This X 1000.

Assad may not be the nicest guy around, but in 2010 he actually passed funding for the refurbishment of synagogues in Syria.

Under him, there was freedom of worship, whether you were Christian, Jewish, or Muslim.

There are 2,5 million christians in Syria.

Anybody under any illusions should watch a wide sample of videos coming out of Syria from both sides.
One side has no religious chanting in their videos, the other has multiple shrieking to a particular deity in almost every single one.

No prizes for which one is which.

If the opposition win, millions of Syrians will feel the first chill of cold fear for the future…

You sometimes wonder what goes through the heads of politicians…..and then you realise that collectively, they simply cannot all be this stupid.
That leaves an agenda of some description….

Stay the hell out of it, and under no circumstances arm the opposition.
It will be paid for in blood later.

I agree completely word for word.

Nic

Rock and a hard place, but imo let the Syrians do what they are going to do…. the same rebels we are “helping” now will be our enemies in the next few years.

They already are in Mali & Afghanistan, but in Libya & Syria they’re our allies. Go figure.

Nic

No thank.

Nic

Can the Mirage carry only 2 a2g weapons?

Mirage 2000 routinely carries 2 GBU 12s. But I’ve seen a pic of a Mirage 2000 with 6 AASM (two on a dual centerline pylon and 4 on the fuselage hardpoints).

Nic

How about taking the ASTRAC upgrade for Mirage F-1 and fitting it to Gripen A replace the RDY-3 with the RDY-2 its not a true upgrade but it dose open up the Rafale toy box for the bargain price of 15 million dollars

Indeed. Thalèsing the Gripen A to make it ITAR free could make for a great update on the cheapo. IIRC RDY-2 is much more expensive than RDY-3 though.

Nic

2) I think it might be easier & cheaper (because of development costs) to incorporate elements of the Gripen Demo programme. Developing modular upgrades for older Gripens was part of the point of it, as well as producing Gripen E.

The advantage of a russian upgrade would be better politically, as you wouldn’t be dependant on the US to get weapons & avionics. You’d get the modern equivalent of a Mig21 Bizon with a combination of russian, french & israeli avionics and weapons in a top notch airframe. What’s not to like?

Nic

Also, the Mirage F1 might look deceptively straight-forward (like the archetypal “supersonic combat aircraft”), but it’s actually hideously complex mechanically – it could hardly have more moving parts if it had variable sweep or variable incidence! In fairness, among most of its contemporaries (F-4E, MiG-23, F-8 etc.) it fits right in, but it’s not exactly a simple airframe by modern standards.

The French price premium does raise an interesting issue though, with the ASTRAC upgrade mentioned so often over the past few weeks it has occurred to me that the Russian aerospace industry has pretty much all the building blocks in place to offer a very interesting alternative…

Well, actually, there are too few Mirage F1 flying around to make the development & integration of such an upgrade cost effective. While I’m sure that the russian stuff should be cheaper, there is also the fact that the french upgrade is available off the shelf.

So unless your purchase huge stocks of weapons, I don’t know how it could be cost effective to develop yet another upgrade for the small fleet of remaining Mirage F1s.

Now what do you think the russians could do with the dozens of Gripen A/B Sweden has in storage. THAT, IMO would be a very very interesting upgrade to develop.

Nic

I’ll bank this purely on the quality of the Israeli Armed Forces. They’re better, simple. Their gear is proven and up to high standards. If you think a dozen MiG-29M2/MiG-35’s or whatever will keep the IASF from destroying their intended targets, you are misled. I love the MiG-29, but I know that an Israeli pilot in an F-15 or F-16I will hastily remove it from the sky. I think the newly-delivered S-300’s are going to be taken out, sooner or later and the MiG-29’s can’t do a thing to stop it.

The combination of a fleet of Mig 29s & S300 could allow the syrians to make a few traps to down a few israeli aircrafts for a political victory of sorts. The way I see it they should attempt to do just that, because it would indeed be vain to try and protect the syrian territory from israeli air attacks. They would have to play their card right though.

Nic