Here is a post by Tom Cooper also from ACIG posted on the China Defence Fora:
About IAF and the training with the US planes. The Indian aren’t that good as they love to talk around. They were fighting 12 againt 4. They had numerical advantage and moved away from the standard fight till die.
You should better read more carefully, Munir: the Indians were sending strike packages of up to 12 aircraft, which were usually including four or six escorts. So there was no real “numerical superiority”.
In fact, the articles above reveal a lots of things which you appear to completely ignore; for example:
They also admit that they came into the exercise underrating the training and tactics of the pilots they faced. Instead of typical Cold War-style, ground-controlled interceptions, the Indians varied aircraft mixes, altitudes and formations. Indian air force planners never reinforced failure or repeated tactics that the U.S. easily repelled. Moreover, the IAF’s airborne commanders changed tactics as opportunities arose….
…”The outcome of the exercise boils down to [the fact that] they ran tactics that were more advanced than we expected,” Snowden says. “India had developed its own air tactics somewhat in a vacuum. They had done some training with the French that we knew about, but we did not expect them to be a very well-trained air force. That was silly….
…”When we saw that they were a more professional air force…
Now think for a second about these statements: the USAF expects the IAF to still fly the Soviet Cold War times tactics? In what kind of a dreamworld do they live? What do they think is the IAF? Somebody who only buys flashy aircraft but doesn’t know what to do with them?
…They would analyze what we were doing and then try something else….
What a revelation….Imagine: the Indian Air Force personnel REALLY goes so far to analyze what the others are doing and why, and then even learn from this….!?!?!
They weren’t afraid to bring the strikers in high or low. They would move them around so that we could never anticipate from day to day what we were going to see…
Yeah, the IAF was obviously not playing that one fair…. How could they only come to the idea to vary their operational levels or the tactics with which they deployed a strike package? That’s not in any USAF check-list….
…We generally don’t train to an active missile threat [like the Mirage’s Mica or the AA-12 for the Russian-built aircraft], and that was one of the things that caused us some problems…
Here one can only ask again: in what kind of a dreamland are these people living? The USAF F-15-assets pride themselves to belong to the top air-to-air outfit world-wide, and do not “in generally” train against ARH AAMs?
Their job is to think about such threats day and night, and not think if they should be thinking about them or not.
Is the USAF again locked in their own belief that whatever the USAF does is right, and only the USAF is doing it right, and when USAF does some things always in the same way the others have to do the same and are not going to vary their tactics etc.? This hears as reports about worst times from Rolling Thunder, anno second half of 1967…
Aerospace industry officials said that some of the radars the U.S. pilots encountered, including that of the Mirage 2000s, exhibited different characteristics than those on standard versions of the aircraft.
Oh, really? Who would ever come to the idea….? 🙄
Hell, one really does not need sending four F-15s to India to find out that Indians have considerably modified almost everything they have: visiting forums like BR or ACIG would be sufficient – and much more cost-effective…
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