French interest can be useful to leverage away any nonsensical talk of selling the second carrier, but the reality is more likely we will commission both in due course anyway, after a change of government between now and then…;)

Yep, a majority Tory government after the next election will probably find the money to commission both! 😉

And as it was Labour who were responsible for the utter mismanagement of projects like FRES, MRA4, St Athan and for not boosting the defence budget to cope with the pressures of two wars that resulted in the £36 billion overspend that made severe cuts inevitable, I’m sure you’ll understand why Im not particularly keen at the idea if them getting back in!

That would seem a logical idea and given the noises made by Cameron and Sarkozy about sharing each others carriers it would make perfect sense. An Anglo-French “Joint Force Hawkeye” with shared aircraft and crews available to deploy on the carriers of both navies as required. A common Fleet Ligistics Squadron using Greyhounds would be a natural progression.

Pardon me while I go off on one but IMO the Hawkeye is one of the greatest military aircraft ever. AEW requires a huge amount of computer processing and to put that in an airframe that is still light and compact enough to operate off a carrier is a great achievement and one that I believe deserves more recognition! 😎

It always struck me as funny that they spent billions on an EH101 Presidential helicopter that never happened….perhaps it was buried in that budget

Certainly the US military has past form in burying the costs of Black projects in other budgets. I was thinking myself that perhaps the reason why the Comanche project continued for as long as it did was that although the US Army knew it was a turkey they wanted to use it to further develop it’s stealth technology for use on the Blackhawk?

Well if it had been up to me the CVF’s would be called Eagle and Hermes. 🙂

Changing tack slightly, just after the Canadian Forces join in the operation the Harper Government loses a confidence motion and an election will happen in May. Are the Liberals in favour of Canadian involvement?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/mobile/world-us-canada-12865339

One curious note British Aerospace during the 90’s intended to use H&W to build the carriers. Of course once Labour got in during 97 one Mr.Gordon Brown MP for Dunfermline East had other ideas… so rather then upgrade and use a yard with the facilities and planned as the intended for the final build they spend money adapting a yard less then ideal! And they talk about waste on MOD Light bulbs!

H&W should of been Britains premier yard for large ships and a rival to Chantiers de l’Atlantique but instead…oh heck I have started ranting again….”nutts” to quote a certain American army officer!

I think that’s a big reason why the coalition are so hostile to CVF, in opposition Fox was a supporter of CVF and was critical of Labour’s delay in placing the final order. When in power and they saw the smallprint of the contract, that and the fact that final assembly is in Dunfermline made it look like a vanity project by Brown and made the Tories very hostile to the whole project. Whether Labour would have put both into service given the spending cuts that they would have had to make is something we’ll never know.

Agree with you about H&W, however it would have been very difficult to get a commercial company to place large scale orders with a Belfast yard at the height of The Troubles. H&W’s reputation for sectarianism didn’t help either, there is the great urban myth that the Titanic had a number painted on her keel which when read backwards spelt “NO POPE!” Completely untrue by the way but there were well documented cases of Catholic workers having tools dropped on them from above and other cases of intimidation. I think they recently lost another sectarian harassment proof that even in these times Neanderthal attitudes prevail in this part of the World.

Secondly the SDSR issues rumble on:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/feb/27/liam-fox-defends-defence-review-libya

Jim Murphy was a member of the government that gave us FRES and a £36 billion black hole in the MoD budget. So I find it difficult to regard him as an authoritative figure.

Agreed, another problem is that the politicians are too scared to tackle the real money pits like welfare and the NHS so defence gets picked on. However the MoD doesn’t help it’s cause with fiascos like FRES, MRA4 and the CVF contract, were it bringing projects in more or less on time and budget then it could be in a better position to resist pressure for cuts.