While in the past the strategic nuclear deterrent has come from a budget outside the MoD there is an on-going battle over this budget as the Treasury wants the MoD to cover the cost of Trident’s replacement.

See:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/jul/18/trident-nuclear-missile-liam-fox and also see:

http://www.defencemanagement.com/news_story.asp?id=13517

So far they have signed contracts for £1.2 billion for the carriers and they have got a good chunk in the way of the building so it would be stupid to not finish them but I would be surprised if the RN did not have to give something up to keep them

If the French are sharing refuelling aircraft with us and A400M’s with the German’s would it not make it difficult for the French to deploy rapidly their forces?

Of particular interest, the Navy’s NGAD fighter, and an undisclosed proprietary aircraft – seemingly in production now…

http://www.flightglobal.com/blogs/the-dewline/2010/07/farn10-boeing-does-strike-figh.html

While I think it is very unlikely but could the “undisclosed proprietary aircraft” be a single-engined turbo-prop COIN demonstrator?

That doesn’t sound like any BBC defence reporting I’ve read. It tends to be greatly inferior to the specialist defence press, but orders of magnitude better than, e.g., the Daily Wail.

Sorry – I was using BBC et. al. to parrot the way that the previous poster was referring to the press – I find the BBC and Telegraph defence reporting okay if slightly prone to repeating rumours – FT is a good source (such as the story I read this morning which I think is of some interest re: Liam Fox meeting LM http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a9544f66-935a-11df-bb9a-00144feab49a,dwp_uuid=bc5ebee8-713c-11de-877c-00144feabdc0.html)

The defence press is much better but I always feel that I do not have enough time to research every story I read so that I am sure I fully understand all the aspects of it (I sure you have picked that up in some of my posts 🙂 ). I also subscribe to the daily news e-mail from the MoD.

Less said about the Daily Wail the better!

I understood that both the UK and France are looking to replace their replenishment ships in the same time frame (I assume in part due to the fact that EC laws require double hulled oilers from I think it is 2016 and while the military are exempt as a rule they are all complying with the new law).

So I would say replenishment ships.

I think it more likely the BBC et. al. will call it a criminal waste to buy 80 F-35B and only have one carrier at sea at time which can carry a maximum of 36 F-35 and they will imply that the other 44 planes are wasted, and of course the public will lap it up like the idiots they are!

In fact given that the head of the RAF has said that the RAF planned to move to only operating two types of fast jet and the out of service date for the Tornado is 2024 I am surpised that there has not been published a badly researched newspaper article talking about converting the Tornadoes – along with some made up figures of how the development costs will be at least a billion and the conversion of costs of each plane will be 20 million followed by some half-ars*d comments about how it is a waste to spend several billion to convert used Tornado airframes to operate on the carriers for decade before they need to be replaced.

Found!

[…] The version the Canadian Air Force is buying is the least expensive of the three variants and in today’s dollars it will be around $60 million per aircraft, said Lockheed spokeswoman Kim Testa.

DoD officials told lawmakers in June that the F-35 fighter program could cost as much as $382.4 billion, with an average through-life per-plane price tag of $92.4 million. […]

From http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?i=4711718&c=AME&s=AIR Defense News is quite respected as source, so i think it can be given some trust. Obviously, mine are speculations however, this is clear.

Just to mention the story says “The version the Canadian Air Force is buying is the least expensive of the three variants and in today’s dollars it will be around $60 million per aircraft, said Lockheed spokeswoman Kim Testa”.

This means that Canada will pay a lot more than $60 million a plane in 2016 and the story in the news thread in the main forum suggests the price tag is actually in the region of $100 million Canadian dollars per plane which is equivalent to €73 million euro’s or £62 million sterling a plane. Still cheaper than what some nay-sayers have been quoting but not a million miles away from what some other estimates I have seen are for the cost of the F-35 in that particular time frame.