Even the Chinese had to give up on the MiG-21 design when it became obvious there was room in the nose for a modern radar without restricting air flow to the engine. It was a great “backyard mechanic’s” aircraft and a tough little sucker to shoot down.

Not to mention the airframe life issue — airframes have a rated life and once you exceed that, it becomes necessary to strip them down and run stress x-rays all over the place to see what the current stress exposure is for the chassis, and given what you find, either re-rate the airframe for additional life or scrap it. This isn’t cheap. There is a reason why Israel retired their F-4’s and replaced them with F-16’s, they had their F-4’s pretty competitive with modern fighters but the airframes were at end-life and keeping them flying was becoming inordinantly expensive.

The Saudi F-5’s have already been effectively retired. I doubt if half of their F-15’s are operational at any given time due to the maintenance costs of what is now a 30 year old fighter. Their Tornados are primarily ground attack aircraft. Given that the Israelis have vetoed selling new U.S. fighters to the Saudis, that leaves Russian Su-30’s, French Rafale, Saab Gripen, and Eurofighter Typhoons on the “things to buy” list. Of these, the Su-30 has political issues as well as being quite expensive, the Gripen is a previous-generation design with a limited range though cheap, and the Rafale and Typhoon are pretty much a toss-up (both rather immature designs) with the Typhoon probably getting the nod because of the Saudi experience with the Tornados (which are made by many of the same vendors behind the Typhoon).

This of course still begs the question, “who are the Saudis defending against?”. I’m not sure even they know that. But I do know they’re looking across their northern border and getting *very* nervous…

With the right avionics and weapons any aircraft is a player. If there was no need for a run to catch the opposing fighters, the C-130 could be decked out with enough fire power to be an air-to-air threat. That might even be a mission the B-1B could actually be useful at. Look how long the F-14 hung around based solely on the Phoenix performance.

The only mission the Typhoon currently flies is as a point interceptor, and the big push may be because of the Iranian Su-30 order, but that will take a while to materialize.

Until we know the weapons systems, we don’t know the aircraft.

That said, the Typhoon is fundamentally an air defense fighter jet (the block being sold to the Saudis has virtually non-existent ground attack capabilities), and it’s hard to see how that’s going to be a threat to anybody. Given the number of obsolete and/or inoperative jets in the Saudi inventories (the Tornados are the only jets they have that are even remotely modern and as I noted their Tornados are primarily the ground attack variant), the wonder would be if they *weren’t* in the market to replace some of those antiques, not that they *are* in the market to replace those decrepit hangar queens. The only real question is whether the U.S. is going to allow Britain to transfer ownership of the AMRAAM weapons systems of the Typhoons to Saudi Arabia at the same time. Without the AMRAAM’s, the Typhoon isn’t even a very good air defense fighter, since any opponent armed with AMRAAMs or their Russian equivalent will simply knock them out of the air at a distance. The Europeans are working on their own replacement for AMRAAM, but that won’t be online until 2012 at the earliest.

The F-15s date back to Jimmy Carter, so they are definitely outdated, but the Saudis don’t show up for appoints unless it suits them, either business or military.

My concern is the number of Wahabi whackos who might decide to be pilots. The Saudis are not our friends.

Ellroon, there may be a real concern, or it may simply have been a reason for Prince Bandar to receive his billions in bribes.

So it is no misunderstanding that Saudi Arabia puts most of their defense dollars into their air force. From the standpoint of deterring an attack against Saudi Arabia that is probably their best bang for the buck. But the question, “who is going to attack Saudi Arabia?” remains. Who, indeed?

-Badtux the Military Penguin