Wow, speaking of "reverse engineering"....

 

 

Oh my. I hope this isn't just a glimpse at his ethical behavior. He's a stress analyst at freakin' Boeing. I hope they have people reviewing this guy's past work. I realize there is a peer review process in place, but yikes.

 

Not a MIG, but here's a Russian made Sukhoi SU-30 exhibiting it's thrust vectoring.
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xY0t_mPv6I4 [/media]

And the SU-37:
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GdfnTLKcvM [/media]

 

MIG 29 OVT
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bE7gvEBroLI [/media]
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xb4ILzzDwjQ [/media]

 

Sick

 

Gee golly, I had no idea.

Everyone agrees the plane is awesome, but it is a huge waste of money to buy another 170. Awesomeness should be the deciding factor when an 8 year old chooses a toy, but not for a country. Hell, I guess we should outfit every soldier with terminator style mini-guns (Awesome!) and personal jetpacks (Super Awesome!).

With all due respect for your military service, the reasoning you have presented here is bunk.

China is a threat (hardly the opinion held by the majority of people who matter)--> F22 is a must have. Even if your opinion of China is correct, the best use of 25 billion dollars in response to that threat is not the purchase of 170 F-22s. Not close. Given the bases we have to work from, missions would take 8 hours and multiple midair refuelings. Wouldn't be so bad if 140 million a copy bought room for a copilot.

Curtis LeMay? Cuban missle crisis? We are going to confront these people sooner or later, and we might as well do it while we have the strategic advantage.

 

The Chinese are already selling their version of the S-300 Air Defense Missile System to Iran and other countries. They are in talks with Iran and other countries about selling the updated S-400 variants. Both the S-300 (later versions) and the S-400 missle systems are capable of eliminating US aircraft at ranges in excess of 250-300 miles, including 1st Gen stealth aircraft such as the F-117 and the B-2 Bomber.

The F-22 is the only aircraft in the world that has the speed, manuverability and improved stealth technology to defeat these improved Russian/Chinese missile systems.

Even if you are not affraid of the possibility of a US-Chinese conflict - they are selling advanced technology to other countries that may make you think again.

 

Wikipedia is no holy grail, but...

1. S-300s are Russian systems. China has a license to build them, may helped in development of s-400.
2. Russia, Belarus, Croatia (?) have sold S-300s to Iran
3. Russia/China rumored to sell s-400s to numerous people...including allies of the US like Pakistan (talk about a complicated "alliance"...i guess a power play on China's part against India), Turkey, and Greece.

Arms sales are a pretty weak indication of future conflict. More of a soft power play, attempt to increase/maintain economies of scale in domestic manufacturing, mitigate the huge development costs, or whatever. But of all things the Chinese are doing, it is way down on the list of things that point to armed conflict in the future. Sure it pisses us off. China and the US piss one another off all the time. Arm sales to Taiwan, trade disputes, accusations of currency manipulation, human rights violations, blocking resolutions in the UN, attempts to buy domestic assets with state owned companies...the list goes on. You can take the sum of all those offenses, mix in the misperceptions our two societies have about on another, the difficulties we often have negotating, and your personal ideology and make some determination as to weather or not we are likely to end up in a war. But like I said above, even if that is where we are headed, our money is not best spend on f22s - unless they start placing s-400s in Los Angeles I guess.

 

The S-300's already sold to Iran have a lower range and are not capable of defeating our current stealth technology (F-117/B2). Russia has committed to not selling the improved S-300 and S-400 systems to Iran and certain other countries (for now), however, China is willing to sell the more advanced systems.

Just a little humor point regarding your item #1: Since when did the Chinese need a license to build something designed by another country?