He's most likely talking about the IAF's and USAF's employment of AIM-120s as missile interceptors against Iranian threats.
Though, IIRC, the Ukrainians have also been using AIM-120s as SAMs.
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- Thread starter tphuang
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He's most likely talking about the IAF's and USAF's employment of AIM-120s as missile interceptors against Iranian threats.
Though, IIRC, the Ukrainians have also been using AIM-120s as SAMs.
Those are not impressive accomplishments. Those shoot downs are no different from target drones and there were no electronic countermeasures.
How do you explain this quote
The thing you need to know here is how AMRAAM ratio has visibly fallen down in payloads.
From nearly absolute(US jets routinely carried around just 1 sidewinder a few years ago), to 4-6 sidewinders(both in US and in Ukraine), i.e. their limit.
Maj. Gen. Jon Norman, USAF (Ret.) is currently serving as .
The good major general wouldn't be doing his job if he wasn't overselling the value proposition of his employer's products.
Though he may have been genuinely surprised by the performance of legacy AIM-120 variants from his youth against relatively modern threats — be it loitering munitions or missiles (re)manufactured these last few years leveraging previously unseen ECM capabilities, albeit not necessarily the most cutting edge ECM technologies and likely largely assembled from OTS Chinese made components — deployed by Russian and Iranian forces.
TBF, the legacy AIM-120 examples he spoke of may not have reasonably accounted for current Iranian and Russian ECM capabilities — even if they're not the most sophisticated — when they were manufactured in the 1990s and 2000s.
So has the AIM-120's performance been particularly impressive? Not really.
However, has it performed well enough for someone in Jon Norman's position to eat up their own and more of their employer's bullshit? Absolutely!
I wouldn't think too much of this: salesmen will exaggerate and embellish. It's what they do regardless of what they sell.
For what it's worth, a Pakistani F-16 shot down an Indian MiG-21 in 2019, and it was probably done using an AMRAAM. That said, the ability to shoot down an ancient MiG-21 isn't much of an accomplishment.
I think that they're starting to worry about their missile inventory. The AMRAAM is probably the most important American missile, and they simply don't make enough of them. Raytheon only makes some 1200 of AIM-120s of all models, and for all customers. There must be around 4000+ fighters which can fire the missile. It would take over three years of production to make enough missiles for each of these fighters to test fire a single AIM-120. And with China's bans on critical materials, that supply might even go down.
I don’t think that AMRAAM has killed anything more impressive than export MIG-29 in live combat.
Shooting a Mig-21 that most likely was not even aware of being shot at is no different from shooting at a targeting drone.
Geran and Shahed drones have ECM capabilities? First time I heard of it.
That said it is likely that PAF scored a hit against an MKI during swift retort. Whether it actually killed the jet outright is inconclusive. Two MKI pilots did die in car accident within a week of the engagement so there’s that…