Ok, almost any country.
I was astounded to discover that Egypt has a dozen AH 64 Apaches in their fleet! The AH 64 Apache is the worlds most advanced attack helicopter, made in the U.S. It has also become the primary attack helicopter of multiple nations, including Greece, Japan, Israel, the Netherlands, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates , among others.
I was even more surprised when I found out Algeria has Russian Mig 25 Foxbats in their fleet. These can reach speeds of > Mach 3
https://militarywatchmagazine.com/m/articles/2020/04/11/article_5e91b4cb557b83_66147547.jpeg
So i did some research.
First, Why do countries buy fighter jets from the US/Russia instead of manufacturing their own?
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To dumb it down it boils down to the fact most countries don’t have the money, technology, facilities and know how. It would take decades to start from scratch to just produce a 4th gen fighter if the country did have the money. And there is still no guarantee that fighter would even be relevant by the time it’s in active service. Then you have to be able to maintain it.
Even wealthy countries can’t just make their own fighters. The US is the only country that can provide you with top of the line fighters and be able to supply you with plenty of parts and tech support.
Not everyone is able or can afford to build their own. There are only a few countries that make good fighter planes, and setting up a new facility that can compete with whats already out there is too expensive for smaller countries.
So apart from the US you have Sweden’s Gripen, the French Rafale, Europe’s Eurofighter, Brazil’s Embraer light military aircrafts, and in the past there was Europe’s Tornado and Alphajet, Sweden’s Viggen, or the French Mirage aircrafts.
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So can any country just buy jets from USA/Russia as long as the country is wealthy?
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The US doesn’t sell the F-35 to anyone; they’ve even denied the jet to some allied countries like India, because India has strong military ties to Russia.
The countries that are being sold F-35s are either NATO countries that the US already trusts with housing forward-deployed nuclear weapons, or they’re major allies like South Korea, Japan, Israel and Australia.
Now let’s come to Russia. In Russia most of the aviation companies are either state-owned or joint stock enterprises. And due to Russia’s not-so-good diplomatic relations with other nations, they don’t usually sell to other countries. Especially NATO countries which include Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom, the United States, Greece, Turkey, Germany, Spain, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia and Montenegro are Russia’s kind-of-enemies. Russia sells to other nations……………but only to those which are it’s closest allies such as some members of former Soviet Union who have not yet joined NATO. Russia’s closest allies are India and China ,and Russia unhesitatingly sells them armaments and weapons (especially China).
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