With a maximum speed of twice the speed of sound (1,400 mph) and 13 weapons-carrying points, it is a true multi-role aircraft: designed as a fighter which can also act as a bomber.British Aerospace, the UK prime contractor, claims Eurofighter will win in four out of five encounters with the top-of-the range Russian fighter, the Su-35, second only to the US F-22 advanced stealth fighter, which will win in nine out of 10. Eurofighter has now flown 200 hours and performed exactly as the computers predicted it would.Described by its chief test pilot last week as "the best handling high- performance aeroplane that any of us have ever flown", the Eurofighter is supremely agile. Few examples cited are of countries which the US would expect to face in conflict; instead, they are places where Europe and the US are fighting for markets.Chile, for example, "may be indicative of the type of environment the United States may have increasingly to cope with", the study says. Saab has already opened a sales office in Santiago, but the US is facing problems selling its F-16s there to replace Chile's ageing fleet of British Hawker Hunters.The European strikeforceEUROFIGHTER 2000After a shaky start, the first Eurofighter 2000s, built by Britain, Germany, Italy and Spain, are expected to be in service by 2001 They should be available for export by 2005. However, "US forces might be confronted with a rough parity in exchange ratios" - one US plane lost to one Eurofighter, rather than three to one, an unacceptable ratio.But the study probably has more to do with the fiercely competitive market for international defence sales than any future war. "The new European fighters employ a considerable amount of cutting-edge aerospace technology and are likely to be equipped with an impressive array of subsystems and advanced components," it says.Top of the list is the Eurofighter 2000, the aircraft which is expected to perform almost as well as the top-of-the range F-22 in air-to-air combat, and which is also a bomber. Below Eurofighter, and comparable in performance with the latest Russian Su-35 air-to-air fighter, come the French Rafale and the Swedish Gripen.But the Europeans are expected to provide better after-sales service, and that, the report says, may make them more attractive to Third-World dictators whom the US may end up fighting.The study does not suggest that current US planes would be outclassed by Eurofighters in Third World hands.

Without a Soviet threat to justify top-of-the-range weapon systems, the US is using European aircraft - which are designed to beat Russian aircraft - to justify them instead. But what, asks the report, if Third World countries were able to buy new European aircraft which "will have significant speed, stealth and manoeuvrability improvements over current types and are actively being marketed worldwide".Sceptics would argue that this is an extreme manifestation of the military- industrial complex. It appears as a justification for continued development of the new US fighter, the F-22."With the collapse of the Soviet Union, serious questions have been raised about the continuing need for highly capable and expensive weapon systems conceived at the height of the Cold War," it says. Existing US aircraft are probably well able to cope with current and future Russian systems. The US Air Force is preparing to meet the "Gray Threat". Not the "Grays" - or "Greys" - of the X Files, the Mekon-like extraterrestrials with the almond-shaped eyes No, the "Gray Threat" comes from Britain, France and Sweden. Or so says the Rand Corporation, the US think-tank that advises the Pentagon and the State Department.

The "Gray Threat" is posed by nations which produce aircraft which they may sell to people whom the Americans (the guys in white hats on white horses) may end up fighting. Not the "Black Threat" - the former Soviet Union - but the "Grays" in between: the Europeans, who will shortly be providing better ones. The study, subtitled "Assessing the next-generation European fighters", was funded by the US Air Force and reviewed by two academics to ensure impartiality. Recently the Croat mayor of western Mostar, Mijo Brajkovic, said that just as the Muslims possessed Sarajevo and the Bosnian Serbs had the northern city of Banja Luka, so the Croats should have Mostar.Nationalist Croats from western Herzegovina regard Mostar as the capital of the self-proclaimed Croat mini-state of Herzeg-Bosnia, which has survived, partly thanks to support from Croatia.In an interview in the German magazine Der Spiegel last year, President Franjo Tudjman of Croatia said: "The Muslims wanted to reign over the whole of Mostar then gain ground to the sea, and finally create an Islamic state That is what our Croats are defending themselves against.". But tensions and suspicions have plagued the Muslim-Croat relationship since the 1993-94 war, and international observers say the Dayton settlement may collapse if efforts to reunite Mostar are unsuccessful.The municipal elections gave 28,165 votes to the SDA and its coalition partners, and 26,464 votes to the nationalist Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ). In practice, this means Muslims and their allies will have a one- vote majority on the city council, should the Croats change their minds and take their seats.From a Muslim viewpoint, the Croats have never been genuinely committed to reuniting Mostar. In a letter to the Irish presidency of the EU, Bosnia's Muslim President, Alija Izetbegovic, condemned the boycott as "block- ing the entire process of democratically overcoming the Mostar crisis, and creating a dangerous precedent for the September elections".Under last year's Dayton peace settlement, Muslims and Croats are united in a federation that occupies 51 per cent of Bosnia, whereas 49 per cent is under Bosnian Serb control. The Croats also argued that the European Union, which has had a mandate since July 1994 to reunite Mostar, had overstepped its responsibilities by publishing the election results and declaring the poll fair.However, Bosnian Muslim leaders contended that the true purpose of the Croat boycott was to keep alive the possibility that Mostar would one day become the capital of a Bosnian Croat state, or even be absorbed into Croatia.

But they elected a council president, Hamdija Jahic, who is the local leader of the Muslim-led Party of Democratic Action (SDA)."As you see, the [Croat] representatives are not here, but I hope that they will take part in our next session," Mr Jahic told council members.The Croats defended their boycott on the grounds that the municipal elections of 30 June, which produced a narrow victory for their Muslim political rivals, had been marred by irregularities in votes cast abroad by Muslim refugees. International efforts to reunite the southern Bosnian city of Mostar suffered a setback yesterday when separatist Bosnian Croats boycotted the first meeting of the city council. The boycott augurs poorly for Bosnia's first post-war national elections on 14 September, which international observers fear may entrench Bosnia's ethnic divisions rather than reunite the country. Mostar is split into a Croat-controlled western sector of about 45,000 people, and a Muslim-controlled east of about 55,000, following a savage war between Muslims and Croats in 1993 and early 1994, when both were nominal allies against the Bosnian Serbs.On account of the Croat boycott, Muslim members of Mostar's council decided yesterday to postpone the selection of a mayor and deputy mayor for the city. But the picture changed this summer when a general election resulted in the governing three-party coalition narrowly losing its overall majority. As a price for the continued support of the Christian Democrats, Mr Klaus agreed to make the restoration of church land a key plank of the government's programme.That, however, made him vulnerable in the vote of confidence - expected either today or tomorrow - in which he is dependent on the tacit support of the opposition Social Democrats, all of whom are against the return of church land..