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Game actually looks super fun. If it wasn't $120 on Amazon I'd consider buying it.

(Assuming one of you don't gift it to me for Christmas ;) )

There is a big view of the map here if you are interested.

http://www.amazon.ca/The-Politics-Procurement-Acquisition-Helicopter/dp/0774817151

Spoilers, the Chretien government threw the maritime helicopter program and the military under the bus to win some points.

Yeah, because we in the field of actually using the stuff don't know what we need. The obvious solution is to let civies turn military procurement into a popularity contest/bean counting exercise.

Might I suggest that drafting requirements is sometimes a little more complicated than your suggested "Oh Shiny" fits of stupidity.

AFAIK, definitive figures are available primarily for early variants (i.e. J-10, J-10A, J-10AS, J-10S), and have been published in Modern Chinese Warplanes, few years ago.

Lately - or at least in the case of J-10B/Cs - it became extremely hard to track new intakes because various of photographers are self-censuring serials visible on their photos before releasing these on the internet.

Anyway, what I know is as follows:

• J-10-Block 00: estimated at 14-16 (incl. prototypes 1001-1006 that are serving with FTTC)
  
  
• J-10-Block 01: 24
  
  
• J-10-Block 02: 24
  
  
• J-10-Block 03: 24
  
  
• J-10A-Block 04: 40
  
  
• J-10A-Block 05: 40
  
  
• J-10A-Block 06: 40
  
  
• J-10A-Block 07: 40
  
  
• J-10S-Block 01: estimated at 10-12
  
  
• J-10AS-Block 02: 40
  
  
• J-10AS-Block 03: 40
  
  
• J-10B: 55 (so far, and including two WS-10-powered examples)
  
  
• J-10C: 27 (so far)
  
  Totals (except I botched up this calculation):
  
  
• J-10A: 232
  
  
• J-10AS: 90
  
  
• J-10B: 55
  
  
• J-10C: 27
  
  -------------
  
  404 (without prototypes)
  
  Re. if they are at 'full production': production rate is at around 20-24 aircraft per annum, and this output is quite stabile since some 7-8 years. Chinese are in no rush, and thus I doubt they're going to increase this output. They're not going to decrease it either, though, because ever more of WS-10s are available and production of J-10B/Cs is organized so to make sure that at least one of sub-variants is regularly entering service (this is done so that there are sub-variants equipped with PESA and AL-41, AESA and AL-41, or with old radar and WS-10, for rexample, but - at least until now - there's no variant including 'all the newest stuff', which means they first want to test all of this at the FTTC, and see it really works, before installing all the 'best stuff' into something like 'definite' variant).

The Third World War by Sir John Hackett is pretty good.

First Clash: Combat Close-Up In World War Three
by Kenneth Macksey is another good one

A lot of the stuff you read will be horseshit, keep that in mind.

If you want reliable baseline, pick up a copy of the Friedman's Guide to Naval Weapon Systems. It hasn't been updated in 10 years but its probably the most reliable source that isn't ABSURDLY expensive. It will help you get an idea of what the state-of-the-art was 10 years ago.

https://www.amazon.com/Naval-Institute-Guide-Weapon-Systems/dp/1557502625

If you want a good basic reference for the technology then pick up a copy of Payne's Principles of Naval Weapon Systems.

https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Naval-Weapons-Systems-Professional/dp/1591146674/

You can use your new found powers to "filter" out the stupidity from the reality when you read defense blogs and news sites.

I really liked the book Red Army by Ralph Peters, I rank it right up there with Red Storm Rising.


It never covers the reasons for the war, it is pretty much just from a military perspective although it dances around from the privates, to mid level officers to the generals. And as the title implies, it is primarily from the point of the view of the Red Army, and I think it does a fantastic job at humanizing them (even though I will always root for the US, I did feel bad when some of the characters died).

The author of the Wired piece is well versed in this topic. See Countdown to Zero Day. Hint: It's about Stuxnet.

$30 off of Amazon. Tl;dr - good book. Buy. Shoot missile pew pew.

Christ, the guy even wrote a whole book about this.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XGS9TJG/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

Also, why do people always quote that RAND study? China is never going to put hundreds of Su-35s in the air to act as fodder to attrite away F-22s.

No prob, it's an interesting topic to me. I will say, regarding the Gulf War, from what I've read it's not at all regarded as an exception or temporary thing, but rather as the dawn of a revolution in warfare, and particularly a revolution in air power. The first Gulf War saw the full-scale wartime advent of stealth, precision-guided munitions, GPS, night vision, ground-scanning radar, and other technologies which are still used today. And technology has gotten much much better since then. And although it's true that Iraq's military turned out to be quite fragile, never recovering from the surprise onslaught of the first night's attack, almost all the fancy technology (possibly excepting the Patriot's nascent ABM capability) turned out to perform basically as advertised even in a miserable operating environment and under wartime pressure. That tech has generally only improved from there. Of course, so have the countermeasures...

And in previous wars, from WW2 even up through Operation Just Cause in the late 1980s, it's true that air power's ability against tanks was mixed, but it wasn't completely useless by any stretch. Tanks were regularly killed by ground attack aircraft in WW2 (consider the Il-2 and Ju-87G, most famously). Most other wars haven't had enough armored combat to show the success of air power against tanks specifically, but point targets in general were at least a partial success. In the Six-Day War, the Israelis destroyed hundreds of Egyptian aircraft on the ground, and in Vietnam, helicopter gunships were very successful in accurate ground attack. Late in Vietnam, the introduction of PGMs started the revolution that simmered quietly until the Gulf War kicked it wide open.

Getting back on topic, I haven't done much experimentation in CMANO with iron bombs and tanks, but I don't recall being overly impressed by their performance, nor with rockets. They work fine on soft targets and buildings, but tanks are more difficult. That said, in planes with advanced bombing systems like the F-15E, Su-24, A-6E, and others, iron bombs can be fairly accurate. One book I have, Storm Over Iraq, says the CEP of iron bombs dropped from F-16s in peacetime at low altitude was 30 ft, and in wartime dropped from medium altitude (~15k ft) was 200 ft (page 212). In Operation Opera in 1981, Israeli F-16s used unguided Mk 84s to bomb an Iraqi nuclear facility, with sources indicating about half hit their aimpoints directly, destroying the reactor and other critical underground facilities. CMANO's log will tell you how far away from a target the bombs hit, so you could set up some test scenarios with various planes and targets. If you could demonstrate some statistical inaccuracies, again I would bet the devs would at least hear you out. :)