Back in the day in computer gaming when a weapon is lowered in power it is called ‘nerfed’
I’ve seen lots of inventories of other countries airforce and they usually say something like “F16A (Export)” or Mig-29a (Export)"
How are these aircraft nerfed for export? If we sell F16’s to say Peru, presumably a friendly country that was fighting a marxist insurgency back in the day, why make them have an export version? Is it worse? If so why? Is Peru going to be dog fighting us? I would think if that were the case we wouldn’t sell them anything to begin with.
In the case of the F-16’s it’s the electronics that are ‘nerfed’. We don’t give them the best radars or on-board electronic systems. Also, they are naturally ‘nerfed’ by the fact that most countries don’t have the tightly integrated C&C systems we have. They don’t have AWACS, for instance, so it makes each individual fighter less effective than a comparable one flying for the US. Pilot training is another factor, but this is straying from your original question. Basically, the US is willing to see the airframe (in some cases…good luck getting, say, and F-22 at any price or in any nerfed config) but the advanced avionics aren’t going to be part of the deal.
This is particularly easy to do with the F-16, which was designed with modular electronics packages so you can quickly and easily pull one unit out and replace it with another (presumably a less-advanced one).
There are plenty of reasons. The two most obvious ones are industrial espionage and security. Whatever you sell has the very real possibility of being copied and reverse engineered, and then remanufactured without license or sold to a hostile party. The third one is where the buyer themselves prefer to integrate their own weapons and electronics packages as well as other modifications, the Israelis being a very typical example of this.
Folks have already mentioned the electronics, but as well the power plant could be a lower grade unit. I believe pakistan got the F-16 with the J-75, instead of the F110 that the later blocks of F16s had.
China flys the SU30 heavy intercepter, with the exception of the Russian BVR missiles that would usually equip it.
There was a proposed export variant of the original F-16A which was to be equipped with the GE J-79 engine (same as the F-4 had). It was called the F-16/79.
Nobody ever bought any. This was at the height of the competition with the USSR to arm the rest of the world & the US eventually decided it didn’t want to signal “you’re a second-class ally” by offering somebody the F-16/79 while other countries got offered the regular F-16A/B.
The early F-16 blocks all had various models of the Pratt & Whitney F100. Later F-16 blocks came in both P&W F100 & GE F110 powered subtypes.
The original Pakistani order in the 1980s was F-16A/Bs with P&W F100 engines. This got held up before delivery due to US unhapiness with Pakistan’s nuclear program. Part of the order was eventually delivered in the early 2000s.
They also subsequently bought some later block F-16C/Ds also equipped with F100s, albeit a more powerful variant than the A/Bs had.
The spread of the F-15 should have made it obvious to anyone that Israel and Saudi Arabia were flying in a different class than regular, run-o-the-mill allies?
