Well, if you look at the comments from the parliament you have to know which party it came from. So far (from open source) members from Nasdem and PDIP have made statement disagreeing with this project. Golkar seems to be ok with it. This is where/how they political system works sometime, someone is releasing information to media then the politicians and other "elemen" commenting it. By doing this we would know who rejected/agree with the program, then the lobby start to smooth things out. I call this "test the water" and see which or what fish come out
New member? Welcome man. I said that in comparison of getting another fighter from the shelf, the
timeline is not that far comparing to EF (upgraded to tranche 2) specially if we decided to get Viper. I know its 2 different fighters but if we look for
more numbers the Viper should be fine. And getting the Viper latest block will be a technology leap as it will be the first one with AESA etc. It also easier to adapt by pilot/technician not to mention the infrastructure as we already have numbers of older one. So having used EF Tranche 1 is not an adavancement in avionic wise (compare to our Sukhoi/F16 block 52id) but rather just numbers/kinetic. This offcourse will be different if we have plan to have more EF in a future, then its a good start to have 15 of them now regardless if we going to upgrade immediatly or not.
Now the question is are we going to have some more EF in the future? I said its a possibility. Then what you said will be right as we let the sukhoi phased out and replace by this EF. But you might be wrong about phasing out EF for F35. Europe while having F35, they still upgrading the EF so it can go side by side while filling each other gap and so must we if we decided to take the EF path. But this will most likely take KFX out of the equation. The hardest part is to get complete missile collection like what our sukhoi family have. We might have to get it from Europe/MBDA and its expensive, forget about getting advance missile from US as it would be hard.
Another interesting part if we take EF path is it might take F16Viper out of the equation as well. We might be pursuing F35 instead. So like most of european countries our future backbone would be EF and F35. Isnt that sweet? We still defirsify our arsenal by having Europe and US source and the current Europe geopolitic indicate that they want reduce their independency to US military and trying to support their own made arsenal, just like how French trying to get rid of US components from their military arsenal so they can sell it more freely.
So if this the case whats the not so distant future of our fighter acquisition gonna look like? Looking at the leftover budget and the future alocation I think most likely we are going to get
15 EF and maybe 4 F35. Just a thought and wild prediction