And now a followup to one of the most vehemently commented old Sepia Mutiny posts - the annual fighter war games between the USAF and IAF. This year brought a new set of games and apparently a similar result -

Mingling over a few rounds of golf, dogfighting a bit over the jungles of West Bengal - this month’s Cope India 2005 war games were billed as a standard two-week exercise between Indian and American top guns.

…The exercises had mixed teams of Indian and American pilots on both sides, which means that both the Americans and the Indians won, and lost. Yet, observers say that in a surprising number of encounters - particularly between the American F-16s and the Indian Sukhoi-30 MKIs - the Indian pilots came out the winners.

“Since the cold war, there has been the general assumption that India is a third-world country with Soviet technology, and wherever the Soviet-supported equipment went, it didn’t perform well,” says Jasjit Singh, a retired air commodore and now director of the Center for Air Power Studies in New Delhi. “That myth has been blown out by the results” of these air exercises.

Predictably, chauvinists of all stripes were pulled out of the woodwork -

…during Cope India ‘05, Bharat Rakshak was a veritable cheering session for the underestimated Indian Air Force.

Typical was a posting by a blogger who called himself “Babui.” Citing a quote from a US Air Force participant in Cope India ‘05 in Stars and Stripes - “We try to replicate how these aircraft perform in the air, and I think we’re good at doing that in our Air Force, but what we can’t replicate is what’s going on in their minds. They’ve challenged our traditional way of thinking on how an adversary, from whichever country, would fight.” - “Babui” wrote, “That quote is as good an admission that the F-16 jocks got their clocks cleaned.”

…an American pilot who participated in the exercise, added his own two cents on the blog. “It makes me sick to see some of the posts on this website,” wrote a purported US “Viper” pilot. “They made some mistakes and so did we…. That’s what happens and you learn from it.”

Oh yeah? Well mine’s bigger than yours. Manish previously covered the new SU-30’s the Indian team fielded for the games. An impressive piece of machinery indeed and certainly an impetus for next generation F35’s and F22’s.