You really think that's what happend at the Falklands? You come here and talk with the
kahve ağzı. We already don't have complete control on our F-16s, our airforce is fully dependant on US, having F-35s would only increase our dependancy on a little level. But it's pros are:
- Tens of Billions of dollars worth of industrial participation that would give us the technology and the experience to develop the TF-X and contribute to our crappy economy at the same time
- Easily being able to gain air superiority if tensions increased in the E.Mediterranean.
- Having a stop-gap plane that would replace our aging fighters while we are waiting for the TF-X/MMU.
- Gaining experince on operating 5. generation Stealth jets with the most advanced fighter ever built.
You guys stupiditly think that we can gain technologies and experiences by pouring money into it. If so, Saudi Arabia would have been the most advanced state in the World. Even Japan which has much more experince than us wanted to join the Tempest or pay for the US to develop one for them; even though they proved themselves to be capable of developing a 5th generation plane with the Mitsubishi X-2 Shinshin.
We need air defence systems. But not a one like the S-400. Do you really think that S-400 can shot down an F-16 from 400 kilometers?
We already have the Siper coming up, we could've waited for another 3 or 4 years more if we managed to wait for 30 years already. And we also didn't needed an ADS like the S-400 that has questionable BMD capacities.
You can't control an airspace with only air defence systems. You can make A2AD with S-400s, but you can't fully control your airspace.Please read the thread in the link:
When it comes to the economics; we could have gained tens of billions of dollars by both the industrial participations and having an F-135 maintanence center in Turkey that would also give us critical technologies.
Do you really think we can gain air superiority with an propeller driven drone?
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History shows us that the side that has the air superiority always wins. Be it the WW2, Arab-Israeli wars, the Falklands or the Gulf Wars... it doesn't matter. Just back in March we saw an another example of that. How can you guys forget that?