Shipbucket

About that FT17 ... maybe you should create your armour force from captured Italian tanks ?

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Nobody expects the Imperial Inquisition!

It probably will be after 1936. Prewar Ethiopia was, along with most underdeveloped countries, a dumping ground for a lot of little packets of surplus from a lot of different nations. FT-17s also really got around in the interwar period (sorta like the Kalashnikov of tanks), some would probably have ended up there.

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An F-86A bought from the USAF, delivered in 1958. Many of them would see service for decades in various postcolonial conflicts, and a squadron was still in service when war ignited with the Yemeni and the Iranians.

Ethiopia in the Decolonization of Africa
The end of the Second World War left the Ethiopian military in a bit of a quandry. Besides a token force to suppress insurgents in Eritrea and the Ogaden, it had no reason to exist. Indeed, for a while the Navy had no funds to operate anything beyond PT boats and anything larger languished in Massawa. A serious fear of the Imperial Admiralty in 1969 was that these ships would turn out to be simply incapable of making the trip to Mogadishu. The air force, for a while, had no combat aircraft besides the B17.

This changed in the fifties. The process of decolonization, already in full swing in Asia, now marched west to Africa. First it happened in Kenya, where the Mau Mau Uprising proved too much for the colonial authorities to control. Facing copycat uprising up and down Africa, including a particularly troublesome insurrection in Northern Rhodesia by the now-infamous ZIPRA, they could not deploy enough regular troops to maintain both its substantial commitments in Germany and the colonies. They reluctantly turned to the Ethiopians for help, and Imperial Army battalions began to take up positions, marching over the Negele into Kenya. While the British presumption that the Mau Mau would surrender rather than fire upon troops from an independent African nation was simplistic and incorrect, the civilian population was much more peaceful and cooperative in the Ethiopian sectors than those occupied by the British and the Kikuyu Home Guard. The insurrection was put down by 1962, and Kenya became independent the next year.

The Imperial Air Force flew into battle for the first time since 1945 in the Congo Crisis. As part of ONUC and a supporter of the Lumumba government in Stanleyville, Ethiopian F-86s allowed the Stanleyville government to overrun Katanga before troops under Mobutu could take the mining province from Kasai. While its dependence on American aid and its distrust of the Soviet Union limited its actions against Mobutu, battalions of Ethiopian troops, with help from the Irish, were able to allow the UN to dictate a peace treaty between the Stanleyville and Leopoldville governments in 1965, splitting the colony into East and West Congo along provincial lines, an arrangement that lasted until 1998. While East Congo was initially in the Soviet sphere, the Ethiopian economic boom of the 1980s allowed Ethiopian interests to displace Russian advisors.

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Sabres over Shimanzi!