I’ll take five then…
Not sure why BoingBoing is rehashing old news (this is from 6 months ago!), but the truth is that this sort of defence contract is complex and built upon careful compromises and dealmaking, often completely unrelated to the technical subject at hand. It’s been suggested elsewhere that Brazilian authorities were looking for a way to ditch the Boeing offer before Snowden was even in the picture (it just didn’t suit their military stance & budget), but diplomatic implications were complex (i.e. US wouldn’t have appreciated it, and Brazil wanted to reduce their inevitable unhappiness as much as possible).
The NSA affair soured diplomatic relationships between the two countries for a period, mostly because the US refused to apologise in diplomatic terms (i.e. to give Brazil some help with this or that issue, or some other sort of symbolic compensation) and sort-of told Roussef to go stuff herself. At that point, “not upsetting the US” ceased to be a requirement for this deal, and the eventual decision could be taken on simpler terms. In a way, it was the perfect excuse.
I don’t think the NSA revelations costed much in economic terms (yet), because US companies dominate most markets for the sort of services that are affected by them. However, from a diplomatic point of view, it’s clear how those months were quite taxing for the US State Dept: a lot of foreign diplomats started knocking at their door asking for a payday, so to speak. It was very disingenuous, hypocritical and a bit too overt, in particular from European governments who clearly refused to commit on the subject, so I can see why the US administration refused to play ball. We will probably never know how big the diplomatic blow was in real terms.
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Only five? At that price I’d start my own personal air force.
Yeah, but who’s gonna fly it, kid?
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Yesss…. since the 1950s the US has had a strong hand in … undermining foreign aviation development.
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Tell that to Iran, who is still flying F14s. Those planes were notorious for their high maintenance requirements too.
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They’re listing them, but how much active flight time are they getting out of them? Are they like North Korean photoshop-missiles, or are they truly useful contributors to the country’s air defence?
I don’t mean to cast doubt on your comment - I honestly don’t know.
Its a pretty good idea to understand that things that happened a few months (weeks or even years ago, like Fukushima, New Orleans and WWII) are still relevant.
Now, I want you to understand that I mean this in the most loving way possible:
Cause 'Murica! That’s why!
(I’m saying that characterizing “this or that issue” as “diplomatic compensation”, is missing the point entirely of the roles played by all parties involved, and ascribing to those roles the ability to deal with the consequences of both the USA’s actions and the responsabilities of a goverment to maintain sovereign rule, thereby allowing everyone to say “Whats done is done” and “move on”, which is of course, not at all what has happened)
Iran, despite its reputation of being in the Axis of Evil, is actually a somewhat progressive nation with a good tech base. Their political structure is horrible, with an unaccountable religious figure gumming up the works, but they’re a capable nation. They’re manufacturing the replacement parts that they can’t source from the US anymore:
There are two wings still listed as active duty, but I don’t know how much flight time that actually entails these days, but they’re not totally grounded. One crashed in 2012 on a training exercise.
It’s ironic that without the CIA installed Shah, Iran would probably be a US “ally” in the region, at least as much as Pakistan and Egypt.
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So who’s going to attack Brazil’s oil fields other than nearby countries? Bombing domestic airfields instead of sending a building inspector or maybe police? Drug wars because the Americans have been militarized Prohibition? I think you’re pretty much backing up my original point.
Some years ago I read a book by a (presumably not-even-vaguely-unbiased) Iranian ex-military guy about the Shah’s 1953 overthrow of the democratically elected Mosaddegh government, which claimed that the overthrow was mostly done by the British, not the CIA, who were still bumbling around trying to figure out who to bribe by the time the coup was over. His assertion is that after the Bay of Pigs failure, the CIA started claiming that they had a lot of influence in the Anti-Communist takeover of Iran, because that one had at least “succeeded”.
Looking back at US foreign policy of the 1950s, with the Dulles brothers running CIA operations in Iran, Guatemala, Vietnam, much of the rest of Latin America, post-colonial Africa in the 60s, etc., I’ve decided that I no longer really like Ike, and that his great speech about the dangers of the military-industrial complex covered a lot of things he should have dealt with earlier.
You seem to have little appreciation for how big Brazil is. It is very, very big. The airfields were bombed from the air because that was the only way to find them in the jungle and the only reasonable way to destroy them. Do you want to spend months building an impossible-to-keep-secret road to each of the airports? Or perform the extremely vulnerable operation of landing troops directly on the airfield? Oh, that would require helicopters, which is an air force.
Just about every nation has an air force, even ones far poorer than Brazil. And yes they are mostly a contingency, but you can’t tell when you need one and if you need one and don’t have one it takes years and years to create it.
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The guys at Top Gear seemed to like saabs. Maybe they went bad after, you know, GM bought them.
Please, leasing weapons of war is only one of many options. Want to bomb a country, but lack the resources to do it? M&M industries will, for a reasonable fee, rent you a fleet of planes and pilots (often subcontracted off that country’s own military) by the hour, and do whatever bombing you need for you. Any country, even our own!
It may seem crazy, but what’s good for the syndicate is good for the country, and everyone gets a share.
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Czech and Hungarian Air Forces also lease their aircraft.
There will always be room for Han Solo in my air force, as long as he shoots first.
My point exactly, they received 79 F-14s, and could only fly a few at a time by buying American parts and receiving Israeli support as unofficial assistance during the Iran-Iraq war via surreptitious channels. With Russian and other support the Iranians have finally been able to support a few F-14s themselves almost forty years after they were delivered and shortly thereafter embargoed following the revolution.
The only problem I ever had with my ’91 900T was the alternator wire repeatedly burning out for some reason, which was easy enough to fix on the side of the road.
God, I miss that car.
Boeing didn’t have a chance in the competition anyways. It was actually ranked 3rd (of 3) bids. The Brazilian AF always wanted the Saabs, but the civilian bureaucracy wanted to get the French Rafales (since they wanted to cozy up to the French a bit more). At one point, the Rafale was announced to be the winner… and then that was taken back.
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