I see no reason why India or China can’t catch up! History is full of such cases. As a matter of fact China alone has made leaps and bounds. Take the Aviation (i.e. J-10) and Auto Industry for example!

there is not a single case in history. take the example of Japan. if US put embargo on it. Its Auto will industry will go bankrupt. No money for large scale R&D. No Design Studios in US for design up market cars.
Infact they will be making small dingy cars for rest of Asia. it is the high end consumers of West that force quality and sophistication over them. Nissan/Mazda/Mitsubishi was rescued by foreigners not including Asians.
J-10 is just amalgamation of available of technologies what was available in West/Russia in 70s. West/Russia did not learn Science by selling cheap stuff

Also, clearly Russia doesn’t need to sell weapons at a loss. Yet, it shouldn’t sign contract if it can’t make money either!

Only two options are either take back the money with interest or accept the price increase. there are other things coming up.

Riiight..

Tu-22M3 – no parallel
SS-N-12/19 – no parallels
SS-N-22/26 – no parallels
Kirov Battlecruiser – no parallels
S-300/400 – no parallels
Oscar II Class sub – no parallels
SS-18 ICBM – no parallels

And yeah, the F-117 has no parallels, yet one got shot down by people who has an SA-3! Pretty terrible if you ask me.

And the Aegis, grand and all, seems to be great for shooting down civilian airliners – or making Standards miss their targets. . . but hey – maybe those were flukes. . .

there’s probably more…

I can also guarantee you, that in 15 years the Russian armed forces will be expanding not only in numbers, but more into quality weaponry, more than enough to deter anyone both conventionally and in terms of nuclear weapons also. But the more worrisome prospect for any die hard US or British patriot – will be China. With over 1.6 billion people and an economy growing as fast as it is, I’d be far more worried about what the Chinese will do in the next 20 – 30 years.

I dont think China can become Soviet Union or future Russia to West because Chinese prosperity is entirely dependent on trade with US/EU/Japan and import of raw materials from rest of the world. Any Chinese mobilization will bring high inflation and shortages for its own people. China cannot survive with 10 to 15% inflation. Maybe in the past with minimal needs but not in future.
the same is true for any other Western nations. Russia have been well of even with these inflation figures for past decades
West simply doesnot have the economic system to sustain a conventional war with Russia.

Small scale excercise’s dont sound too impresive at all to myself and i certainly wouldn’t want to be practising/rehearsing an attack against a CSG using airfix models (just kidding there).

After thinking about this subject some more another thing i’m curious about is this: Threat library’s, electronic jamming assets, recon assets, airbase personel and infustructure and thier associated support structure. I say this as i figure its all well and good having fancy assets to fire deadly missiles but as i understand it warfare is a team effort and requires many more things then just the shooting platform. The CSG would need to be located and tracked precisly for a fair few hours in utter secrecy without giving away the game to even think about sending a squadron or two of Backfires at it, and then i have to really wonder what shape the crews of said Backfire bombers might be in if they rarly get to fly thier jets let alone getting the weapons off the rails/out the bay doors whatever. Do we even know if theres enough crews available these days for any sort of large scale shooting match?

Then from there we come to the maintainers, weapon loaders/handlers etc and all the associated ground equipment involved being first rate and reliable. In theory its all well and good having 60 bombers or however many but if you cant get crews to fly them who are proficent and for example you don’t have the working equipment to load or fuel such bombers then your pretty much doomed from the word go.

I would like to hear what people think on this and i know after reading this board for god knows how many years now theres alot of you on here that visit Russia and study its military so some of you must have a fair idea.

Bombers are like transports for Straight line performance. I think they get enough flight hours through transports. and survellance is more and more going into space.

http://en.rian.ru/russia/20080125/97753428.html
Russian Space Forces to launch new military satellite in 2009
Popovkin said the satellite, worth about 1 billon rubles (over $40 million), will be put into geostationary orbit over Russia to relay data obtained from Russian reconnaissance satellites positioned in different orbits.

In terms of thrust weight ratio the EJ200 is not behind the AL-31. The EJ200 weights ~2/3 of the AL-31F, but produces ~3/4 the thrust.

You are comparing 25 year old AL-31F to newer EJ-200. 117S/AL-31FM has better TWR than EJ-200 with far less money used to develop it. Give same amount of of money to Saturn/Salyut like Eurojet consortium and you will get engine of 20 to 1 TWR. Similar is the case of avionics/semiconductors/software etc. Russians have simply more impact in these fields than rest of EU combined.

The A models demonstrated the ability to supercruise to M1.1 with wingtip ‘winders in 1978. That was with the -100 engine that barely made 12,000 lbs dry. With one of today’s product improved engines you get 17,000 lbs dry, a 40% increase! Supercruising with a newly built F-16 isn’t a stretch. Just don’t hang a bunch of stuff on it that boosts the drag count.

There is also alteast 1.8 tons weight increase. which is 25%

It is this one putting it on spacecraft inaddition to satellite.

http://forum.keypublishing.co.uk/showthread.php?p=690141&highlight=space+radar#post690141
Russia’s Fazotron-NIIR developing new radars

PARIS. June 20 (Interfax-AVN) – Russia’s Fazotron-NIIR corporation is developing several new types of airborne radars.

“We are developing a radar to equip small-size spacecraft at order of certain Russian firms. It is a very promising field of activity that is only starting to develop,” Anatoly Kanashchenkov, the corporation’s director general and designer general, told a news conference at Paris Air Show 2005 that finished on Sunday.

The corporation is also developing space-based radar for China in cooperation with some of its partners, he said.

Star

Yes but it will take hours, and I dont mean just a couple, to shift that kind of ordnance. Remember what I was saying about ‘tracking’ a contact and surviveable reconaissance assets?. The whole challenge to mounting multi-element airstrikes is to get the package assembled and on-target before to target information ages out. If you are having to wait on resources or airframes to be generated then your strike coordination is out of the window from the kickoff.

So do u think Ships travel at speed of light from there target location and aircraft cannot catch them with much faster and longer range Anti-ship missilesf from Air. A single Su-27SM can do combat airpatrol 1000KM from station and could detect destroyer size target at distance greater than 300KM. Tracking is job of fighter regiments now equiped with multi-mode radars.

Yes all true and very worthy, but, in terms of short-notice strike generation absolutely meaningless. You are saying that, because the Russians have hundreds of Il-76’s then ALL necessary ordnance is guaranteed to be in all theatres at 100% maintenance ready status?.

why it should not be. we are talking only about air warfare. not assembling ground forces for invasion which takes months as shown from Gulf War.

Oh good grief. EXERCISE!!!!. Exercises have defined exercise areas and schedules in order to get all the training necessary for both players!. No point having a PLAN ADEX scheduled if the Russian tactical strikers never find the PLAN ships to attack them!!.

why would not they find? with all there survellence assets, satellites and modern multimode Fighter Radars. As the electronics becomes smaller and more powerfurl Naval warfare will becomes obsolete in front of airpower that is faster, can see further from the sky and can deliver longer range punch because of high altitude. I am sure u know the difference between Sea Dragon and Novella.

http://www.royfc.com/news/aug/1401aug03.html
Source: 14.08.01, Strana.RU, Pavel Dzygivsko held the interview
For the first time this year the instruments of this complex will be presented, which will be installed on an Il-38 naval aviation patrol airplane both here and in India. In an 8 hour period it can patrol a pre-determined region of the ocean and control the movement of submarine and surface vessels and the air space. There is not similar complex in the world today.

They will be installed on all Russian naval aviation airplanes, and therefore a rather large volume of work awaits our serial plants. Seven Leninets plants will be in operation and several dozen other enterprises in Russia

My reasoning is not reasoning though. It is actual operational reality backed up with anecdotal evidence from actual deployments and weapons test serials. The USSR HAD some great scientists, Russia today has very many worthy institiutions but those facts do nothing to alter the reality that Russian supersonic missiles are dependent on targetting systems that do not exist and fly profiles that have been countered, demonstrably, by western shipboard systems.

so this person is stating operational reality similar like Yours as he should know rcs, flight speed and intelligence of AIM-120?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vympel_R-77
Gennadiy Sokolovski, General Designer of the Vympel Design Bureau, said that the R-77 missile can be used against medium and long range air-to-air missiles such as the AIM-120 AMRAAM and AIM-54 Phoenix, as well as SAMs such as the Patriot. It can also be used against cruise missiles and even precision-guided munitions (PGMs).

and dont go over Some Scientist. It is not some.

Lads,
Please put down the Milparade or Russian Weapons Catalogue 2006 and understand something. Listing weapons as a fait accompli is meaningless and does nothing but underscore the fact that some of you cant even quantify how much you dont know on this topic.

so we should not discuss weopons catalogue. it is the quality of weopons not the just the platform.

http://www.royfc.com/news/jan/1405jan01.html
In particular, within the framework of similar work, in anticipation of 2007 and the fifth generation fighter, the air force has been working on the upgrade of the Su-27 fighters to the Su-27SM level since 2003. At the same time that outwardly two of these airplanes are absolutely similar, the inside stuffing – the avionics, weapons and targeting control system, and engines – are as it were night and day

You have to look at deployable force packages – there may be 145 Backfires and 400+ Fencers but how many are deployable and how many are based at locations within strike radius if a carrier is detected off Murmansk…or off Kamchatka?. What are the current weapons stocks at those locations. Its no use saying that 100 Kh-22Ms would smite a USN battlegroup from the high seas if, the one time you get a lucky passive sonar hit, you only have 40 useable Kh-22’s in the local inventory and the other couple of hundred are on the other side of the country x000 miles away!.

Not a big issue. considering they could spare 100 IL-76 for Tsunami and many more from private firms.
and why would a Single carrier group show up all of sudden. considering there is one to spare from Middleast/East Asia and not deal with $500 of oil. Economic reality of 21st century does not allow West to have another Cold/hot war with Russia since in previous Cold War West lost too much in Industrial capacity to Asia and completely dependent on Debt/Oil.

http://www.royfc.com/news/jan/1405jan01.html
There will be 10 more,” the CinC explained. – “And perhaps more, I have nearly 100 Il-76 in constant readiness with trained crews. The problem is only that not all intermediate landing airfields, even in the southeast Asian countries themselves, are able to receive our equipment

All these factors, plus most critically, the targetting issue that all the proponents of this kind of long-range missile warfare always try to gloss over, weigh far more heavily in the calculation of what effectiveness any given strike will have.

So u are automatically assuming that Russians dont have idea of harpoon/Tomhawk/SM-2?. they have been training with much faster and manevorable missiles.