Critisism noted.

As you say i am working with the benefit of hind sight,

 

The carrier capability was allways going to be a bone of contention to a pan european design, as for the G/A role Im sure with negotiation that role could have been designed in (theyve had to do it anyway) if France had been more willing to allow a bit of give and take.

 

I cant see a home built fighter of any sophistication emerging from europe again, the huge costs and shrinking market  dictate collaborative efforts either Pan european or across the pond.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nice to see you here Alexis

Cooperation with Russia is provocative to USA and not in our interest.

Israel will stick with US products as long USA give 3 billions $ each year in aid.Moreover I don't think a lot of french politicians and diplomats would be happy to see israeli aircrafts bombing arabs.

 

BTW today Kuwait declares it is interested and waiting for Dassault offer.

I don't know, FS...de Gaulle screwing the Israelis out of the Mirage 5 really worked out well for France, didn't it?  It's not like you've had any problems with Arab terrorism since...except, of course, you have.  France of all nations should know the price of appeasement.  In any case, Israel does buy French equipment, and if they haven't bought the Rafale, it's because they don't want or need it--being satisfied with late-model F-16s until the F-35 rolls around.  (Now if the F-35 gets cancelled...maybe.)

 

Getting back to the topic--could the F-18 have operated off the Foch/Clemenceau?  I would think it would be too heavy with not enough deck space.  If that's not true, then the F-18 would've been a good choice--though I can see, given France's somewhat understandable desire to steer a middle course, why they would pump money into the Rafale and not just buy F-18s.  (Though I notice France did finally say "screw it" and bought C-130s rather than wait umpteen years for the A400M.)

 

Hello FS! I also was glad to see you reversed your decision last year not to take part on these boards.

I agree with both your points... as far as the present situation in world relations is concerned. But we're speaking of decisions which would become final maybe a decade from now. My hypothesis is that the present economic crisis is a global depression, at least as devastating as the 1930s', and whose most important stages are still to come.

In this case, geopolitical consequences can be expected to be very large, and are largely unpredictable by now.
International relations in the 2010s decade may turn out to be just as quiet, stable and devoid of surprises as they were in the 1930s. That's why I would say no cooperation scenario should be closed by now.

Actually, Sentinel, De Gaulle did not "screw" the Israelis. He just advised them - admittedly in no uncertain terms... - to refrain from beginning armed attacks against Arabs in 1967, in spite of the closure of the Aqaba gulf by Egyptian forces giving Israel the formal right to consider itself at state of war, arguing that Israeli victory was anyway certain given the forces in opposition and that the Arab bluff should not be called, and warning that France would not support (with spare parts etc.) armed attacks begun by Israel. His concern was also that Israel having conquered the lands it was yearning for (West Bank mainly) would not be ready to relinquish their control to their inhabitants after the war and that the armed conflict which would ensue against Arab resistance ("which Israel would call terrorism") would become a deadend impossible to solve, this just as the pride wound suffered by the Arabs at the time of Israel creation needed time to heal, instead of more land loss with unpredictable consequences.

This is precisely what he publicly expressed in press conference six months after the 1967 war, at a time when it had become obvious that Israel was indeed set on settling the occupied territories, never to let them go. I would say time has fully validated his concerns.

 

 

Arab terrorism in France in the 1990s had little if anything to do with the 1967 conflict. It was the consequence of French support to the Algerian government struggling against an Islamist insurgency which lost in the end, at a time when many countries, the US included, were maintaining contacts with those Islamists so as to prepare good relations after their arrival to power...

Like most Islamist forces, these were inspired by Wahhabism, the state ideology of Saudi Arabia. Which I think is more of a US ally than of a French one... even if also we are admittedly sometimes complacent about them. Had France supported Israeli occupation of the territories occupied in 1967, and continued to support until now like the US are doing, it would not have lessened any bit Islamist terrorism. Maybe it would have worsened it.

Alexis, that's ridiculous.  Israel had paid for those Mirage 5s, and de Gaulle voided the contracts.  If he had merely advised them not to do whatever, why cancel them?  The only way I can resolve what de Gaulle did and what you wrote is to say de Gaulle punished the Israelis for not listening to him, which is childish.  Moreover, the Mirage 5s ended up in AdA service, with all the instructions still in Hebrew, and the AdA didn't want or need a clear-weather fighter bomber in notoriously wet Central Europe.  Sucking up to the Arabs hasn't really helped France in the Middle East that much.

 

I don't want to hijack the thread to talk about Israeli policy, but why is it Israel has to give up territory it takes in wartime but no other country does?  I don't see France giving Calais back to England anytime soon.

 

Lynstyne :

 

""Dassault ' s prototypes of early Rafales were very much within the DGA requirement :""

 

what ? you mean they wanted a first batch of planes to put in a warehouse and never fly

Thank you for a more reasoned reponse.

You did however misunderstand me on one point. I was not advocating France buy more Mirage , my suggestion was that the Rafle was designed more as a Mirage succesor (f16 / grippen competitor) - A suggestion whos flaws were pointed out by sentinal (i think).

 

It could sill have been Marinised fulfilling that requirement.  Such an aircraft may well not have been the biz A2A hence why i suggested Staying on with Typhoon or perhaps buying a number as a dedicated A2A fighter.

 

 

Damn, there's no way to edit a message. Promise, I won't turn into cwDeici 2 :-D

Settling for a "cheap and chearful" Mirage replacement (with a navalized version) that wouldn't do the A2A (or A2G) job well enough that another type should be purchased to complement it would have negated the goal of the program : one platform to fulfill every mission.

Case in point : AdA or MN Rafales can do A2A, A2G, AShW, Recon... effectively (yes it took the F3 standard but there it is now). 

Typhoon will have to be complemented by JSFs in A2G. JSFs will have to be complemented by Typhoons in A2A (at least that's the current thinking among operators). Maybe the combo's going to be better in pure efficiency, but it's still two very different platforms, thus increasing costs and complication. 

Of course it's always a compromise, in the end.

I think there is a broad misunderstanding of the reasons why France left the EFA programme. It was certainly not because of carrier compatibility issues, but due industrial reasons and the AdAs requirements. Back in 1982 the MN studied the option of procuring the F/A-18 which would have been able to operate from the french carriers. The french did not decide to go ahead with a navalized new fighter (Rafale) before 1986 and at that time France had already left the EFA programme. It was the french demand for design leadership and 50% workshare, the usage of the M88 7-7.5t class engine under development by SNECMA at that time. The remaining partners didn't accept that, 3 of them already collaborated on the Tornado and persued a partnership of equals and a workshare arrangement based on the total numbers to be procured by each nation. Other differences concerned the configuration and class of the aircraft. The french required a 9t fighter with strong emphasis on AG operations, germans and italians were looking for a pure airdefence fighter/interceptor in the 10t class, powered by 8-8.5t class engines, while the brits and spanish prefered a heavier multirole fighter optimised for AA, with a secondary AG role in the 11-12t weight class and with an engine thrust between 9-11t. The french additionally prefered Dassault's proposal for a close coupled canard design with side mounted intakes, while the others prefered the long coupled configuration with chin mounted intakes.

 

Would it have been better for the MN to procure the F/A-18? At that time yes, given the lengthy development phase of the Rafale, in the long term a common type fleet for both AdA and MN is certainly more economical.

 

Is the Rafale M a bad striker because it thought about purchasing twin-seaters, something the AdA did? Not worse than the F/A-18C/E in comparison to the F/A-18D/F.

 

 

The french can be proud of the Rafale, but it shows that nowadays it is even more difficult to fund such a project all alone and I have my doubts that France would be able to do that again. It's not that their industry isn't capable of doing so, but the ability of the french state to afford such a project.

jack :

 

(Me)""Dassault ' s prototypes of early Rafales were very much within the DGA requirement :

 

The Super Hornet is vastly superior to the Rafale as is the standard Hornet simply because of the radar, the missiles,  and two generations of air warfare experience that showed what worked and what didn't. The French made a 1985 guess about what air warfare, air to air and air to ground, would look like, and they guessed wrong. They chose the wrong radar development path, tried to build the wrong kind of missile to go with that radar, and they developed an underpowered set of engines to go with that aircraft. Their partners had access to Russian and American data, and refused to follow the French into a blind dead end plane. Its sad, really, because Dassault was warned by Aeromachi and MBB that they were headed the wrong technical way.

 

Now the French belatedly develop a whole class of standoff weapons, and they try to fix the RBE2 radar with a new  AESA front end copied from the Americans (don't be deceived by the advertusing fluff, it's a blatant Thales copy of American NG tech)  as well as update and product improve the less than satisfactory M-88 engines which, as reported from the Rafale's brief Afghanistan foray, failed to even meet the minimum hours mean hours between teardown, the French Air Force expected.