Able to take off of shorter, rougher runways, run on Ukranian perfume if necessary, quite robust and hardy at the expense of some crew comfort and safety. Shorter-range, defensive aircraft. (Don't tell Conservatives the Soviet armed forces were primarily defensive in nature. You get a snotty comment back.)

I watched a Youtube show the other day of a Swedish Viggen landing on a road, being refueled and rearmed and taking off again. The narration said that they practiced such things because they could assume an overwhelming force would take out their airfields immediately.

He added, gratuitously, that the US didn't have to have planes which could avail themselves of such rustic, crude operations as they were always "the overwhelming force".

Arf