In my humble opinion, Jane’s were never better than they are today, it’s just the average Joe who can get much better and more inside info about pretty much anything these days. A guy with access to some good forums with few active insiders can easily know more about what’s really happening than the whole IHS staff (no pun intended).

Going to disagree with this- times change so does journalism. I own many Jane’s Fighting ships from the 1940’s-80’s. They were considered the bible for naval matters for nearly 100 years. There were always some inaccuracies considering the opaque nature of the topic, but they had the most experienced staff and were the definitive source for western open source defense information.

It is a bit ironic that people quote part of the editorials from Defense-Aerospace.com as truth and are up in arms about the YouTube video from Janes. First, the Pak-Fa program is not happening in the spotlight of a 24 hour news media cycle reporting every hiccup. The defense media publications are probably going on guesswork and what little information on the program gets reported to them through sources. As we can all see from being on here, there are differing “ahem” opinions on thing like empty weight, engine power, composite makeup, stealth features of the Pak-Fa project, just to name a few. Can it be possible that the defense journals have little better, or no better information than this forum? Quite possible.

http://ria.ru/defense_safety/20160801/1473336170.html

Afghanistan wants Mi-35Ms, but they have no way of paying for them.

What kind of craziness is this? Are you telling me Russia dosn’t just hand over billions in weapons as aid? You Russians sure are odd.

-sarcasm off-

At the contrary the close coordination between land and air forces is one of the “secrets” of the great effectiveness of said expedition and that finally seems to have finally get also into the dumb heads of the international coalition commanders despite their congenite JDAMtism.
And accuracy matter a lot:it is precisely because of that they have introduced a such large swathes of SVP-24 and others targeting devices in their planes.
es[/I].

Let’s inject a little realism. Would you rather be a JTAC embedded with Iraqi force directing JDAM strikes similar to the recent operation in fallujah, or a FAC embedded with the SAA directing SVP-24 bomb runs in Alleppo dozens of meters from your position?

JDAMism is a good disease when it’s someone’s a**, especially in an urban environment. Unfortunately, a smart bomb can’t account for dumb/outdated intelligence on a target- either way innocents die.

There is actually some merit to a variant of this idea. With missile costs as high as they are, and inventories correspondingly lower, there could be a place for swarms of very low cost drones/cruise missiles. You could see them coming, but could you, would you, shoot million dollar missiles at them? That is obviously the thinking behind something like the UTAP-22. The trick would be to create a drone with sufficient performance to be challenging to shoot down, but remain cheap enough to keep the cost advantage.

Something like the ADM-160 MALD with it’s unit cost of roughly 300,000 USD. Cheap enough to launch in large numbers. Don’t know if the MALD-V went anywhere, but certainly it is an option.
http://www.dtic.mil/ndia/2010targets/Rutt.pdf

Tactical recon UAV’s, even a relatively simple one like the Searcher-2 (unit cost around 6 million) alleged to be perpetrator in this latest incident, are pretty expensive. Then again, when you fire roughly 5 million dollars of missiles at one and miss…..

Matthew Rust was trailed by MiG-23’s and the commander on the ground made the call not to shoot down.

That was according to the later history. Rust reported the Mig-23 fly by, the pilot of the Mig ID’d the aircraft as similar to a Yak-12. This was a mere 4 years after the shoot down of KAL 007. That pilot could clearly see the passenger windows before he fired on orders in that case. The reason Rust was not downed was very much because he was not properly ID’d nor deemed a threat. He flew threw the SAM ring around Moscow, do you really think that was allowed because it was a Cessna? Or do you believe that Rust was allowed to land in Red Square out of the sanctity for human life? Again, PVO downed a 747 near Sakhalin due to an incursion, a Cessna was allowed to fly within a few miles of the Kremlin, please.