Only if you want to send it to a small war.
It’s almost like the old Ka-50/52 fixed gun vs Mi-28 turret debates.

Tiger .de was sold as a Kiowa-on-steroids.
In a real war, why would you want to send your precious few recon/tank hunter helicopters (be it a Ka-50 or the Tiger.de or Kiowa or MD-500 Defender) on a gun CAS mission? You want them sniping tanks, not getting shot up by flak.

So you’d be happy sending in NH-90s, CH-47s, UH-60 etc loaded with troops and equipment unescorted so they can be “shot up”?

Are you saying that SH-2G & Wedgetail have been good experiences, or that KC-767 would have been better than KC-30? Look at the Japanese & Italian experiences.

If selecting C-27J was meant to enable tapping in to USAF logistics, it must have left a rather bad taste in RAAF mouths.

C-27J was never actually selected; it only got as far as the Department of Defence seeking FMS sales information. Since the uncertainty around the role of the C-27J in USAF service has emerged, the project has essentially gone into hibernation. Alenia’s public fight with the USAF and stated stance regarding support for any aircraft onsold by the USAF has probably killed the project. I suspect the ADF will simply buy more CH-47s.

Wedgetail was late true, but by all public accounts was free of the last minutes dramas and squabbling over their causes and fixes that has marked the KC-30. The KC-30 still can’t refuel using its boom, while Wedgetail is fully operational

SH-2G(A) was not an FMS buy, and the project was clouded as much by RAN decisions and the impact of changes to the ADF’s certification practices and standards while development was underway as it was by contractor performance.

A non-UK perspective.

Where I live (east coast Aus) retailers can open whenever they choose; 24/7 if the want. Sunday trading is pretty much obligatory for anyone in retail who wants to survive, but Monday through Wednesday are pretty quiet days (the de facto weekend for most in the industry).

It works for us, and there are pretty much zero calls to change things.

or even Australia (as a replacement for the Anzac in a 2020+ time frame)?
Regards

The RAN is centred on USN systems and weapons, so I don’t’ see any sales there.

Posters here speak of F-35 delays as if that program was the only ever major defence project in the last 25 years to have experienced schedule slippage.

While EF, Rafale, Grippen are available, to be attractive as F-35 alternatives they’d need a significant amount of work e.g. new modern radars, integration of weapons for the full spectrum of missions, and a lot of work to lower their signatures to enable them be competitive over the next 20 years. So there would be no possibility of delays or cost over runs for that effort?

Interestingly, Osamu Fujimura, Japan’s chief cabinet secretary, announced last Tuesday that a decades-old ban on arms exports would be relaxed, opening the way for Japanese companies to participate in the international development and manufacture of advanced weapon systems.

Could be interesting. As the RAN and JMSDF are the only operators of large (c 3,500+ t) conventional submarines, it will be interesting to see if there is any cooperation with the Collins replacement. After the Kockums experience, I don’t know whether the ADF necessarily wants to parter with another Euro supplier offering a scaled up version of a small Euro-style boat.

And with the C-130 rapidly becoming “too small” I suspect the C-2 has a market.

You’re entitled to your opinion

Japan isn’t a defenceless child that need the protection of big daddy USA. Japan is selling high tech to the US and the rest of the world, and the only limiting factor in their self defence is the US pressure to keep them dependant. Tawain trusted the US for their defence and look at what that got them.

Meaning what? Taiwan is still an independent, democratic nation with an alliance with the US. Probably the biggest long term “threat” to Taiwan’s independence is the level of economic ties between it and the Chinese mainland. In short, it won’t be long before Taiwan is simply part of the much, much larger Chinese economy. How will Taiwan deal with this?

That’s plan B. US wanted more F 22, Australia wanted to buy it as well, and Canada chose not to have a choice. To this day the F 35 buy is contested, and no competition occured.

WRT Australia, the Aus DoD’s position has always been that the F-22 was far too costly and too role limited for it to be attractive, and that the F-35 was the better option for the ADF. Advocates of a F-22 buy were pretty much limited to groups like Airpower Australia, and a couple of politicians seeking to be seen as “strong on defence” in the lead up to federal elections.

Any pilot from any air force that are selected for exchange tend to be quite remarkable in their trade of background. The RAAF pilot we speak of could have easily been on exchange in the past with the US and possibly with other air forces. Theres no doubt about it that he knows a significant amount of various variants of -18s, knows the aircrafts systems that he usually operates like the back of his hand and has quite an understanding of further developments. During his exchange with the RAF he would’ve been tought and shown the way around the Typhoon and likely given a brief on some systems already in development. Maybe this was enough to make him think which would he’d rather go to war in. Whatever it was, he made his mind up.

But you can’t get around the entry into service timelines for the Block II with both the USN and RAAF. And as far as the blog’s use of unattributed, “alleged” quotes goes, you would need to place in them in the context of the attributed, in back and white, quotes coming out of the RAAF and USN about the Block two, including those made after Bersama Shield 11.

Don’t worry, they are as the RAAF found out in Malaysia. 😉

Again, there were NO classic RAAF Hornets at Bersama Shield 11.

Weapons, radars, various sub-systems etc are just a few things that make up an overall package of a fighter. You can add bigger boosters to the AIM-120 models to give them longer ranges but that could be pointless if you can’t improve it’s NEZ at the end; enter Meteor with it’s ramjet. The APG-79 might be maturing but I’d be quite iffy on comparing it to the Captor-E’s/Repositioner, 220 – desgrees WFoR and 1,400 TR modules.

But as I say; these are just a few things taken into account. Amosnt many other things, you need a platform that’s very, very capable in A/A, and the F/A-18 isn’t exactly well know for it.

So Captor-E is in service? By the time Captor-E is fully developed, refitted to a sizeable number of aircraft and is operational (I won’t mention post financial crises European defence budgets), the F-18F’s APG-79 and associated networking capabilities won’t have improved as well?

Yes, the F-18 in all it’s variants is consistently written off in this forum. So?