IAR-95 required an engine thrust of 54 kN dry and 91 kN with afterburner. The Chinese WS-9 (licensed RR Spey) was selected.

The explains a great deal.

China never quite managed to get the Spey/WS-9 in production. I have never seen an adequate explanation for this failure. Did Rolls-Royce fail to transfer full documention and tooling? Did China fail to adequately fund the project? I don’t know the answer.

A completely fabricated nonsense.. For terrorizing civilians a Flanker is really an overkill.. A-37 is more than sufficient..

I would agree that Chavez’s procurement plans are indeed “overkill.” If Chavez was indeed concerned with social equality, he wouldn’t be seeking to augment his arsenel.

That is Colombian problem.. If they really wanted to deal with FARC, they would have wiped them out long ago.. But it is indeed hard to wipe out narcos, when some of them are sitting directly in paliament house.. 😉

Colombia is a deeply troubled country, but now that it is surrounded by narco-terror supporting regimes the situation will worsen. Legitimate efforts have been made by the Colombians to eliminate the cultivation of coca. However, it will be impossible to combat narco-terrorism when Boliva is lead by Evo Mendez, the head of the so-called “coca growers union,” which is little more than a front for cocaine production.

Sorry, yes, I should have been more precise.

Internally its extremely stable.

However, as far as its relationship with other countries go… unstable/unpredictable, at best.

The current administration is hardly unpredictable.

….but maybe this deal has ruined the chances for the deepwater program, which is very very tempting.

I would say that the odds of the CN235-300M being “de-selected” have been increased by the Venezuelan deal.

The CN235 could easily be replaced in the Deepwater requirement by an increased C-130J buy, more Global Hawk UAVs, any number of business jet based platforms or a combination of options.

The CN235 is an old design, the leadtime is long, and the current Spanish government is among the most Anti-American in Europe. You do the math.

Exoatmospheric, so we’re talking the very high end of the hypersonic realm. A Mach 2 aircraft won’t give you a response time of under an hour!

http://www.fas.org/irp/mystery/nasp.htm

If you want to deliver submunitions then you’re stuck with Apache for the moment.

Actually, variants of the Tomahawk (including the cancelled MRASM) have carried submunition dispensing warheads. Of course, the primary US options are JSOW and WCMD.

In the current air defense environment, a gliding weapon such as JSOW can perform the same task as APACHE for far less money.

(Incidentally, APACHE is a French acronym. I’m not shouting.)

Ah yes buying and operating an F/A-22 or even an F-35 is so cheap? And as glitter said who will get F/A-22, probably no one except USAF and the exportmodell of the F-35 is less “invincible”.

The F-35 is entirely comparable in acquistion cost to the Eurofighter, with dramatically greater effectiveness and tremendously lower life cycle costs. Even the F-22’s operating costs are in the same order of magnitude as the Eurofighter’s, despite the fact that the F-22 is far larger, more powerful aircraft.

The big difference is that both “low observable” aircraft can use cheap ordinance in high threat environments. Hundreds – or perhaps thousands – of SDB’s can be dropped in a sustained campaign with little – or maybe zero – attrition to the F-22/F-35 fleet.

In contrast, no more than a few dozen Storm Shadom missiles can ever be expended in a single conflict. The missile is simply too expensive, and will never be stockpiled in militarily significant numbers. Similarly, the warhead is too large to be used in urban areas, especially when you consider the European “sensitivity” to issue of collateral damage.