Zitat von »sir_roma«

darf man fragen wer die Quelle ist ? Scheint sehr viel Theo wissen dahinter zu sein.

Zitat

MOSCOW, September 3 (RIA Novosti) - Russia and Saudi Arabia are holding talks on military-technical cooperation, which may include sales of military equipment to the Arab country, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said on Thursday.

Russia's Kommersant newspaper has reported that Russia and Saudi Arabia discussed a number of deals worth an estimated $2 billion 18 months ago, when the country's Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal visited Moscow.

"We are working in this direction, we can confirm this," Andrei Nesterenko said, adding that military-technical cooperation between the two countries is in Russia's interests and does not violate its international commitments in this sphere.

The diplomat refused to comment on the amount of the potential arms deals citing confidentiality in the negotiations.

"This is confidential information and I cannot add anything on the figures," Nesterenko said.

Saudi Arabia has traditionally bought only Western, mainly U.S.-made, civilian and military equipment, but has recently expressed an interest in acquiring Russian weaponry, including S-400 air defense systems, T-90 tanks, BMP-3 infantry fighting vehicles, and various types of helicopters.

Russian analysts linked the Saudi interest in Russian weapons with a change in the kingdom's political priorities and the difficulties it has encountered in purchasing weaponry from the West since the September 11 terrorist attacks, masterminded and performed mostly by Saudi citizens.

Saudi Arabia's defense budget currently exceeds $33 billion, and is expected to reach $44 billion in 2010.

Zitat von »sir_roma«

Bei den Red Flags hat die F22 extrem gut abgeschnitten, auch gegen den Eufi. Das heisst im endeffekt nichts, aber zeigt schon das der flieger nicht nur teuer ist.

Zitat

The US hasn’t worried about command of the air for more than 50 years, but the trend lines all are negative.
n five years, the Air Force will lack sufficient fighters to meet the basic requirements of the national military strategy. The inventory in 2013 will dip below 2,250, the minimum needed for meeting national needs, and it won’t rebound for a long while.

This is going to happen. Indeed, it is already too late to avoid the crisis. And without intervention some time soon, the weakness will continue for decades.

The crisis will be brought about by two separate but interrelated factors—massive retirements of worn-out or obsolete fighters, and failure to provide sufficient numbers of modern replacements. The combination of the two will produce rapid shrinkage of the inventory in years just ahead.

The Air Force calls 2,250 fighters "the required force." What USAF actually will possess a few years hence is the "program force." This will be the result of the dramatically underfunded fighter acquisition plan foisted on USAF by Pentagon leaders.

The number 2,250 was developed in the aftermath of the Quadrennial Defense Review of 2006. This is the air armada USAF’s leaders say will be needed to fight two major regional wars more or less simultaneously, fill out the 10 rotational air and space expeditionary force (AEF) units, and meet other demands such as providing forward presence.

The number also reflects USAF’s most up-to-date analysis about the nature of future battlespaces, which it warns will be increasingly deadly to so-called "legacy" aircraft, such as the F-15 and F-16. It’s the number needed to be able to win with "acceptable" losses, a senior USAF official said.

Today’s Air Force inventory comprises about 2,400 fighter aircraft. In many cases, service lives already extend well beyond original dates. The fleet, as a result, is getting smaller at a rapid rate.


--> In 2008, USAF will retire 35 F-16s, 32 F-15s, and its last 42 F-117 stealth aircraft.

--> In 2009, if all goes as planned, the Air Force will let go of 45 F-16s and 17 more F-15s.

--> In 2010 and years beyond, the service annually will retire some 50 to 70 fighters.

Air Force leaders describe 2013 as the crossover year. Numbers will crash right through the 2,250-fighter floor and then keep on falling for another two decades.

In the Air Force view, the window of vulnerability extends from today through the early 2020s, when more than half of USAF’s fleet will be newer, fifth generation F-22 and F-35 fighters.

Even then, however, the service still will be flying a significant number of F-15s and F-16s, some of them more than 40 years old.

Zitat

Fighting in an Enemy’s Airspace
China has now fielded its own indigenously built counterpart of the F-16, called the J-10, and is jointly developing the FC-1 or JF-17 with Pakistan. The JF-17 is externally similar to the F-16 and F-20 Tigershark and shows potential to be a world-class point defense fighter.

Raw comparison of fighter numbers is not useful in gauging USAF’s needs. With a fleet of fewer than 200 Raptors, USAF will be able to go to war with 125 or so, at most. The rest will be in maintenance, training, or test.

Moreover, USAF fights in an enemy’s airspace. The first squadrons in wartime deployments will find themselves outnumbered by some of the larger air forces in the world, operating from their own home bases, demanding that the Raptors achieve a heavily lopsided kill ratio. They will have to be many times better than the aircraft they face in battle just to survive.

Fighters represent just part of the threat equation. Integrated air defense systems, or IADS, are proliferating, and in recent years, the "threat rings" around adversary targets are expanding, USAF documents show. The SA-20 system, in service with Russia and China, already offers a detection range of 124 miles. A near-term improvement, the SA-21, will have a detection and engagement range of more than 230 miles. In practical terms, such a system deployed by China on the edge of the Taiwan Strait would put any aircraft taking off from Taiwan immediately within range of China’s surface-to-air missiles. Naval variants of these air defense systems, such as Russia’s SA-N-20 and China’s HHQ-9, are also making it harder to engage surface vessels. They also have greater capability against stealthy aircraft and cruise missiles.
In addition, both Russia and China are fielding new air-to-air missiles with active radar. The Russian AA-12 and its Chinese counterpart, the PL-12, have been dubbed the "AMRAAMski" because of their close patterning on the American Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile (AMRAAM), which has never been beaten in combat. "We’re real concerned with ... their continued advancements," Matthews allowed.

Some of the Pentagon’s leadership may be thinking that the F-22 would only be useful for the opening hours of a future conflict, an assumption that would be false, Matthews said.

"It’s wrong-minded to think that suddenly, after four days," an air defense threat will be beaten down and never pose a problem again, he said. The Air Force experience in Serbia in 1999 showed that adversaries learn from others’ mistakes, and that surface-to-air missiles lurked undestroyed and were still problematic throughout that conflict.

"A lot of these surface-to-air missile systems ... are mobile. We don’t expect them all just to sit there and radiate constantly until we destroy them. They’ll move around; they’ll hide."

Gates, in his testimony to Congress, said he sees little chance of a tangle with a "near peer" country "over the next four or five years," leading him to be satisfied that the F-22 buy of 183 aircraft is enough.

However, Matthews said, "It’s important ... that we not get focused too much on what the next four years of warfare might be." The next half-decade may be reasonably predictable, "but we sure don’t know what the next 34 years of warfare is going to be."

He added that it is hard to answer one of the biggest questions: How many conflicts have been avoided because no one wanted to take on the Air Force’s fighters?

"You can never really quantify what that is, but ... certainly ... it was a key element of our winning the Cold War, preventing a lot of other major conflicts, and deterring a lot of other bad things." Matthews said USAF wants to "make sure we’re doing the same thing for the next 30 years."

• Der Raptor ist dazu ausgelegt, im feindlichen Luftraum alle fliegenden Feinde erfolgreich und ,mit niedrigster oder gar keiner Verlustrate zu bekämpfen.
• Der Flieger muß qualitativ viel besser sein, als alles was umherfliegt, was er aber nach den weiter oben beschriebenen Schwierigkeiten eben noch nicht ist, und das zu horrenden Kosten, die die Entwicklung und Erprobung anderer Jagdflugzeuge im Rahmen eines USAF-Budgets sehr erschwert, oder gar unmöglich macht. Deswegen wird der JSF als ein Projekt aller Waffengattungen (ausser Army) geführt, weil man auf drei seperate haushalte zurückgreifen kann. USAF, USN, USMC. Gleichzeitig holt man sich entsprechende ausländische Partner ins Boot, die die Kosten und das Risiko eben mittragen. Mit anderen Worten: Die USAF könnte sich alleine gar nicht die F 35 leisten.

Zitat

Critics of the Air Force’s fighter modernization plans often put forth
an argument that the F-22 in particular was a Cold War weapon designed
for a threat that "never materialized," citing the fact that the Soviet
Union went out of business in 1991. Pierre M. Sprey, an Air Force
gadfly who had a hand in designing the F-16, recently declared
air-to-air combat a thing of the past.

Zitat

Apparently, foreign air forces didn’t get the memo. Russia never paused in developing, building, deploying, and selling its best fighter, the Su-27 Flanker (and derivatives), one of the best-selling and most capable combat aircraft in the world. About 1,200 Flankers in a bewildering array of variants have been deployed or sold to 15 countries, including China, India, Venezuela, and Belarus.

As recently as the late 1990s, the Air Force F-15C was still considered the best all-around fighter in the world, owing to its radar range and aerobatic abilities. However, according to internal USAF documents, the F-15C is now second best to the Flanker in practically every important comparison, such as radar, weapons, range, processors, and maneuvering. Plus, most Flankers are less than half the age of the F-15.

Flankers boast thrust vectoring, some variants have close-coupled canards, and nearly all have Digital Radio Frequency Memory jammers on wingtip pods, which are adept at confusing older-style radars such as those on most F-15s and F-16s. They make the Flanker appear to be somewhere it isn’t.

The Air Force plans to upgrade many of its F-15s with active electronically scanned array radars, or AESA, which will buy back some of the Eagle’s detection range, but such improvements won’t make the F-15 any younger or more agile. The recent F-15 grounding, due to cracks in supposed life-of-the-aircraft parts, was evidence enough that the fleet is tired after 17 years of continuous combat.

That the Flanker has matched the F-15 was borne out in Cope India exercises a few years ago, in which US F-15s were defeated by India’s Flanker-led forces.