and unknown to the USAF guy secretly forming chankian strategies to defeat that technology
If you truly think this is how the Americans are thinking, and that their diplomatic PR face is representative of the complexity of their thinking or approach, it's you who are in for a surprise.
post Cope India 2004 it was funny to see all these guys on the airforce forums trying to rationalise why the F-15s got beaten by elderly bisons
There wasn't much "rationalization" needed when the facts of the scenario were known.
Besides providing good DACT training for USAF and building interoperability, part of the game is for the USAF to cry wolf so that they get more funding.
Excellent point that many non-Americans do not grasp, despite the long history of the Pentagon doing just this. Crying wolf is not always _simply_ crying wolf, mind you. Sometimes it's necessary to play up a potential problem as more than it really is in order just to get the funding to deal with the actual level of threat in the U.S. system.
Interoperability is another excellent point that seems strangely overlooked here. This is how the U.S. operates, and it benefits greatly from it. America often plays coy about its capabilities, often because it's politically difficult to fully employ them. With the leash off, U.S. capabilities are significantly more advanced than many people want to believe, and its strategic thinking is VASTLY more multi-layered, complex and long-term than people believe.
You need good PR, if you run up huge bills all around the world, doing things which the US taxpayer may not approve of, but having to convince them anyway.
As a side note pertaining to "huge bills all around the world" - U.S. debt loads as a percentage of its economy are smaller than those of virtually every other developed economy, and many large developing economies such as India's. For example, America's current federal budget deficit is 2.6% of GDP, versus around 4.5% for India. Overall public debt for India is in the double-digit range. Because America's GDP is so much more massive than any other single nation's, the dollar amounts of its debts and deficits appear huge and have a far larger impact on global finance, but versus the resources available to the U.S. those figures leave the U.S. in reality in a much better fiscal situation than many of its critics.
But US human capability is average to average (-), by our standards, and its proven everyday.
The same way various negative stereotypes of Indians are "proven" every day? The U.S. has been vastly underestimated by many, and yet it never turns out to be the slow, slovenly, broken dullard it's portrayed as. Yet such stereotypes persist. Odd, no? It's almost as if the U.S. does little to hide its dirty laundry, and permits the stereotypes to go unchallenged.
The MKI “is an amazing jet that has a lot of maneuverability,” an essential trait when fighters fly within visual range of their enemy during combat missions, Captain Mentch said.
Which underscores what I said above. (And what others elsewhere note.) This sounds like high praise - and it is, but within a certain scope, that scope being that the reality is that U.S. (and other advanced Air Forces) doctrine and technology revolves heavily around eliminating the enemy _well_ before visual range.
And, finally, these exercises for the U.S. are _not_ about "winning." If this is how you see the Americans' mindset toward these things then I submit once more that you are operating under some grave misunderstandings of how they think and operate. Winning or losing a cooperative exercise does not matter to them. Their goals are multi-faceted: Analysis of their performance within narrow ranges, analysis of Indian performance within narrow ranges, overlapping of ranges and concommitant performance by both sides, deepening military-to-military ties, expanding interoperability, getting a feel for the attitudes of Indians, the atmosphere, and the mindset of Indian officers, and many, many more. Coming out on the winning or losing side of a scorecard doesn't change their large technological edge, their resources, their experience, their talent, their geostrategic position. It does _nothing_ for them except _help them improve_ if necessary, at the possible cost of having some people engage in empty, often misguided chest-thumping and gloating.
Can you not see this? The U.S. is not where it's at simply due to fortune or luck or happenstance, regardless of how many people try to play it off that way. Even the Chinese, as they have emerged more onto the global stage, and as is evidenced by their defense and political white papers, have abandoned their similar long-held beliefs. They now speak of a new-found appreciate for the depth and breadth of the position of the United States, and government universities have published several papers in the past few years that have done a 180 degree turn and frankly discuss that they believe the U.S. is not only not a waning superpower but that it will likely strengthen through century (while China and India do as well, of course). This is not the country of the stereotypes. That sort of behavior and mindset, the stereotypical "short-term thinking," the ego and the arrogance -- all of those are PRESENT in the United States, obviously, but their display obscures the fact but those are not the CORE of the country.
The U.S. does many foolish, sometimes stupid things. But the U.S. itself, its long-term course and its core systems, instutitions, goals and planning are _not_.