pjhydroWho besides the U.K. uses the brimstone and the SS? who will pay to certify these? and using such a short ranged and small weapon as the brimstone on the F-35C doesn’t seem wise for SEAD.
Brimstone was originaly an anti armour weapon with a range of about 7 miles that is fire and forget and able to search for its own targets and hit moving vehicles autonomous of the launch aircraft. There is now a dual mode variant with laser targeting so it can aslo be used against all sorts of fixed targets and as a targetted CAS weapon.
Its warhead is small but very powerful being a tandem type designed to punch through very thick armour.
pjhydrohttp://www.janes.com/news/defence/idr/idr090807_1_n.shtml
It has some elements of ASRAAM but is actually a new missile. Also note the really different way it is targeted.
pjhydroCAMM will have more reach than RAM. RAM is a point and shoot point defence system, it has very limited local area defence ability, while CAMM will have a much larger envelope of engagement. It is also intended to be the Rapier replacement and RAM could not do the LLAD job over the army very well at all.
Then there is the need to maintain missile R&D in the UK, if we scrap CAMM we are in danger of losing skills. Which goes for using Mica.
pjhydrohttp://www.eglin.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123174231
You were saying….:rolleyes::cool:
Yeah you got there in the end 😀 Just 14 years development was it…not sure can’t quite see past the 9 years of dust on this Storm Shadow users manual… :p
pjhydroRidiculous. The whole point of this change to the F35C is to enable cross decking with France. Green Dave announced that the F35B could not cross deck with the French as if it was some scandal he had just uncovered. Are you surprised that literally days after this announcement, Dave and Sarkozy were signing a treaty to enable the “sharing” of carriers? Clearly this would be impossible if our carrier operated only STOVL aircraft. Do you think the treaty text was written in the days after the SDSR? Whatever the pros and cons of going to CATOBAR for the CVF, the underlying reason was politics, and the desire of “Eurosceptic” Dave to tie Britain’s armed forces into a European defence structure. Do you remember any of this being discussed at the General Election, the one time we serfs get to actually have our say? Me neither. Dave is a typical Tory grandee I’m afraid, and has no interest in consulting the little people.
Now your just being touchy and if you think I actually believe Liam Fox loved Top Gun so changed the carriers well, yes exactly riciculous. I don’t actually disagree with you here to be honest. I am a signed up member of the pro F35B VSTOL club. As for the anti-euro bit though, i’m afraid i’m also a signed up memember of the pro-euro club too and believe in closer co-operation.
pjhydroOh do wind your neck in, it’s obvious what I meant by “fleet in being” in this context, namely that the Argentines would not just look at the SSN and two frigates, but what else the Royal Navy had, not in the South Atlantic. It was you who were rather keen to point out that as Ark Royal was in the Med at the time, she could not provide a deterrent to Argentine aggression, a position I cannot accept.
Wind my neck in? About being correct with terminology? It isn’t ‘obvious’ what you meant, your use of an official doctrinal term was wrong, plain and simple – “Fleet in Being” has one meaning and it hasn’t changed for 320 years. Sorry if that makes me a smart ****, but i’m afraid it does make me right.
Well we will just have to disagree then. The Argentineans were launching an invasion bid in 1977, Ark Royal exsisted in 1977, so I’m not seeing how you can come to your conclusion. surely in your world those are two mutually exclusive events.
As to being a “carrier nut”, this is the naval aviation forum isn’t it?
Yes it is, but we don’t have to agree and then there is being pro-carrier (which I count myself) and then there is giving them magical powers and sticking them on an untouchable pedestal.
We are discussing the uses of naval aviation aren’t we?
Barely.
My position is that whether Ark Royal was in the South Atlantic or not in 1977, the mere fact of her “being”…
Its that term again. You mean existence.
…was a major factor the Argentine staff would have to take into account.
Yes. A factor they would have considered in any reprisal but you argue her existence was enough to deter yet they were attempting to invade in 1977 so her mere existence was obviously not enough, she needed to be demonstrably deployed, but she wasn’t, Dreadnought was.
And as for your comment that a carrier is “difficult to hide and therefore predictable”, I’m afraid I just can’t make sense of it at all. Care to expand?
Can’t make sense of the fact that- a 53,950 ton warship (in Ark Royals case) that is electronically active, very detectable on radar and very visible when it passes through a choke point like Gibraltar, surrounded by escorts and oilers, and putting aircraft in the air that are also pretty easy to spot, is difficult to hide?
If in 1977 Ark had been ordered south she would have been spotted passing through Gibraltar. You draw a line to her destination on a map and you can calculate where she will roughly be on each day for any given speed.
You search and of course you might not find her easily, granted, the sea is still a big place, but then your Maritime Patrol Aircraft gets close enough and is intercepted by an RN fighter. Your navigator plots the maximum radius of that fighter on a map from your position and now you know the area of sea the carrier is in. Or Your MPA doesn’t return having been downed, well that tells you just as much.
Point being surface vessels, especially large ones are difficult to hide. SSNs on the other hand are the perverbial needle in the haystack. If one that is already at sea is ordered some where then your opponent has no reference point to start a possible plot, no good idea exactly which direction its coming from and from and how far away. Means they are great for bluffing, you can tell an opponent that there is one nearby and then invite them to prove you wrong. You can’t do that with a carrier battle group.
It’s not hard, really.
pjhydroOk ok…since it looks like our cover has been blown….. I work as a henchman for Doctor No in our top secret missile launching facility off LA…it’s true Commander Bond only THOUGHT he had seen off Dr No…..but he never……..Be afraid!!:D:D
By a very funny coincidence Dr No is my commuting book for the train home at the moment so you post made me laugh. Read the Bond books when I was 12, thought I would give them another go now i’m getting old enough to resemble M.
pjhydroSix Fifties – Your baseless opinion that the Mod and RAF did not want to operate Harriers in Gulf War 1 is totally wide of the mark. At the time of the first Gulf War the Harrier II did not have the necessary weapons clearances issued to it -therefore it didnt go. It was absolutely nothing to do with the perceived threat as the Harrier II was designed to operate again the Warsaw Pact defences . This isnt opinion -I was serving at RAF Wittering circa 90-95.
Yep and in General De-billy-SAS me-air’s book he specifically mentions the debate over deploying Harrier and how it was almost forward deployed with 1st Armour, but I seem to recall that the team up with the USMC (before the move west) meant they considered CAS was covered (incidently by USMC harriers!).
pjhydroThe USMC should not duplicate the capabilities of the Army, Navy or Air Force. Specifically – whatever may have happened at Guadalcanal during WWII – the Marines must be able to assume that in the highly unlikely event that they are conducting a high-intensity opposed amphibious landing, that there will be a carrier battle group in support, providing CAP and air strike capabilities. Therefore Marine aviation should focus on CAS, using attack helicopters and, ideally, aircraft such as the A-10.
But with reduced spending and fewer carriers with fewer aircraft thats possibly a dangerous assumption and in any case how are the A10s going to “get there”?
pjhydroI didn’t realize it before, but since the USN/USAF will qualify the jassm they could let the Americans do all of the testing work. Jassm has a greater range than scalp any way.
UK doesn’t use it and almost certainly doesn’t want it, Storm Shadow is battle proven and reliable. As for range they are comparable, SS’s range is classified but is usually stated at over 250km’s. Jassm is listed as having 370km range.
pjhydroAll agreed, except that it’d probably not have Storm Shadows, but smaller, perhaps unpowered, PGMs. The point of Storm Shadow is to save the launch aircraft from having to penetrate defences. Apart from range, which can be achieved with a modified airliner (e.g. Nimrod MRA4 – bah!), the point of a stealthy deep strike UCAV is to penetrate those defences. Unpowered PGMs with similar power to the Storm Shadow warhead, internally carried, would give it a lower RCS & could deliver the same effect at lower cost, or it could carry a larger number of smaller weapons.
Oh agreed, I think I was just considering the maximum possible reach you could get i.e launched from a carrier to fly to a missile launch point and then the range of the missiles, almost any point on the globe could be hit. If you could pack them internally then the first an opponent would know is when it all goes bang. I wonder if the SCALP development line will see the long range Ship launched version eventually go air launched?
pjhydroWith Google Translate it is to read in English.
In short, the A400M will reach its full capability in December 2018. The first examples delivered to France from 2013 will be substandard examples.
Thats a very loaded word there…
pjhydroWhat I find most interesting about it is the level of AI in Taranis compared to similar US projects, which is of course a recognition of the more limited satelite access the UK has, Son of Taranis is going to have to do a lot of thinking for itself. That said a boost in space is needed and it was interesting that this was mentioned in the “Entente Frugal” though not spotted by many.
pjhydroThis is a terrible smoke screen … What is truly shameful is that the Harrier has been a widow maker that killed too many of our brave young pilots, and with little to show for it.
Widow maker? Lets see the figures then? Its a difficult plane to fly but that term is thrown at it by US figures who frankly hate the fact the USMC use a foriegn product, the fact that the Harrier has suurvived in US service despite the criticism is perhaps a testement to its value as recognised by those who actually use it.
It has not been cost effective. The British Navy needed vertical thrust technology mainly because the larger carriers were taken away from them, but I really don’t see the justification for it in RAF or USMC service. It was a waste of funding.
So which other close support aircraft were the USMC going to operate off their LPH/LHDs then?
If there was a modicum of truth in your words, the makers of the Harrier would have enjoyed more sales. That together with a high loss rate and accident rate over the life of the aircraft provides us with a long history of proof that nearly all other potential customers simply did not believe your opinion that buying Harriers was money well spent.
The Harrier is operated by the UK, USA, Spain, Italy, India, Thailand and was in the process of being sold to China in a deal cancelled by the UK over china’s invasion of vietnam. In all its variants its been used for 43 years and had been produced in large numbers. It has been used in at least 5 major conflicts with outstanding success.
For some comparison the F15 is used by 4 nations, Tornado is used 4 nations, A10 is used by 1. Whats your point? Harrier has been pretty succesful on the export front. Harrier is a complicated, specialised piece of kit, not many air forces CAN operate it.
pjhydroThe issue would be limiting the USMC to low end warfare if you didn’t acquire a higher end piece of kit. Yes granted for most of the time a “low intensity” bomb truck is all you want (isn’t that the case with most air forces?!) But if you only buy an aircraft that can only do that then you have limited your options entirely. It is not always certain that the USMC could bank on a handy CVN being nearby to cover the harder missions- if there were multiple crisis, a general war or a conflict where a CVN might seem overly provocative then the USMC would certainly want a platform able to cover the higher end of possible missions so as not to put them at a disadvantage.
F35 costs a $100 million, thats what good aircraft go for these days and it would be cheaper than losing dozens of obsolete harriers that were attempting missions that a F35 has a higher chance of coming back from. The Harrier is getting pretty long in the tooth now.
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