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The United States warned Turkey against moving ahead with plans to buy a sophisticated Russian missile defence system that the Pentagon believes would threaten its advanced F-35 fighter aircraft.
The State Department made the remarks on a day when the head of US European Command spoke to politicians on Capitol Hill and said Turkey should reconsider its plan to buy the S-400 from Russia this year.
"We've clearly warned Turkey that its potential acquisition of the S-400 will result in a reassessment of Turkey's participation in the F-35 programme, and risk other potential future arms transfers to Turkey," said deputy spokesman Robert Palladino on Tuesday.
The US agreed to sell 100 of its latest fifth-generation F-35 fighters to Turkey and has so far delivered two of the aircraft. But Congress last year ordered a delay in future deliveries.
[...] The S-400 can track a large number of potential targets, including stealth targets such as the US F-35 fighter jet. Other advantages included its high mobility, meaning it can be set up, fired and moved within minutes.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 07 2019, @11:11AM
We'd be better off just spinning up a new run of A-10s. For the price of other close air support planes they are without equal. And given that they only go in when air superiority is achieved, the only real threat would be hidden ground based targets like the S-400, which wouldn't take long to be dealt with by either ground forces, or the swarms of A-10s we could afford in place of a single F-35.
Furthermore last I checked their cost to operating is much lower than almost any other currently fielded plane, and given their survival odds in the field, other than avionics upgrades, and maybe adding another layer of flight surface control redundancy thanks to modern electronics and manufacturing (in addition to hydraulics, and cable if they have them) they could have a return rate even under critical damage that no other plane has or had.