Comments on: Pentagon Selling F-14 Parts to Iran

By: Nima

Nima — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 02:26:44 +0000

Well, I need to mention a few things:
The threat from the Phoenix missiles should not be important because most of their F-14s were sabotaged right after the revolution so that they do not have the capability to fire Phoenix missiles.
About the pilots, I do not think they are crappy. However, they might not be as good as the ones who were trained in America before the revolution.
There's a possibility that the Iranian engineers may reverse engineer some part of the F-14 as they have done it in many other cases. However, the planes themselves are old and there's much body fatigue in them. In addition, they use older engines that are known for stalling.

By: ob1

ob1 — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 05:32:28 +0000

There is no reason to degrade them. It just isn't necessary. The Iranian F-14's are around 30 year old airframes. I don't know the history of them but I doubt they were top of the line even back then. They were probably several versions old back then. I'm sure that they have tried to make improvements but they are still so far behind anything we now put in the air that they have virtually no chance of doing anything other than exploding spectacularly. We should sell them all of the parts that they will buy. That is 57 million that they won't have available to buy other military equipment from the Russians or others.

By: jeff b

jeff b — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 01:28:26 +0000

They should degrade the parts and then make sure they get to Iran :)

By: Dale Cox

Dale Cox — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 01:15:22 +0000

Let me get this straight - we get money for parts to airplanes that our pilots may end up shooting down and oh by the way nobody else on the planet needs the parts? What's the problem? Sounds like a two for one deal to me. We get to make money for getting rid of our trash. What a bargain.

By: legion

legion — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 23:40:10 +0000

Not to mention, the real threat from the F-14 is not necessarily from the aircraft itself, but from the 110-mile range Phoenix missile system it was built around. _That's_ something that we've never put on the market to anyone; nor should we. As ob1 notes, without that missile, and absent long hours of flying & combat training, they're just more targets...

By: ob1

ob1 — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 22:49:15 +0000

Why not sell them to Iran? More targets for our pilots! The F-14 is obsolete. Iran's pilots are crap who have almost no time training in the air. Add the 2 together and all you have are human piloted target drones that the Iranians have paid us to shootdown.

By: Jackie Jones

Jackie Jones — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 20:58:00 +0000

What about the laws for military sales, what are the stipulations? There are laws and rules for military sales to foreign countries.

By: On Deadline - USATODAY.com

On Deadline - USATODAY.com — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 +0000

Customs agents confiscated them and returned them to the Pentagon, which sold them again -- customs evidence tags still attached -- to another buyer, also a suspected broker for Iran. Reaction to AP's report is building in the blogosphere: â¢ James Joyner at Outside the Beltway writes that "in the context of a $439.3 billion defense budget, grossing $57 million in sales is less than a rounding error. When one subtracts the cost of running the program and monitoring it, it becomes quite trivial. And my guess is that the sale of items