On Sat, 13 Sep 2003 18:14:03 GMT, Chad Irby wrote:

Steven DeMonnin wrote:

The real Asymmetry is in the quality of the pilots. I don't know the
Israeli training tempo, but I read a piece by Victor Hanson that said it
was comparable to the US training tempo, and that most dictatorial
states have a training regimen that is about 5% of the time the US
devotes to its pilots. In military training, marginal quantitative
difference can lead to huge qualitative differences.

Not to mention ,of course, the ground troops maintaining the planes.

Those brand new Eurofighters are going to be combat-effective for a
month, maybe two, and if they go into a heavy training regimen, it'll be
shorter than that.

And since they'll be "new" planes, they're going to have the normal
teething problems, without a good crew to do the updates and fixes that
any plane suffers off of the assemby line.

We're not talking some of the less able Arab nations, but Egypt, who
has no problems keeping it's F-16s at a fairly high availability, and
the Saudis, who also manage to keep their E-3s and F-15s in the air.

Peter Kemp