"phil hunt" wrote in message
. ..
On Wed, 10 Sep 2003 01:01:41 -0700, Hobo wrote:

If a country had zero interest in offensive actions and was only
interested in defense, would putting money into military aircraft
instead of a SAM system make any sense?

Consider a vast country with lots of empty spaces, such as Russia,
Australia or Saudi Arabia. It'd beb uneconomic to put missiles
everywhere on such a country (even if they just covered the
borders), you'd have to use patrol, AEW, and interceptor aircraft.

But for smaller targets, for example a nation's capital city and its
environs, missile defence may be viable. However, missile defence,
if it uses radars, can be destroyed by anti-radar missiles, and I
don't know of any long-range SAM systrems that use only passive
sensors (such as visual and IR).

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