Wrong! People have been saying this for the best part of a decade but truth be told no one has the courage or might to confront Iran. They will gain their nuclear weapons they’ve been longing for and then the world will be faced with nuclear war when the Jihadists in charge attempt to cleanse the earth of the jewish folk as they’ve been saying they are going to.
I for one would much prefer we get this over with now and flatten Iran rather than waiting for a nuclear war in 5 or 10 years time.

Iran is massively over hyped on internet forums. The biggest consequences of any attack on Iran are going to be internal. I know people love to go on about potential oil price rises, but the effects will be limited and fairly short term. The UK could adjust for this simply by lowering its ~70% tax on petrol 😀

I’ve got to say, I don’t think the “too many cooks” aspect need be an issue, if well managed. So long as the design is kept general enough, individual partners can have their own flavour, which interestingly is what has happened with Typhoon. Britain and France are probably the two most likely to have issues with each other in the programme, so an agreement by them on design, industry, technology etc would make it much smoother.

I’m half Spanish, so I have a higher tolerance level to Europeanisation of the UK than I do to US culture creeping in… don’t get me started on the fact that Halloween now means loads of kid’s knocking on the door or people call their phones cellphones and not mobiles as the Queen intend the devices to be called!

I have been to both Germany and the US for business and I was understood about as equally well in both countries, but Germany felt closer to UK culturally than my visit to South Carolina did!

I’d suggest that Spanish culture is more different to English culture than is much of US culture. That said, too many people seem to think that Britain needs to align itself to the US or the EU, which is clearly not the case, and in fact could be counterproductive, as we can take advantage of the midpoint position. The best position for the UK is outside of the EU (giving us greater freedom in our decisions), but sharing trade and cooperation with the EU, the US, and the whole world, where it best suits Britain. Of course the bigoted “little Europeans” would rather see Britain focus entirely on the EU, but naturally we respect their right to their opinion…

Yeah, we are so hyprocrites that we are not selling our EF-2000´s as second hand planes to third countries, and keeping our % of the project. And we signed 27 A-400´s and stay with 27…some european countries could learn something.

Who’s talking about small change like airplanes? You made a slight about other European countries being late to deliver etc. Spain is synonymous across Europe, much like Greece, as an example of poor working practices. Maybe the RAF would be able to afford lots of nice new airplanes if the government wasn’t having to cut the armed forces budget, not to reduce its overall spending, but to provide budget increases and loans to Europe…

i’m sure i read that the US economy was starting to show signs of recovery even if it is lugging a huge debt around with it.

Oh sure, it’s growing, on the back of increased public debt during an election year. The American economy will get worse after the elections IMO! Similar stunts in France, I wouldn’t be surprised if Sarko manipulated the Rafale price to fulfil his election promise right before he announced he was standing for election again (and that engineered argument with Dave Cameron).

There was NO plan to use nuclear weapons during the Falklands conflict regardless of what a former french president claimed.

The issues are separate. The plan to use nuclear weapons according to the French President was with submarine launched ballistic missiles, not the ships nukes. The depth charges would never have been used of course, since the most likely targets in this scenario would have been ports and airbases!

yep, so essentially the UK works on the basis that it puts the warhead so close to the target that it won’t need 10MT to hit something….

Not really. Trident works on that basis, as the SSBNs can attack the silos and airbases before they can launch, with the air and silos of the attacker pressing home against cities and other targets. Britain alone doesn’t have the numbers to do this. In a Cold War scenario Britain would not be willing to dedicate its nukes to attacking Soviet silos, since it would want to target Moscow, to ensure MAD for all of NATO and ensure the Americans didn’t get cold feet and back out. If Britain targetted the silos, Europe and Britain could be nuked, the Soviet silos and airbases nuked, but then the Soviets and Americans draw up a peace agreement keeping their cities intact!

What is truly AMAZING is that they put the Rafale PESA ahead of the Captor M in terms of detection and acquisition! What was that about the Rafale’s nose being too small? EFritter PR brigade should be ashamed! Again, they mention the Spectra suite as an outstanding system – my guess: ACTIVE CANCELLATION!

The Rafale designers knew what they were doing afterall. Of course, this is assuming the report is authentic (it looks it fer shore).

The range comparison was based on public statements by Dassault and BAE on the aircraft’s respective performance, and this remains true. I couldn’t see any range numbers in that document. Nobody ever said Rafale’s nose was “too small”, all that was said was that it has a 55cm radar aperature. As for active cancellation, it’s not been proven to work, and if you’re going to assume it does in that manner, then we’ll just have to assume Typhoon has laser cannon turrets 😀

Same here. Was that judgement based on the flight-tested airframes? IIRC these were German examples, which would have had a severely cut-down DASS installation (no MAWS, no LWR, no TRD). So if that was the benchmark the only surprise would be that the Swiss criteria were this specious and nonsensical.

As others have said, this is an intriguing leak but questions about its legitimacy remain and it is in any case drastically fragmented and incomplete, so may give inaccurate impressions.

Also no PIRATE IRST on German Typhoons IIRC

Looks like the French PA2 won’t happen as such and any new French Carrier will be the replacement for CDG rather than to complement it so certainly the Thales CVF PA2 design has died a death.

http://www.meretmarine.com/article.cfm?id=118711

Not sure if that helps put forward the case to get both CVF fully operational or justifies that we can make do with just the one ?:confused:
As Ministers could use either to justify their decisions !.

PA2 was effectively axed a couple years ago

@Pioneer

It has NOTHING to do with historical differences. The differences I’ve mentioned in these threads are very recent (last few months/years). We do a lot of things together with Europe, but that doesn’t mean we should do everything with Europe. We do Typhoon with Europe, so why not do F35 with the Americans? The French had the opportunity to be a part of Typhoon with us, but were not because of their arrogant attitude to the other partners, that’s their problem, and the onus to rectify that is upon them. Your statement appears to be very prejudiced from the outset, you seem to imply that when Britain works with the Americans it has lost out, whereas when it works with Europe it is an important partner or has gained something, which IMO must be clouding your conclusions.

There are programmes which are far more boring than Top Gear out there… anyone seen “Eastenders”? 😉