“Most Austrians seem to think Jesus and the saints do the job better then any fighter. And that at a very competetive price.”

Lol! I think we have the same kind of people in Sweden, but here it’s the green and left wing parties. The latest unpriceable comment they made was that it was shocking that we’ve ordered more than 200 fighters but just 100 Amraams. That prooved that we bought too many Gripens in the first place they say. Yeah, or perhaps it prooved that MoD actually has foreseen a shift to Meteor in a couple of years and only bought the Amraams as a stop gap solution? 🙂

Distiller wrote:
“The point defence fighter is a thing of WW2. … Today the best point defense fighters are S-400, PAC-3 and SM-2ER.”

AAM showed their superiority on the 3:rd of July, 1988, when USS Vincennes fired two missiles at a civilian iranian Airbus over Sidra bay – killing over 298 innocent people.

Castor

Kovy wrote:
“just replace the mirage 2000 assembly line by a rafale one, et voila !”

The Rafale is quite pricy as is – and developing/maintaining yet another Rafale assembly lin wouldn’t come for free either. Who is going to pay for this? Dassault? – You wish…

But Seahawk; haven’t you learned from all the Gripen-to-India or Gripen-to-Pakistan threads that all western european countries will throw their export restrictions into the garbage bin when it comes to a customer who can cash up front. Big time. 🙂

Castor

I think you’re missing one very important point here – operational costs. In my humble (but biased) opinion I think we would see the opposite rank of these three when it comes to operational costs.

Then you have the cost of weapons and all other kinds of gear. Buying Rafale means that you’re stuck with the same weapons as the french have ordered – unless you wanna pay for the weapon integration programme. Same goes for Typhoon and Mig29 as well, but I believe that buying Typhoon means that you’ll have a bigger chance of getting the weapons you’ll like without paying for weapon integration. There are five countries that have ordered that plane. Dassault has scored one sale.

Then I suppose the choice depends upon what fighter India wants for their carrier (if these planes aren’t destined for the carrier programme). Buying Mig29 for the carrier and Rafale for airforce is idiotic – and will make your maitenance and training costs sky rocket. But I suppose that’s a common problem in many non-western armed forces. They simply cannot go for one or two fighters but buys so many different models that they’ll have enormous costs for maintenance and training. Some countries solves this by reducing maintenance and training I believe – but India should have learned their lessons regarding the Mig 21 accidents…

@Severodvinsk:
Regarding the devolpment of larger vessels in Swedish navy – I suppose we have different opinions there. But I would also like to emphasize that when I was talking about the fear of a russian invasion, I was speaking of the cold war era – not today. I believe that the baltic sea is as calm as it should be today! 🙂

@plawolf
To realize what kind of threat these truck launched SSM is, you could look at the Balkan conflict. I’ve been told that american carrier groups weren’t willing to station in the Adriatic sea because of that Saab had delivered RBS-15 to Belgrade. The risk were to high. Perhaps dienekes can shed som light on this story?

I believe that the fast missile craft / fast patrol boat era was 70’s and early 80’s. The fast missile crafts were used, as stormeagle points out, close to the archipelago, making rushes towards sea in order to fire their penguins etc towards incoming vessels.

But in the early 80’s we had missiles with increased range and accuracy, Exocet being the most obvious example. These missiles could be launched from ordinary trucks on land (for example RBS15) and deliver the same effect as the fast missile craft could – but from a much safer place.

In Sweden and Finland, which both feared a russian invasion fleet during the cold war era, the marines / navies adopted this truck launched ssm system at once. That was a decision that led to the abandonment of small fast missile crafts and patrol boats. Therefore, one can see that the swedish navy is moving towards larger vessels (Stockholm class 50m -> Gothenburg class 57m -> Visby class 72m), and that these new vessels are capable of carrying helos as pointed out.

I believe that this change could be seen already in the mid 80’s when the Stockholm class was launched. Unlike it’s predecessors (the Norrkoping class fast missile craft) it was capable of advanced ASW with torpedoes and grenades, it had a more advanced air to air artillery system (en extra 40 mm cannon at the aft) and it was bigger.

Regards,
Castor