I have spent the last half hour looking through various news agencies, most of which are covering this. There seems to be nothing but silence or a few non-committal comments from Washington which suggests that they possibly don’t have a policy for this scenario. No doubt something will come out in the next few hours ? :confused:

As I said in the earlier post Oil is key here, and the US won’t want to do anything that may disrupt 12% of their oil supply that comes from Venezuela as the world market is currently so tight unless it is absolutely forced to. The US election is a factor along with the current US financal crisis and $5-6 gas won’t do anyones election chances or the US economy any favors. Colombia is also an oil producer but not on the scale of Venezuela and so can possibly be ignored in this respect alhough we don’t know the sensitivities of the relationship with the US. US fence sitting in the short term may prevail unless it kicks off. .

The US is perfectly cabable of running a major air war in the region as we all know, but it would rather not get involved for now.

However, the US needs Venezuelan oil, and Venezuela needs the US refineries (for technical reasons US refineries are about the only ones regionally that can process Venezuelan oil). The two have an almost unique hostile symbiotic relationship, that has to be based upon pragmatism despite public pronouncements to the contrary.

The US will also not like the optics of being seen to protect Colombia who to the majority of Americans mean bad things even though they are a US ally. Unless things get really serious and they are forced to intervene, my guess is that the US will publically sit on the sidelines but in private will be trying to get everyone to talk, as a war will significantly push the oil price upwards and that is the last thing the US or indeed anyone wants at the moment 🙁

With the value of scrap metal being what it is at the moment it would be extremely profligate to sink any of these ships.

Excellent, if what he hints at comes true then 8 RAF C-17’s will be just fine 😀

The A400M is starting to look a lot less like a paper plane now.

http://www.airbusmilitary.com/images/1sta400m2.jpg

Maybe its a photo perspective thing, but it looks about 10-15% smaller than somehow I had anticipated

The VH-71 has to be one of these worst procurement headaches ever. Is it really correct that the costs are heading for $500m per airframe as reported in the States ? No wonder they have frozen the project 😮 I don’t think even Big And Expensive could quite manage to do things that badly. If I was in the USA and going to procure the new tankers that sort of record would certainly make me think very carefully before buying from Europe, when we knew we also had to increase the local content to keep the porkbarrel factory busy 😉

Something else to factor into the debate about weapons fit for future ships; from Navy news, so its semi-authorative

http://www.navynews.co.uk/view-story.aspx?articleID=113