New Recruit
Do you know why that is the case? Is it more because of external factors? I mean Huidfelts and its STANFLEX concept sounds good on paper, don't know why not many navies find it appealing
I do too finds the Damen's Omega class offering much more appealing, albeit for more shallow reason of simply looking badass.
Wouldn't RNoAF bird is pretty fatigued/high hours by now.
to be honest , if the norway decide to sell 46 of their F-16 for a hefty price , let's say around 800 - 1.5 billion ish price range, i would recommend to take it , however that would make our f-16 fleet + 32 brand new vipers creating 7 squadron , is indonesia ready to provide the supporting stuff such as airbase and other thing , the lockheed martin may aswell seeing this as opportunity to provide us with TOT of maintenance and MRO or even more , making the spare parts.
We've always made spare parts for the F-16. When General Dynamics first came to us in the 90's offering the F-16 over Boeing's F-15, part of the deal was setting up an MRO facility in PTDI along with the manufacture of certain spare parts. This is why I've always lobbied for more US arms. You can say whatever you want about US politics but US weaponry is undoubtedly superior to their Russian counterparts and often times they have better trade deals that comes with them.
Uniquely, Norwegian F-16 has AN/ALQ-162 Internal ECM, although they also have AN/ALQ-131 ECM Pod
We do need them though. Right now, the Air Force's main issue is sortie generation due to lack of air frames and weapons. The AU would struggle to generate sorties from their Tri-Service bases after the first day of war against any capable tertiary adversary. Regardless of what aircraft it is, they need to be of sufficient numbers and would also need to be datalinked together in order to be a credible deterrence. The addition of more Vipers along with more advanced sub systems and weapons to our existing one would help us survive, at least, 2 weeks in the event of a war. Why 2 weeks? it's because 2 weeks is the time frame most countries use in defense planning as it is a realistic time frame for external help to arrive.
If you take the 46 Norwegian Vipers + 32 Block 72's then upgrade them all to the Block 72 standard, datalinked through Link-16 and supported by E-7 AWACS + GCI radars and KC-46 tankers it would be a bigger deterrence againt any potential foe than the Flankers could ever be.
And coated it with Have Glass V RAM (Radar absorbent material) paint scheme if US allowed us to do so .
About Link16 , we need to sign Cismoa first to get it right?
