Helicopter dropped firebombs wreck way too little of area. If anything we take a lesson from Black Hawk Down and take out targets wholesale. Go in big or go home.

p.s. – swerve, stealth is important. The pirates operate a little more sophisticated than what people give them credit. If you use planes that emit radio emissions then they will simply avoid those patrols yet the pirating will continue. The pirates use high tech tools to locate their prey. Who knows, they may be getting tipped by moles inside the shipping companies themselves.

And my comments about carpet bombing are totally tongue in cheek. I do condone shooting down kidnappers. Collateral casualties on the other hand are not something anyone here honestly seem to condone. I thought you’ve posted on here long enough to understand that.

The F-35 will replace the F-15C just fine. The F-15C isn’t exactly perfection today or will it offer any margin over anything but marginal competition in the (next couple of decades) future. I liked the F-15C. It was a beautiful and powerful beast. But its time to move on. The F-35 is a fine replacement considering its big brother F-22 is going to get modernized incrementally to give it that edge it needs to stay dominant for the next three decades.

Your best bet is to use long endurance stealth spy planes to catch the pirates in the act, watch them tow their booty in, then lay waste to the entire wharf with B-52 carpet bombing. After a few ‘over reactions’ like that by Washington the somalis will fix it themselves.

If the mess in the Caucasus region doesn’t sort itself out I can see Russia beating Israel to the punch. Russia is really absorbing a lot of Islamic extremism right now and its origin is from those same nutjobs that support the likes of OBL. Iran wants to pit Russia against the west but its a pretty hard pill to swallow – for the Russians to side with their antagonists.

The brass in 1993 realized these problems when they reviewed the gw1 performance and they immediately went about to tackle the problem sooner than the projected phase it was to be implemented. It was something that was to eventually happen, but it wasn’t deemed necessary in light of their other weapons at the time. But with the cluster munitions causing so many headaches politically and the failed ‘bigger is better’ approach to everything guided at the time this became an immediate need. Remember in that day it was still a good idea to box in with minefields and indiscriminately throw cluster bombs on top of the enemy in your path. There are better ways to deny mobility to the enemy today.

I wonder if the Hawk 200 will ever be qualified to carry Meteor.

Yes, but someone must find the target. Either a friendly ship (which is not that bright as it means to be pretty close) or a friendly air asset (an MPA like P-3 Orion f. e.). Especially in blue water operations such assets are often not available (range, time on station), especially not for small navies.

So, just firing missiles in direction of an assumed enemy is pretty wasteful.

This is why the icbm form of anti-ship missile, even nuclear tipped failed in development. It is pretty difficult to aim at something you don’t keep in constant contact with. Firing a missile that is already 30 minutes away only gives you a circular target area of 2000 square miles against a 40 knot target.