Ike, Your goverment couldve purchased F16s and F15s if they could afford them, which I seriously doubt.
My country, Colombia, does not buy those airplanes...first we cant afford them and second theres no need for them. Our Khafir fighters are updated regularly in their avionics and weapon systems, they may be no F15 or F16, but they do the job of killing Guerrillas and posing a serious threat in the air superiority role should any of our neighbors wish to play pokey.
Any country buying F15s and F16s or Mig29's in hopes of being able to defend itself against a major world power like the USA or Britain are sadly deluded, no matter how good or how many they buy, the bigger boys will always have more of them and with better stuff on them. So why burn money in stupidities?
Take Peru for example. In their "incident" with Ecuador in the 90's they almost came to war.. they had their fighters and helicopters shooting each other... Peru had F16's , Ecuador had POS fighters. In the biggest folly of all , Peru's F16's were grounded because there was not money for spare parts or the fuel to use them in combat, they were too expensive to use or risk using. How much more messed up can you get?
As far as Russian weapons go, you just have to look at what Russia itself is worried about.
The Iraqi army was built from the ground up as a mirror copy of the Russian military, with assistance from Russian military peeps. Their Air defenses, their training, weapons, etc.
And they got WIPED in less than a week by a force which was significantly smaller, on unfamiliar terrain and on the attack role.
Now the russian military is going to be having a MAJOR restructuring after this war. You just wait and see. They have realized that their policy of poorly trained, but numerous (conscript), centralized command,with mass-firepower based army design fails in front of a highly trained, precise and volunteer (motivated), SMALLER force.
