gambit
PROFESSIONAL
- Joined
- Apr 28, 2009
- Messages
- 28,569
- Reaction score
- 148
- Country
- Location
Nowhere have I made any comparison between Saddam Hussein era Iraq and today's China. It is YOUR mental gymnastics that made such a leap.Your mental gymnastics, jumping from a vague spin that "Iraq had "hired" China" to suggest Chinas modern air defense must or even just could therfore somehow be as terrible as Iraqs because "applied Vietnamese plumber logic",...
http://www.nytimes.com/1987/05/19/world/war-in-gulf-spurs-china-s-arms-export-role.html
The issue -- that you and your fellow Chinese consistently avoided -- is the PLA reforms to the lines of the Western militaries, notably to the US.China also agreed to sell arms to Iraq in 1981 and 1982, during the earlier stages of the Iran-Iraq war. The arms that have been delivered since then include bombers and tanks.
The new report indicates that China has moved up in the ranks of arms exporters partly as a result of these sales and partly because third world nations with large debt burdens now have less interest in buying costly, advanced weapons from the West.
We can have identical machine guns, fighter jets, and tanks, but if our combat doctrines differs, our fighting methods, which includes the deployments of those identical weapons, will also differs. In the end, one way will prevail, and in the aftermath of Desert Storm, your China saw the end of its PLA as a credible fighting force. If the weaponry of the PLA at the time of Desert Storm was so superior to what China sold to Iraq and Iran, along with the war doctrines to the respective militaries, then what prompted the radical changes to the PLA ?
Am Air Force, so I will stick with airplanes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_Air_Force#1990s_.E2.80.93_Persian_Gulf_War_and_no-fly_zones
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People's_Liberation_Army_Air_Force#Aircraft_inventory
As everybody can see, the combat aircraft inventories of the respective air forces are quite different. However, their performances can be quantified and have been analyzed. Given the fact that both militaries have nearly identical concept of (inflexible) centralized command and control structures, if one fails, and one did failed spectacularly, the other practitioner will be forced to reassess its commitment to those ideas and institutions that made up that inflexible centralized command and control structures. Your China's PLAAF knew of nothing else. The rapid defeat of the Iraqi Air Force was seen as a complete defeat of what the PLAAF believed to be a successful airpower doctrine and have exported that doctrine. Without even a contender air force, the ground forces will be seen as defeated.
You may not like the phrasing that 'Iraq hired China', implying even consultancy role for China, and continues to deny what every military in the world acknowledged to have happened, but that denial will get you nowhere except to serve as an intellectual lollipop. So far, that 'Vietnamese plumber logic' have patched many holes your fellow Chinese made in this forum when they do not know what the hell they are talking about.