The Perfect Soldier: Special Operations, Commandos, and the Future of Us Warfare by James F. Dunnigan |
Dirty Little Secrets
The Long And Winding Road
Russia's effort to develop an F-22 class fighter (the PAK FA) is going to require a lot of work. The prototype, that took its first flight recently, was clearly the basic Su-27 airframe modified to be stealthier. This included changing the shape of the aircraft to be less radar reflective, and providing internal bays for bombs and missiles. But there's much more to do in order to achieve anything close to the stealthiness of the F-22. It took fifteen years for the F-22 to go from initial flight, to entering service. The PAK FA could proceed faster, learning from the F-22 experience (especially if some of the Internet based espionage carried out in the last decade was Russian). But such development speed has not been a Russian characteristic.
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