WI: Comanche not scrapped?

You wouldn't be a Rafale apologist, would you? :D

On a more serious note;
I won't deny politics are very important for fighter sales, but they're not the only reason something is or is not selling.
If your argument was true, there wouldn't be a single Gripen flying outside Sweden. The Swedish "political clout" abroad after all is about 1/1000th of the French one.


No, I'm a Super Hornet man myself.

The Gripen can tick a lot of political boxes. It can provide a 4.5 generation fighter for the least cost of the current crop, and doesn't exhibit favour to any great power. It says to neighbours that a country is serious about defending itself but doesn't own a long-range, high-payload offensive weapon.
 

MacCaulay

Banned
An interesting alt.hist story I toyed with for awhile was the fact that according to USMC and RAAF Hornet Units in Operation Iraqi Freedom an RAAF F/A-18C had an Iraqi MiG-29A Fulcrum on it's radar and even apparently started getting tone for it's AMRAAM before the MiG entered another engagment zone and the Hornet wasn't allowed to pursue it as it was on CAP for just that certain area.
So...a small nudge to that MiG's direction, and the chances are better than even that you'd have a the first Australian air-to-air kill in at least 40 years in the skies over Iraq in 2003.

Bloody mission creep fear; "Thou shalt not go an inch beyond one's designated box, as this exceeds the limited political goals one's government is pursuing in Iraq."

BTW it would have been 50 years since our last air to air kill, which happened in Korea in a Meteor F8.

Well, the reason given by alot of the interviewed RAAF and USMC pilots in the book (they were colocated as they were all flying F/A-18Cs) is that the USAF AWACs were running the show and deliberately tipping the scales in favour of their service to get any air-to-air kills that popped up.
 
Top