Even if India can have more Su-30 in inventory than Pakistan has for the JF-17, it does not translate to the same amount of flight capable aircrafts. Anyone who has any experience in any air force, and I have ten years in the USAF in actual flying squadrons, will know that it is extremely rare for any squadron to have %100 'code one' aircrafts. Most commanders would be thrilled to have around %90 'flight mission capable' (FMC) status and mid-80s is the acceptable median. This is not WW II where massed formations of bombers and fighters are the norm. But even if we use WW II as an example, a good example would be the Battle of Britain where the RAF was continually outnumbered but always managed to isolate enough German aircrafts and shot them down. That is how the air battlefield works. India cannot deploy overwhelming numbers at
EVERY sortie. Not even US can and we had to rely on allies in Desert Storm for the air campaign. So even though Pakistan may be outnumbered on the ground, in the air, it will be up to how creative Pakistan's air commanders could be that may put a serious hurting on India's Su-30s. For that subject I will leave it up to the Pakistanis here to debate on how good are their air generals.
The Soviets/Russians have no lack of resources, especially intellectual. It was a Russian mathematician, Petr Umfimtsev, who came up with the predictive behavioral equations of a wave upon impact of a surface. The Soviets ignored his creation but we did not. The Soviets/Russians are behind US solely because of their societal and institutional failings, not for lack of resources. If Russia is to catch up or perhaps even surpasss US, Russia will have to go back to being a dictatorship where military needs takes highest priority for national resources.
Fly MiG and Sukhoi Fighter Jets in Moscow!
When the Russian Air Force has to resort to giving wealthy tourists flights in its front line and export fighters, that does not say much about the state of the Russian military overall and the ability of native Russian technological base to do anything other than to maintain, not innovate, its military.
I find that criticism amusing at best. Hardly valid. Is there a comparable car to Lamborghini? Yes...There is Ferrari and several others. When the models of these brands are less than %10 of each other in terms of performance, we can say they are statistically comparable, if not outright identical, and it become more reliant upon driver skills and experience, less on the hardwares, that who, not what brand, would win a race. But if there is no Ferrari, then what is Lambo to do? How about pitting its cars against each other? Likewise, since there is nothing comparable to the F-22, what make you think we have not perform any analysis on how we could deal with a potential F-22 rival by using another F-22? Same for the F-15 when it came out. Same for the F-16 when it showed the world its exceptional maneuverability and versatility. We have
ALWAYS had comparable aircrafts -- our own -- to test our mettles. But I do have sad news for you...
Constant Peg
We have always had access to Soviet fighters, if not in our hands, then at least through former Soviet allies such as Egypt. If not in numbers, then at least we have a few that we worked hard to keep them flying so we can study their performance.
Viktor Belenko - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The data we gleaned from these few aicrafts and from defectors we incorporated them into adversary air programs like the USAF's Fighter Weapons School and the US Navy's Top Gun. We used US aircrafts to simulate how Soviet fighters would perform and how those performance envelopes influence Soviet tactics. We do not need %100 accuracy, just like the supercars, all we need is %90 for our pilots to come up with Dissimilar Air Combat Tactics (DACT) to train each other. A good analogy is using the machine gun to simulate an adversary with a single shot weapon, then change to be another adversary who is equiped with machine guns. Each simulation will create different tactics and outcomes. When the Soviet Union collapsed, former Soviet satellites needed hard currency to support themselves and as they were in physical possession of many Soviet arms, from rifles to tanks to aircrafts to even missiles, they had every incentive to call US and certainly we were interested. What could Russia do about Soviet arms sold under the table to US? Lodge a protest at the UN? I was not joking about actually worked on Soviet equipments that spanned the entire Cold War era. By the way...India benefited from our adversary air programs starting with the first Cope India exercise. Indians (falsely) gloated on how the Indian Air Force prevailed over US F-15s, never mind that US pilots did exactly what was asked of them -- simulate Pakistani tactics. If US pilots were allowed to unleash what they know...
The current Suckhy series is playing catch up to the F-15 and F-16 and our aircrafts have established combat records. Everyone expected the F-15 and F-16 to have a gradual evolution into a class similar to the Su-30. With the F-117 we introduced a new element in air warfare, including aerial combat, and that element is 'uncertainty'. With the F-22 and F-35 we decided to bypass the Su-30 series altogether. In other words, we eliminated the Su-30 class from our planning. This is what you failed to understand about 'stealth'. Even if we remove the 'stealth' features from the F-22 and the F-35, both are still at least one generation ahead of the Su-30 class. There is no need for US to match the Su-30 and its brethens.
Of course there are other ways. They just take more time and are costlier, in terms of human and materiels.
Yet again sir.
