Alejandro Dubrovsky wrote:
>
> * Barbara Lamar <altamiratexas@earthlink.net> [010916 19:47]:
> >
> > > Israel is able to defend itself quite nicely.
> >
> > I don't believe it's ever had to defend itself without US support.
> >
> history is definitely not my field, but AFAIK, there was no governmental US
> support for the first dozen years or so of israel's history. They even refused to
> sell weapons to israel during the 50's. i would like someone with more knowledge
> on the matter to comment.
For many years the US held an arms embargo against Israel, leaving
Israel to buy Mirage and Mig fighters from France and the USSR, as well
as european and south african armor and artillery. It developed its own
small arms industry, building the various models of Uzi derived from a
Czech design, itself derivative of a Nazi machine gun (interesting
huh?). IAI also got into the fighter plane industry, developing it's
Kfir fighter planes based on Mig and Mirage technologies (both of which
are also direct descendants of the Messerschmitt 262 and the Heinkel
Volksjager jet fighters, the core of their jet engines is nearly
indistinguisable from those of the early Kfir fighters).
It was not until the late 60's/early 70's that we started selling planes
to Israel, F-4 Phantoms, F-5 Freedom Fighters, and I believe A-4
Skyhawks, and not in significant quantities until the late 70's, when we
equipped them with enough F-15's and F-16's to allow them to chalk up a
50 to 1 kill ratio in the air battles over the Bekaa Valley with Syria
during the Lebanon War.
We had also sold F-5's and A-4's to Jordan, Egypt, Kuwait, and several
other moderate arab states as soviet influence started waning over the
region in the 70's. While there is a complaint that we wouldn't sell
F-15's to, say, Saudi Arabia for a while, we did sell them to Egypt, and
keep in mind that tactically, an F-15 can be beaten by 2.5 F-5's (which
are significantly cheaper planes).
In the mid 80's the Israelis then invested in US attack helicopters and
attempted to launch its own version of the F-16, a delta winged beauty
with a wholly new avionics and radar suite that was in excess of
anything the US had envisioned for its own Falcons. There was a big
fight with democrats in congress over this, and the program died out (as
did a similar program with Japan several years later).
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Oct 12 2001 - 14:40:48 MDT