France’s embargo was to all intents and purposes a publicity exercise aimed at the Arab world.

Israel built their Mirage III/5 copies completely independently of France and with only the benefit of a little espionage in France for the airframe, and Switzerland for the ATAR engine?

Think about it for a moment.
Israel at the time was a relatively impoverished nation only 20 years old with an extremely limited industrial base. It was not the Israel of recent times and today.

Yet within just a couple of years (less than 1000 days) Mirage 5 copies were rolling off the production line and entering service in Israel?

All indications are that the Neshers were built in France and simply assembled in Israel.
All indications are that the vast majority of the ATAR for the engines were merely assembled in Israel.

All indications are that even the follow on Kfir, with the J-79 engine, continued to benefit from major but clandestine French technical assistance.

Before then, IAI had only assembled the pedestrian Magister, also under French auspices.

Next you’ll say the breakout of the five Sa’ar 3 missile boats from Cherbourg was also done without French collusion…:eek:

Here is some footage of the IAI Kfir production line.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kXNjkdI1Gk

I suspect the Nesher and the Kfir mirrored the Australian Mirage III licence production run somewhat, in that the first aircraft were purely French built, the next batch being mostly French built, with a portion of Australian components, and the last portion having a majority of Australian built components.
And lest we forget, Australia had a vastly larger industrial base, including CAC that had designed and produced it’s own fighters, as well as producing under licence very modern jet fighters for the time from other manufacturers.

My opinion would be that this mirrors the Nesher Kfir story, either closely or loosely.

I’m not knocking IAI here. The rapidity in which they developed their aircraft industry from scratch is actually very impressive.
But they very obviously had plenty of help, even though it had to be kept hush-hush for political reasons.

The 20 year old Spy-3 equipped Frigates are better than indigenous built.

Don’t knock used when it’s an improvement over new.

I was under the impression they were equipped with the SPS49 and SPS55 main radars?
The youngest US hull is already 25 years old.

In mid-2000, the Navy removed the frigates’ Mk 13 single-arm missile launchers and magazines because the primary missile, the Standard SM-1MR, became outmoded.[4]

USS Rodney M. Davis (FFG-60) after the removal of her foredeck Mk 13 missile launcher.
The “zone-defense” anti-aircraft warfare (AAW) capability has vanished, and all that remains is a “point-defense” type of AAW armament. It would supposedly have been too costly to refit the Standard Missile SM-1MR missiles, which had little ability to bring down sea-skimming missiles. Another reason is to allow more SM-1MRs to go to American allies that operate Perrys, such as Poland, Spain, Australia, Turkey, and the Republic of China (Taiwan).

The loss of the launchers also strips the frigates of their Harpoon anti-ship missiles.

On June 16, 2009, Vice Admiral Barry McCullough turned down the suggestion of then-U.S. Senator Mel Martinez (R-FL) to keep the Perrys in service, citing their worn-out and maxed-out condition.

The Perry-class frigates will eventually be replaced by Littoral Combat Ships by 2019. However the worn out frigates are being retired faster than the LCSs are being built.

The USN did announce a month or so ago that 7 Perry Class figates would be available for FMS from the end of 2014, so it may be that Brazil is simply pondering this in light of that.
http://news.usni.org/2013/07/11/navy-to-decommission-7-frigates-mcm-and-ssn

The statement that Quantity has a Quality of its own comes to mind.

The Soviets would have simply flooded area with ships and had a enough long range transport aircraft to send tens of thousands of airborne troops.

Really Soviets would have retaken Falklands faster then brits but would have taken higher casualties in doing so.

This, in a nutshell.

The Argentinians would have run out of munitions long before the Soviets had even bothered to get out of first gear.

They had 2 Ivan Rogov class, each carrying 520 marines and 25 tanks, in addition to about 70 or 80 other types of landing ships for amphibious operations.
Many of the 2500 vessels of the Morflot were allocated roles for amphibious landing support in times of war.

They had 2 Moskva class helicopter carriers, 3 Kiev class Aviation Cruisers, of which some could have been availed of.

They would have flooded the area with submarines, seeing as they had by far the largest fleet in the world.

They had a huge airborne component, with 2 divisions being able to be dropped in a “first wave”, and another potential 5 that could follow up.
These came with light armour.
And the Soviets actually had a long range bomber force that could sustain operations.
Add to this the plethora of large, long ranged air and sea launched missiles that the Soviets loved so much.

Even if they used a fraction of those resources, it is easy to imagine what the result would be.

Actually, bring-it-on’s photo comparison just shows how different the F-22 and J-31 are.

Apart from a relatively superficial similarity, starting from the front:

The nose has a different profile.
The front under fuselage just aft of the nose are very different.
The intakes are completely different.
Leading edge has a different length.
The main wings are completely different in shape, and indeed, have different flaps.
Verticle fins have a different chord.
Junction of the trailing edge of the main wing and the horizontal tails are different.
Horizontal tail surfaces are completely differently shaped.
The engines are spaced differently.

This took me 3 minutes, after looking at those photos and a couple more on the net.

The differences between the F-35 and J-31 are even larger.

Sure there are similarities, and I’m sure the F-22 and F-35 were looked at (to put it mildly) before designing the J-31, but the differences are far greater.

Also, is that last one a Mirage IIIA?

No.

It’s the first Mirage III prototype.

The Mirage IIIA was about 2 meters longer, and built to the tune of around 10 airframes. It looked much more similar to a Mirage IIIC, although was marginally shorter. The Mirage IIIC was basically the Mirage IIIA tweaked somewhat and in an operational format.

But he doesn’t have to march directly to the pipers tune though…

Let the Russians sort it out,they are pretty much bankrupt as well.

They’re bankrupt?

This will be news to the financial world and economists…