the F-15S's were upgraded later. a writer called Henry Marter (or Martr , i'm uncertain of his name) has an article on that in Janes website
Where did you pull this one out of?
Saw it on the net. It says the IAF beat them even more the 200 times with the Python 4 or 5 slaved to their HMS while USAF used AIM-9L/M. Not surprising the won that many times.
The radars in synthetic apture mode have three times less resoloution than the original. The F-15S (AFAIK) is a downgraded F-15E.
If you come across the link to this I'd be interested in reading it--i haven't heard anything like that before either...
The F-15 has proven itself THE premier fighter over the past 30 years.
Calm down there. Marketing hype ,huh? So why wasn't India (or Malaysia [has American planes], Algeria and Indonesia [has American planes]) rushing to get the F-15E? Was it becuase the Su-30MKI made the F-15E look like trash? And the US said they bought an S-300 "to fit superior technology to the Patriot" translation: they probably took design concepts of the S-300 to make your beloved "Patriot Advanced Capability-3". And as the for the protection Saudi "enjoyed" (IIRC) the Patriot had a success percentage of less than 50% in the Gulf War and that was against "Hussien" missiles and we all know how sophisticated those were. There is no doubt in my mind that the S-300's and S-400's capabilities are far superior to those of the PAC-3 system and they're probably cheaper. And you're so called "real world combat performance". Yes, very real world. I think when the world's most powerful military goes against a third world military that was choked by sanctions the world's most powerful military is expected to have dazzling results. Not only was the Iraqi Air Force suffering from sanctions and bad pilot training, they were lacking AWACS. Are you telling me that when an F-15 flown by a 1st rate pilot and has AWACS support flies against 5th rate pilot in a poorly maintained plane and shoots it down, it's a show of how good it is? I said when used professionally Russian equipment would have the upper hand. But of course if you're lacking support systems, training and maintenance you're not going to have the desired results. As for the Saudi kills with F-15 they were going against the same obsolete planes the US was going against. When I see the F-15S score a kill against an Su-30MKI when both platforms have AWACS support, well trained pilots and were well maintained that's when I'll say the F-15 is better otherwise give real evidence that any of the very expensive (and AFAIK downgraded) F-15's Saudi has is better than an Su-30 tailored to Saudi specs.
I was just responding to Aussie Diggers claims that the PAC-3 is better than the S-300/S-400.
no because we have many of experience with US and French air defense systems while we have Zero experience on any Russian Air Defense system other than man-portable ones
as i mentioned earlier , its on Janes but for subscribers only and written by Henry Marter (or Martr , unsure of the name) as an English source
no because there are differences , a guy in the RSAF told me the Russian jet fighters are different and gave a one simple example that it measures the altitude by meters instead of feet (which Saudi pilots are used to is feet and not meters)
I wasn't proposing that you use Russian jets in conjunction with American ones I was saying not to buy the American ones in the first place and you bring up some good points but I have to say it's not like Saudi has one single type of plane from one single country in fact your two frontline planes are from two diffrent countries and are two very diffrent planes. As for their terrible record I already explained in the previous post read it again if you'd like.no because we have many of experience with US and French air defense systems while we have Zero experience on any Russian Air Defense system other than man-portable ones
if we aquire Russian air defense systems then it means we are starting from Zero again !!
as i mentioned earlier , its on Janes but for subscribers only and written by Henry Marter (or Martr , unsure of the name) as an English source
the Arab sources are Khaleeji military magazines and mostly unavailable to the internet. the UAE airforce magazine (i think edition #180) has mentioned before that the Kingdom has replaced all the F-15S radars
no because there are differences , a guy in the RSAF told me the Russian jet fighters are different and gave a one simple example that it measures the altitude by meters instead of feet (which Saudi pilots are used to is feet and not meters)
secondly , adding US and Russian jet fighters in one Airforce will make it extremely expensive to operate , hard to act together , hard to maintain , hard to train and hard to gain experience
thirdly , during the time the F-15C/D's were delivered (1982) , there was no Saudi-Soviet relations , infact it was terrible (Afghanistan war)
fourthly , the Russian fighter planes have very terrible record in past wars and therefore i can not trust it
by the way what does the terms (AFAIK) and (IMO or IMHO) mean ?
no, there was no "revenge killing", it was not a war(at the time) so there were alot of limitations on ammo and rules of engagement, to kill 1100 civils is a job for a few hours, not a month, most of the civils killed died in the last week of the war, when the IAF was running out of "smart bombs"(it was an "extended operation", meaning that there were limitations on ammo, most of the smart bombs were saved for incase Syria decided to join the conflict), all the long range and medium range rockets Hezbullah had were destroyed in the first day, thanks to inteligence, the problem was that there were 10-20k short range rockets left, and an unknown number of launchers to destroy, and as i said, rules of engagement prevented from the IAF to bomb civilian buildings with rocket launchers in them, if it was a war, the houses would have been bombed regardless of the civils inside.
Yeah, that's what I though happened. Isn't it just a little hard to believe that Hezbollah was still able to operate and launch huge amounts of rockets even after a month of bombardment (and maintains the same capability today) but that the civilian infrastructure was completely destroyed in South Lebanon within the first few days of war. You bombed apartment buildings for goodness sake. I really think Israel meant everything that it did. I saw footage of them dropping bombs (I think GBU-12's) in the middle of streets on individual cars. And it's really nice hearing from an Israeli first-hand that "if it was truly war that you would've killed even more civilians". You're just for reinforcing the stereo-type in the Arab world that all Israelis are ruthless war lovers (which I don't think/hope is true).
no you got me all wrong, the apartment buildings that you saw were in the Hezbullah section, if youll see from a satelite picture, most of Beirut is ok, the section that was under Hezbullah controll got the hits, i didnt mean that in war time Israel would have killed civils, i meant that Israeli pilots would have bombed thier targets even if they were close to civilians, without the early warning of droping leaflets, and there would not have been "dumb bombs" because the army could hvae used its war time supplys, in war time the civilians would still not be targets, but they would have been in much more dangre then in the last conflict, cheack out youtube for clips of the IAF in Lebanon, you would see UAV vids that show you that when the UAV sees some kids playing next to the launchers or when the launchers are next to an apartment building(not in the Hezbullah controlled sector) the UAV operator does not give the pilot the green light. in the war there was a spec ops raid in Tyre, the only reason the special forces were used instead of using land or sea arty or the IAF was that the building was mosly a civilian building.
i agree that this should be in some other thread but i just wanted to explain that the last Israel-Lebanon conflict is not a good example for how an air force will operate against ground forces, as i said, it was not a war so its not a good example of how a scenario between KSA and Iran will look like.