DTN News - DEFENSE NEWS: Global Fighter Jets ~ Asia, The New Centre Of Gravity?....NSI News Source Info # 1844Some of Asia’s aerospace industries are starting work on fifth-generation fighter aircraft. Despite huge technological hurdles, these countries could displace Western Europe as a leading centre of fighter jet development, and possibly one day give the United States some real competition in global markets.
FOR CENTURIES, North America and Europe have dominated the state-of-the-art when it comes to military technology. Nearly all the great breakthroughs in weaponry – from muskets to missiles – have originated there. And perhaps no field of military technology has been more consistently and overwhelmingly the purview of the occidental West than fighter jets.
Since the end of World War II, a handful of countries in the West – basically, the United States, the USSR/Russia, Britain, France, and Sweden – have controlled the global fighter jet industry. Many countries have tried to break into this business: Argentina in the 1950s, Egypt and India in the 1960s, Israel and South Africa in the 1980s; none were particularly successful, and some – such as the Indian HF-24 Marut – were spectacular failures. Even today, perhaps 90 percent of all fighter jets flown by all the world’s air forces are produced by these five countries, or are based on copies of their planes (such as the Chinese J-7 fighter, a virtual clone of the venerable Soviet MiG-21).
http://defense-technologynews.blogspot.com/2011/04/dtn-news-defense-news-global-fighter.html
