Who Can REALLY Make the Gear

G

godofthunder9010

Active member
Split off from Topic: Iran's 2nd Fighter Passes Tests

... How many nations in the world possess the capability to produce a top notch fighter (or top notch BIGGER military hardware of any sort) without any outside entity making the parts for them, etc?

Seems that almost every "first world" nation has that capability. All of the former USSR has that capability. Most of Europe as well. The more developed nations of Southeast Asia too. But ... I don't know of a single predominantly muslim nation (but if anyone can give me better information please do.) And the continent of Africa only has one that I can think of: South Africa. None of Latin America that I'm aware of. China and India are even questionable on this score. Most of the hardware they produce is reverse engineered and built from parts they obtained from elsewhere.

I believe that the list of nations that are sufficiently developed is a relatively short list. This seems very interesting, because it means that there is a very limited number of nations cabable of waging war for a sustained period without any help from outside sources.
 
R&D requires money and resources that only a few countries in the world possess.
Southeast Asian countries don't have this capability. Even the advanced ones.
Japan has this capability and South Korea is next in line but still very far off in 2nd. Actually there is a new K-2 MBT coming out and it appears (for now anyway) that it isn't a serious clone of anything.
 
But in that instance, South Korea would be making a top of the line Main Battle Tank after having either made all their own parts of at least have the capacity for doing so, correct?

I suppose there's no getting away from the fact that it goes by degrees and by levels. What surprises me is that Iran (for example), a nation with substantial resources and population, appears unable to develop the capacity of building first-class military hardware start to finish. Of course, truth be told, ousting the Shah and the following rule by Ayatolla Komeni drove their technical capabilities back towards the dark ages. Prior to that revolution, Iran was the most technologically and economically developed nation in the muslim world.

There are countless nations like Iran who have the resources in abundance and just fail to use them.
 
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I guess if you cannot produce something that will top what's already out there, there's no need to reinvent the wheel. It's easier to clone and copy.

Currently South Korea has been pretty aggressive with local R&D. Their current designs are based on technology they have bought from the US but usually such baby steps are required to gain the industrial and high tech know how of the arms industry before a full blown domestic product can be produced.
The most non-clone equipment are the K-1 Submachine gun and K-2 rifle. They are very different, especially so that the K-2, though the magazine feed and trigger system is similar to the M-16 series, the gas system is closely related to the AK series rifles.
The T-50 trainer jet is very much F-16 and you can also see bits of F-5 in there but it's again a baby step towards maturing the aircraft industry.
It's making the steps to create new stuff.
Japan of course has some very original hardware and has been producing them for some time now. Their Type 90 MBT is among the finest MBTs in the world.
 
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