The bottom line is this....they had their SU 30 and Mirage 2000 in the area too just as we had our F-16's. They could have engaged the retreating PAF Mirages and JF 17's with their BVR's why didn't they???
I guess they were scrambling to save to their behinds instead of shooting down the intruding planes.
I wonder, if at some point, it's a question of diminishing returns.
Not once, not even in 1999, has there been a fight with such level of qualitative parity in the modern missile age.
You have two air forces with AEW&C networked BVR assets, and that too in the hundreds on both sides. Be it an F-16 or JF-17, the point is to lob a BVRAAM with a sufficiently good hit probability. So, I wonder, as far as the PAF is now concerned is having more F-16s worth it when for that price they can get a better BVRAAM (e.g., PL-15) and a lot more JF-17s to carry them.
If anything, I'm not as concerned about the A2A as much as AAD. So, the S-400 could make high-altitude SOW deployments tougher, even from our own side of the border. We'd have to fly lower and, as a result, the glide-based SOWs (H-2, H-4, REK, etc) might lose range, and we'll need to build-up on ALCMs.
