That’s taking a VERY narrow view.

GWB is the notional head of the administration, so the buck stops with him. Before and after 2006 the White House has failed to use its influence (or even to attempt to use that influence) to make changes to ITAR that would be favourable to Britain.

And it must be recognised that Clinton and the Democrats were and have always been in favour of the USA meeting its obligations on JSF. (A waiver was promised in 2000).

While all of the key bodies and key personalities involved in denying an ITAR waiver happen to have been Republicans.

Apart from GWB and Don Rumsfeld (both of whom have been unco-operative and hostile to an ITAR waiver) you have, for example:

Henry Hyde (Rep, IL), the Chairman of its Committee on International Relations since 2001.

Duncan Hunter (Rep, CA), the Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.

AND AS I SAID BEFORE:

In any case, it’s not important who is responsible for it, what’s important is that there is no more than mealy mouthed platitudes in the way of evidence to support the belief that technology transfer and operational sovereignty have been sorted out satisfactorily.

What the UK needs, and was promised when we signed up for JSF (under Clinton) was “a waiver from the ITAR to ensure access to the software codes and other data that (we) will need to maintain and upgrade (our) JSFs” and to integrate our own weapons and kit without requiring US/LM input.

What we have is a highly classified document, which has not been made public. This, we are told, details the assurances that we have been given by the US government. This deals with the issue of operational sovereignty but it is by no means clear whether it’s any more than a face-saving compromise (many believe that we’ll merely have fast tracked access to US facilities for support, maintenance and upgrade, rather than the AUTONOMOUS capabilities that our military thinks that it needs).

If we’d been given what we actually wanted, people would be co.ck a hoop about it, and we’d know about it. This feels like a fig leaf to cover another shafting by the GWB administration.

Hurrah!

Unerringly to the point, Mr Swerve.

Percentage of GDP is no more than a useful indicator (if that), and if huge chunks of your budget are disappearing in RAB charges, procurement ****-ups, and useless but high prestige big ticket programmes, you might well be better off with a smaller sum spent more wisely, and with less smoke and mirrors from the accountants.

Figures are too easy to fiddle. Mr Brown tells us that the Forces have enjoyed the longest period of sustained growth (in real terms) in their budget since the 1980s. He may well be telling the truth – but it matters not if force structure has to be cut back in the process of making the defence books balance.

If we pay millions more through the life of a programme because it’s a misbegotten PFI or PPP, then that’s bad for the MoD, even if the Treasury loves the arrangement because it minimises up-front capital spending.

All that really matters is force structure, as Swerve infers. Set what force structure you need, and then pay for it. The questions to ask are about:
How many FJ Squadrons do we need, and how many are there?
How many support helicopters?
How many hoses in the sky can the tanker force provide?
How many frigates and destroyers?

And that leads me to the other concern I have with their lordships campaign. It’s dominated by the dark blue and the Army, and I worry that this magical 3% GDP that they want will go primarily on Navy and Army priorities – Carriers, FRES, etc. and not on the air power assets that are most useful, most often in post Cold War operations.

And I’m increasingly convinced that what we need are Cold War levels of spending (we spent 4.4% of GDP in 1984), or close to them.

It’s a fallacy to think that our Cold War conventional forces were in any way sufficient to fight and win the Cold War – they were there to buy a little time for negotiation, or until the whole thing escalated to nuclear.

Once the Cold War was over, the lids came off various bubbling saucepans (the Cold War super powers had kept their clients, like Iraq and Yugoslavia, in order), and the world became a more dangerous, more unstable, and less predictable place, and we needed more conventional power – not less – more deployable FJs, more SH, more AT, more tankers, more frigates, more air mobile troops. etc.

We could have saved a little money by opting for a cheaper deterrent and by getting rid of the heavy armour, but overall, the switch to the light, flexible, agile and deployable forces we needed would have probably cost a little more than the Cold War forces we had.

But the politicians presented a simplistic and wrong picture of “big expensive wartime forces” for the Cold War, and promised that the end of the Cold War would bring a peace dividend, and the electorates bought it.

And they’re still buying it.

Because reducing waste, social security payments to immigrants and asylum seekers, and all the other panaceas will not free up enough money to address the MoD’s funding shortfall.

If you want adequate spending on the forces, then be prepared to pony up a few more pence in the pound on your income tax. Nothing else will cut it.

And that’s why the Tories will be just as bad for the Forces as Tone and Gordon have been – if not worse. They won’t do anything that entails asking the electorate to pay higher taxes.

The F3 was never an F-15 or an F-16, but it’s consistently underrated, and performed far better in exercises than most spotters realise.

The SA provided by one of the earliest and best JTIDs integrations, and the well-sorted, well-trained two man crew arrangements meant that the F3 OFTEN gave the pilots of more agile fighters a nasty shock.

And you should remember that with the wing forward the F3 turned pretty well, while few fighters accelerated as quickly as an F3 at low level, nor reached such high speeds.

It marked a massive improvement over the F-4, which isn’t bad.

“Have a think of why nukes deployed to Germany would need PALs in the first place.”

Um, err. Only the US weapons had them. Because they were US weapons that were built with them, genius! WE177s in Germany didn’t have PALs and didn’t need them.

You say that PALS are “a last line of defence totally independent of anyone who may have physical access to the weapon.”

People who actually know about nukes suggest that such a last line of defence is necessary only if your procedures are slipshod and slack (or perhaps if you’re doling out your nukes to less-than-reliable allies). An RAF aircraft would NEVER have been accidentally loaded with live nukes, an RAF pilot would never have failed to notice the coloured bands on the weapon that indicate exactly what it had, warhead wise, and he and his aircraft would never have been released to the runway with weapons aboard without proper authorisation, and would have been physically stopped without that authorisation.

WE177 already had multiple safeguards (belts and braces) – they didn’t need a frayed bit of string as well.

Indeed, proper procedures and safeguards are BETTER than PALs, which have problems all of their own.

Nor was the lack of a PAL on WE177 a “dirty little secret”, certainly since the weapon was withdrawn, much has been known about the weapon’s characteristics and the procedures surrounding it.

You get as worried as you like, old chap, but do so in the realisation that you’re doing so out of total ignorance, and about a weapon we haven’t had for nearly ten years.

With the two-man principal, armed guards and NLZ (No Lone Zone) procedures, the nature of the key (which was pretty sophisticated by the standards of the day) is irrelevant.

And PALs don’t appear to have stopped some of the US atomic screw-ups – most recently accidentally flying six from Minot to Barksdale.

There’s a great deal of bol.locks being spouted here.

The accurate prediction of structural life remains a black art even now – which is why a ‘scatter factor’ is applied when life is calculated.

And unpleasant surprises happen all the time – when the Buccaneer switched from over-water to overland, for example….. or the effect of taxying on rough ground on Hercules fatigue life (and the Herc fatigue meters are in the wrong place, and are inhibited when the aircraft is on the ground).

Whether the accident aircraft was 25 years old or 30 years old is completely irrelevant. The number of flying hours is a better guide, though one hundred hours of CAP will usually impose less stress and strain than ten minutes of air combat, so a low-houred aircraft may have had more fatigue consumption than a high-houred one, depending on the profiles flown. Nor is it just about the application of g – a rapid pull to 9 g will impose more damage than a gradual application.

Which is why you have fatugue meters on the jet – and don’t simply count the years in service or the hours flown.

And then you have the ‘mission-external’ factors – of which corrosion, faulty maintenance, manufacturing and materials defects/problems are just the tip of the iceberg, and all of these factors can be applicable across a fleet, or just to a sub-set of aircraft, or even just to a single airframe.

Litening is flying on the ISPA, and a live guided bomb has been dropped.

The helmet will come when the helmet will come.

At least Typhoon will have a helmet….