It would also cost quite a bit of money to intergrate Tomahawk into the A70 version of Sylver and I cannot see the French helping in nay way.

From what I have seen over the years, Richard’s site says it all with regard to joint ventures with the French – be afraid, be very afraid (and still our politicians think its a good idea……….)

😡

If the UK needed to go down the international joint venture route then we’d have been far better off either pursuing a joint venture with the USN or joining the German/Dutch F124/De Zeven Provincien program IMO.

True, and I’ve said on here before I think the decision to optimise the air warfare capability at the expense of ASuW/ASW makes sense, as those capabilities can be added whereas compromising the AAW capability to afford a wider range of systems would comprmise the ships primary role and would be dificult to recover later. However, in a way that is one of the reasons I’m thinking the RN would have been better off going for a off the shelf answer, if the RN had gone with Mk.41 VLS and SPY Aegis they’d have gotten the capabilities they need, more flexibility and been in a position to get the ships sooner (wasting all those years on the failed horizon joint venture) and probably cheaper. True there is a question over maintaining the industrial base, but rather than reinventing the wheel the UK defence industrial base might have been better served by investing in new technology, BAE wants to be on the leading edge of UAV/UCAV development, that seems to offer greater rewards for British industry than spending a lot of money to develop systems already available elsewhere IMO. At the end of the day the UK wated time and money on Horizon, and it seems the RN’s first choice would have been with the Mk.41 VLS anyway.

True, it would be re-inventing the wheel, but in a sense the whole project is re-inventing the wheel by bridging the capability gap between the T42 and Aegis destroyers. Now I’m not saying Sampson/Aster is bad, it promises to be a superb system, but realistically in it’s primary air warfare role it’s capabilities are pretty similar to the latest SPY/SM combo or APAR/SM with the massive exception it has no theatre ABM defence capability (Europe may claim it doesn’t want ABM capability, but if they had access to the option offered by SM-3 they’d bite your hand off to get it). The Germans/Canadians/Dutch have developed their own radar/battle field management system but integrated it with the Mk.41 VLS, this has retained an industrial base and expertise in high technology along with controlling costs and minimising risk to at least some extent, as well as having a much more flexible weapons system and probably better access to missile upgrades in the future by piggy backing USN programs. Most of the Navies in the market for this type of hardware not usually Russian customers do seem to choosing the Mk.41 and it’s weapons (Japan, South Korea, Australia, Germany, Denmark, Spain, Norway and any others escaping my mind at the moment) and if the UK had developed a radar/battlefield management system to work with these it’d be a lot easier to pitch on the export market.