Wow!!
I am very surprised that most here support M7's stupidity in buying some useless aircrafts that he will never use. He could improve the morale of his army through better pay to personnel.
Facts,
- Uganda may own the fancy jets but chances are due to poor pay to their personnel, poor training etc, if it were to come to a time to use them, the gadgets will probably malfunction as a result of poor maintenance and lack of technical knowhow.
- Ug may be able to bomb her enemies once or twice before running out of the bombs ( I read somewhere that a tomahawk is Usd 8m) so one wonders how much a variant for this russian jet will cost and just how many Ug will buy and keep in stock. Therefore the cost of fighting a war with such gadgets will be too prohibitive and not sustainable for more than 3 sorties.
- I am yet to here of a war that was won by air superiority only, even the US had to put boots on the ground in Iraq to subdue them after billions of $ spent on bombing campaigns. The russians chased a ragtag army in the Afghan mountains for years using airpower and eventually gave up and returned home.
- The only deterent you need to neutralise the UG jets are SAMs moved in a mobile SAM launchers that you can procure from Russia for a fraction of the price and will not need running costs, place a few around the likely targets and the jets will suddenly have no viable targets
- And finally outside the US and her western allies and Russia no other country in the world has been involved in a war where it needed to deploy such sophisticated weaponry.
Museveni is purchasing this jets to use in independence parades and nothing else, if he doesn't know it yet, he will learn very painfully at the waste he will have gotten himself in.
I actually like the way we spend on our military, we should simply maintain a small highly motivated and mobile army that can be easily deployed if necessary.
Heavy weaponry (e.g a main battle tank) is expensive will probably never engage a viable target in this parts of the world and breaks down easily while the light armour is cheaper to use and maintain and can be deployed rapidly.
I would suggest we vary our military expenditure to recruit and train about 5,000 new recruits every year on a 5 year cycle in which time they should be a modest pay but also be trained in some skill, such that they form a reserve force equivalent to the standing army. The young men will after 5 years leave the army highly disciplined and with a skill and they can be arbsorbed into the police, fire dept, the KWS or move into the private sector where such disciplined skilled individuals will be in high demand. At the same time, they will retain their reserve status for say another 10 years.
I would also like to see acquisition of more mordern light armour including some mid sized helicopters, transport planes that are simple to maintain. and light tanks and personnel carriers.
Having said this, our military budget as a proportion to the entire budget should always be below, education, health care, agriculture, development expenditure, police and security matters and all those costs that are critical to the well being of the common mwananchi.
"The purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline." James Collins