure really. The attack mode could simply refer to the STT mode (lock).

The question is why would they single out the Su-33 radar. Perhaps it has some modifications to optimize it for over the sea operation which changes its signature somewhat? Or perhaps they were referring to the wartime radar frequency?

They seem to have got some variant of SVP-24 upgrade for Su-33 nothing else beyond that but with Engine production again starting they might do some deep upgrade based on 27SM3 variant.

They also got the Pastel RWR in an earlier upgrade IIRC.

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Sea Sparrow requires target illumination and IIRC there were usually only two illuminator radars installed per ship, though there’s still Phalanx as some backup.

I wouldn’t expect these two systems to fare pretty well against a P-500 salvo, but that’s just a guess. The US does test various missile drones intended to simulate various Soviet missiles against test vessels, but the results are obviously classified.