Bring the boys home from Afghanistan, Germany, and Sierra Leone. Cut the army and RAF in order to concentrate on the RN’s Type 45’s and pair of CVF’s. Sell off the oldest 50 Typhoons in a fire-sale. Merge the Army and Royal Marines into a unified force; they live on an island and all of the land lubbers should be trained to operate as Royal Marines. Merge the RAF into the RN; the force should be concentrated on expanding the influence of the RN.

As much as people hate to hear it, the British army and Royal AF are given too much priority when the RN is your traditional defender of the crown. I’m not saying that the RAF needs to be eliminated. I’m saying that the RAF is defending an island nation and needs to supplement the defense of the island by the RN, not be separate in its function. Instead of buying so many Typhoons the force should concentrate on flexibility and mobility. The RAF really pretty much made itself irrelevant when it canned its last long range bomber.

The British army has been consuming large fractions of the budget mainly operating overseas in a role to support the U.S. Sending land forces abroad is expensive business and consumes the airframe hours of transports unnecessarily. The army’s equipment is returning in horrid condition, if at all. You pretty much can write off half the equipment you’ve deployed for anything but spares. The government would have been far better off helping foot the bill rather than sending its own.

I am thinking IAR-95 had input from GD or Northrop at the time. Basically like the KAI T-50 only using long intakes optimized for a turbojet rather than the short underwing intakes used for T-50’s turbofan.

While similar to the JF-17 it doesn’t have strakes, straight line elevators, or narrowed wingtips of the latter. I think the former has a stiffer wing judging by the loadout placement. The JF-17 looks more husky in it’s shaping. The former is slim like a Gripen.

Top 5 Battlewagons

When the Su-15 came into service the only American bomber threat over the icepack was the B-52. Early interceptors had plenty of gun power to bring them down but the bombers had radar-aimed tailguns to contend with. Beam-rider missiles were pretty bad at that point in time and a simple banked turn would avoid them. The only accurate way to fire them was well within tailgunner range.

It’s important to note that the early Su-15 brought enough standoff range to avoid the 50’s in the tails of American bombers. The solution was exchanging the quad 50’s for twin 20’s. This called for better missiles to engage the American bombers.

If the UK would just sell off their old planes at a greatly prorated price to the Canadians it would solve two problems with one stone. The UK is always trying to gouge people when they sell their kit abroad. At least the Canadians are a close ally, unlike their Middle East partnerships.

In 1939 the Russians had arguably one of the best fighters in the world. Two years later Stalin was overly complacent with the technology and slid way behind.

Something tells me that history would have been significantly different over the skies of Vietnam if they had both the Su-9 and Su-15 fighters to contend with. While the MiG’s were more maneuverable and better at being ‘fighters’, the Su-15 were meant for taking down incoming bombers, regardless if they were B-52’s or F-105’s. The Su-15’s missiles would have created problems for the American aircraft operating over NK territory, considering they could be fired head on. Even if they didn’t get a lot of aircraft kills they would have increased the mission kills by a significant amount.

had a very stressful day, needed a little escapism so i started doodling, here’s where i decided to give up:

I like the idea in principle. The older birds at the time probably could have been converted something useful instead of being recycled into junk piles. Maybe a little better line art can be whipped up later. 🙂