Bad idea. Gunships like that can only be used against opponents with no realistic chance of shooting back at them - they're what the US uses to say "we're not even taking you seriously any more". Against a Me-109 or Wirbelwind flakpanzer, they're nothing but an entire crew's worth of "sad duty...
No, I mean that the reason they had so many aircraft is that they expected them to be used up. Although if they were planning to use trainers, they weren't the only ones: the RAF was planning to arm their trainers and use them with instructor pilots as last-ditch interceptors, and I'd be amazed...
It's possible, but I doubt it. I think it's more that if/when they had to go up against a serious opponent (such as NATO) they had enough aircraft that even with poor readiness rates they could count on enough being operable for the four weeks the campaign would last (after that, either they had...
Yes, that's possible, although the radiation levels would drop quite fast from airbursts. You wouldn't need many ground bursts to soften up a landing zone, mostly what you want to do is prevent reinforcements arriving, and the beach defences themselves can be handled adequately with conventional...
There are several solutions to that problem, but the most obvious one is probably also the simplest: nuke your way in, starting from the outside. Use nukes to clear a path through the air defences, starting from where you can reliably get a bomber to. It doesn't take many nukes, even on...
Well, most of them do, at least in theory. But have you ever noticed how many Russian transport aircraft have windows on the underside of the nose? That's so they can be converted to bombers more easily by building-in a bomb-aimer's position. It's also worth noting how many transports get...
That's assuming the Argentines practice the same things. If they see the Harriers as carrier aircraft which don't need arrestor wires, they might not be ready to deploy them like that.
They've also started getting LPH-style vessels, which make sense given their huge archipelagic nature. But with helicopters, not prop birds from the 1950s.
The Thai carrier is basically a royal yacht - I don't think it even carries any aircraft any more, and it never carried more than a handful...
Forget power projection - developing countries can't do it, and if they try they deserve everything that happens to them. My question about the remaining roles is "which of those are helicopters not suitable for"? Because I can see a role for a CVE-sized helicopter carrier in them, but I can't...
Agreed. They'd need some significant bomber threat to make it a plausible purchase, and a more-capable Indonesia was about the only one I could come up with.
I agree with this point, although Australia might also fit into that category. If faced by a Red Indonesia that made better use of its Tu-16s, I think the Aussies might be remotely plausible purchasers. They're not going to want to fund or run an orphan fleet either, of course, so in anything...
What it boils down to is at night, the Stukas can't find their targets. In daytime, the Stukas are the targets. All the WW2 combatants quickly learned that divebombers cannot operate in circumstances where the enemy can effectively fight back. Enemy fighters eat them for breakfast, any...