Well, the Dassault-Breguet Atlantic was quite a success at the scale of the Eu industry.
But more importantly, I think that a disaggregated system should be the point of focus here. MPA in Eu is the facto a mission to sustain in contested airspace. On the opposite side, France have it’s oversea territory (often isolated) mission to assume that would require some long range/high endurance, multi point (orbit?) component. So partnering and finding synergies goes well beyond who’s gonna have a piece of the cake. At least, it requires more imagination.
Example (from Breakingdefense.com):
“One of the main reasons that the Navy decided to fund Triton was to have that teaming arrangement, to be able to communicate back and forth between P-8s and the Triton aircraft,” Capt. Dan Mackin, the Navy’s Triton program manager, told reporters at the Navy League’s Sea-Air-Space Exposition.
The deployment will also allow the P-8s to focus more on the submarine hunting aspect of tis mission, leaving other ISR missions to the drones.
“You want to give the P-8 the ability to perform the anti-submarine warfare mission while tying to high-altitude ISR mission,” Mackin said. “One of the things we’ll do is pass information back and forth between the two aircraft and the situational awareness of the fleet will be enhanced. Both aircraft have the ability to do chat, so both crews will be able to communicate back and forth.”
Given the smallest nature of Eu water, I will include a third faster, smaller component to act as a surrogate for larger MPA during circonstances that requires increased reactivity or less exposure and simultaneous multiple zone of action without requesting all the systems that you can typically find in a larger MPA: a Scorpion/Falcon 20 type of aircraft.
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