This is a 4-month “airforce review”, which is pubblished by HAF’s Air Command. The trainning with the french group was in 2 stages:
1)early December 2009 (Pean 2009), 2) mid March 2010 (Medor 2010)

Yup. Like I said, it is an official publication of the HAF, which is why I found it ridiculous that someone would question that the exercises happened at all. Especially someone from one of the participating nations, whom you would expect to be well informed in such matters.

It does not mention anything about 6:1.

Yup. The only place I have seen the 6:1 claim was as a comment on a forum, which is about as far from official as you can get. In real life I am sure that both sides got kills, and if indeed there was a 6:1 ratio at some point this happened because of some specific circumstances that is being conveniently omitted to make it seem more impressive.

And FWIW the Marine Nationale mentions it as well, although they don’t go into any details the Charles de Gaulle’s “journal de bord” page briefly mentions the exercise in its March 2010 entry:

Cette inspection générale est intervenue pendant la sortie MEDOR 2010, sortie d’entraînement profitable en particulier pour amariner les 24 pilotes fraîchement qualifiés mais qui permettra aussi à l’ensemble des pilotes du groupe aérien embarqué de se confronter à l’environnement changeant des espaces aéromaritimes.

Likewise “an earlier entry” in the same “journal de bord” mentions the PEAN exercise in its November 2009 entry:

Présent à bord avec son état-major dans le cadre de la préparation de l’exercice PEAN qui débute le 23 novembre, le contre-amiral Kérignard, commandant la force aéromaritime de réaction rapide, a détaillé au CEMA les objectifs de cet l’exercice et les capacités mises en œuvre par le groupe aéronaval constitué du porte-avions et de son escorte.

So yeah. The Greeks were more vocal about it for whatever reason, but there’s no question the exercises happened.

If Harriers can be based very close to the target area, and if the forward base (FOL) has sufficient fuel and munitions, the Harrier is the world’s best at generating sorties. This is because the flight time between FOL and target is short.

True but for CAS pure sortie generation rate isn’t as important as time on station. I always enjoy the USMC’s propaganda that “Basing AV-8Bs at FOB Dwyer during the fight for Marjah resulted in 65 percent of their sortie duration being spent on station. In comparison, aircraft based at Kandahar spent 55 percent of their sortie duration on station“. Yes, that’s all very well, but if you have to truck all the fuel, supplies, and ammunition all the way out there through difficult and non-blue terrain it’s really not worth it. And never mind that “sortie duration” is hardly uniform for all types; I’d rather have an F-15E spend 55% of its flight time over my head than a Harrier spend 65% of its.

Put very simply the average warthog flew 57 sorties in the campaign and the average Harrier flew 45. With equal losses to both types the actual risk to the individual aircraft of surviving the mission was about 20% worse for the jumpjet. Not the 2.5 times indicated by the simple figures.

No, your math is just plain wrong. You are averaging the number of missions, but failing to average the number of aircraft lost. By your logic, if there had been 8 Harriers which flew a total of 360 missions (for an average 45 missions per aircraft) and lost 5 aircraft the results would be the same. Clearly that is not the case.

The A10’s flew more sorties but those were spread over near twice the number of airframes.

The sorties were spread out over more airframes, but so were the losses. Again, the correct measure is losses per sortie.

A source I saw stated that of the six USMC Harriers lost, half were to IR-SAM’s while the other half was to AAA.
…
Oh, and for the record I found around 7 A-10’s that were lost, with six of those being lost to IR SAM’s. I doubt anyone would say that it was an ineffective CAS aircraft.

Make it an apples to apples comparison. The same number of AV-8Bs as A-10s were lost to enemy action (5 each) but the A-10s flew 8100 sorties vs the Harriers’ 3300. So the Harriers’ loss rate is two and a half times as much.

Trying to discredit the operations of Harrier crews (RAF/RN or U.S.) in the recent Iraq/Afghanistan campaigns is shameful.

Nobody is discrediting the crews or their efforts, just correctly pointing out that those crews could today be better served with better aircraft.

In the first image the array is almost straight and points forward, in the second one it’s gimbaled upwards. Definitely not the same off boresight orientation.

In the first image the array is angled toward the viewer, in the second image the array is angled up. Both angles are the same. There is no mechanism to allow the angle to vary.

Not true. To achieve scanning 120° off the longitudinal axis, the Irbis-E antenna must be turned hard against the 60° limit of its mechanical gimbals and then steer the beam another 60° electronically, where it runs into the same issue.

While the Captor-E which is fixed at 45 degrees can’t scan usefully at all past 105 degrees off boresight.

Anyway they’re both interesting approaches to the problem. Irbis-E gimbals video

Not really, both the performance and mechanical / maintenance differences are significant and interesting. An AESA fixed at 45 degrees and rotating longitudinally will actually have worse performance head-on than at 45 degrees off boresight. It will also have worse performance out at the edges of its FOV than the gimballed array for the same reason. Certainly the swash plate concept is lighter, more compact, and likely less prone to failure, but it comes with a performance penalty compared to gimbals.