As it was expected, the dick measuring contest is now in full swing between Croatia and Serbia regarding whom has a better squadron. Its absolutely hilarious to read because none of the arguments takes into consideration minor things such as strategy, system integration, long term planning and infrastructure needed to support such a complex system such as Rafale.
For Croatia Rafale has some sense, since Coratia has a huge coastal line that needs to defend and from that point, Rafale will serve them well. Also for their expansion plans, Rafale fits well as a force projection asset, especially if they get meteor missiles which they will almost certainly. The downside is that airframes are used, but considering how well they are maintained, that is not really an issue.
For Serbia, acquisition of Rafales is pure miss on all levels. Serbia is a land locked country with, to say at least, problematic standing and attitude. That puts logistic issues on the top, since it creates total dependency on political side and actually reduces sovereignty. In actual hostile scenario things are even worse. With a small strategic depth, Serbia has no worthy air bases that can survive the famous first hour of the war as all of them are in range of land based systems. If we add drone warfare into the mix, the situation becomes even more hopeless. This obvious realization lead to the almost panic acquistion of anti ballistic deffense systems from Israel at the mind bending cost. Finally, after they spent all those billions on equipment, they came to one simple realization that they are trying to fix now. Serbia doesn't have enough man power to man those systems and voila the compulsory service has been re introduced.
What a glourious mess this whole ordeal is.
