And some people are going to believe all the STOVL hype no matter what reality has shown.

…and what has been shown in your reality Ben?. In mine STOVL has put fastjet tacair support in to operational areas where none would be otherwise in two major conflicts since 1980.

Runway repair has not been an issue in any modern war. Even the Iraqis were patching them faster than the allies could punch holes in them.

Yet it took NATO what 5 years to get the runway at Kandahar into a fit state to operate conventional types?. Runway repair, to acceptable tolerance, is not a 5 minute job.

As for burning holes in the runway cast your minds back and remember what STOVL means. Short Take Off Vertical Landing. The takeoff, under max thrust at max weight, is not vertical it is just the same as any other jet with the efflux direct aft….its just shorter than most. With SRL techniques spalling can even be minimised on landing.

The point, as Swerve has patiently explained, is to enable the use of hard strips unsuitable for conventional aircraft like Port Stanley airport or Kandahar International. Perhaps using a suitable length of taxiway if the main strip is unuseable. Seeing you are on an airfield that needs to have its main strip relaid I’d not think a bit of surface scorching on a taxiway, IF VL had to be used, would be such a issue would it?!.

Jim,

Whenever somebody says that the F-35 is overkill for a mission type someone else always rolls out the what if senario of an opponenet being equipped with large numbers of double digit FSU SAMs…How many nations actually operate these and of these how many can be reasonably be identified as possible adversaries and how many systems do they have.

Question: Which is easier airspace control or airspace denial?. For airspace control you need the positive control elements of wide-area surveillance, ground and airborne, plus the C2 elements in the backend, plus the air combat elements and support infrastructure. For denial you need a few batteries of advanced SHORADS and a halfway contempory GSM network. Which will be the more likely to be faced.

Double Digit SAMs have become the bogeyman for the stealth lobby. Yes they a believed to be effective but most are over a decade old and I wouldn’t be surprised if many nations have intel on their capabilities and developed active countermeasures.

Double digit SAMs are the BASELINE of the threat going forwards….the absolute minimum threat level that must be reduced by any comprehensive CAS/BAI designs that are intended to be in service into the 2030’s. Its not just the Russian kit either….look at the likes of VL Mica…a system that can be eaily dispersed, passively cued and volley off half a dozen, high performance, fire and forget SAMs in seconds. This isnt the 80’s anymore and you cannot rely on knowing where the SAMs are if they are mobile and well deployed/redeployed.

A single battery of a contempory system like VL Mica, well sited, could render ineffective the modest-sized expeditionary tacair forces that countries deploy now. You minimise that risk by building ‘disposable’ tacair…which means unmanned in any western service…or by building as much capability in to the manned platform as possible. If you have the luxury of being able to build a, seperate, low-rent capability for that environment where your principle CAS/BAI striker is overkill then all power to you, but, you build that IN ADDITION to a comprehensive strike capability and not INSTEAD of it.

But how many opposed amphibious assault against well equipped opposition have the USMC conducted since Korea?. I cannot think of one. Chances are that if the Cold War had hotted up these sort of operations would have been few with the USMC being moved to theatres like Norway and fighting as convention formations.

That last sentence, swapping RM for USMC, is almost a direct quote from John Nott in 1981. Its even more absurd in context of the US armed forces than it was regarding ours. The USMC’s forced landing capability was of significant value in Op Desert Storm. Even if no landing was eventually made the presence of the capability was a significant force multiplier for the coalition forces as it drew significant opposing forces out of the real operational theatres. For a country who’s whole military credo is the, very sensible, one of fighting on the other poor beggars territory, so you dont risk damage to your own, removing the all-areas rapid deployment potential offered by the USMC over-the-beach capability would be beyond stupidity.

Operations against high level opposition will not be conducted without USN CVNs in support and lower level operations like Somalia etc can be more than adequately supported by rotary assets.

This is the point through and through Jim. You dont need for the situation to be high-level to face advanced SAMs going forwards. A battery’s of Tors ‘lent’ unannounced by Ahmedinejad to Hezbollah would have a major impact on the ‘adequate’ rotary assets you would see the USMC left with in that low-intensity theatre.

As stated before the USMC has historically used a high-end and low-end tacair capability with Hornet and Harrier. They are replacing that with a single type to streamline ops….you cant replace the high-end with a simple CAS type and the USMC, understandably, want independence from the CVN’s that have to look after their own issues before the USMC’s. The answer is very simply the F-35B.

Yes, but close air support is a key USMC mission, and are they really going to be happy using a $100 million F35B as a bomb truck?

If the things they are dropping bombs on have, hitherto undetected, double-digit battlefield shorads covering them I’d expect so yes.

You are both wrong, and that is NOT what it says on the links you posted.

If you build a home or other property in a foreign country, it does not make it community property in which anyone can enter or use as they please and for any reason. Unless you live in a police state, it is called trespassing without your expressed written or spoken consent, except when you sign an agreement that says otherwise in clearly defined words.

You build a house on someone elses land you do it with their consent and subject to the laws and dictats of that land…not yours. You break the rules and you can suddenly find that you are unwelcome on that land.

If the U.S. had said no, there would have been a very different kind of war over the Falkland islands.

Yes….we’d have had to stick one of our oilers off Ascension feeding the truck relay to the airfield instead of the American provided one and the RAF crews wouldnt have been able to buy beer in the US commissary. I imagine that last one would have changed the entire complexion of the campaign…god only knows what the light blue would have hit had they been sober!.

Grey – message received loud and clear. I’ve made the points I wanted to and will shore this up here.

The UK can use the base and the island whenever it wants. The USAF built and run facilities were ‘lent’ to the UK in 1982, but had the US said no to their use that would have not made much difference. Honestly people this stuff is not hard to look up.

Happy to stand corrected….thanks PJ. I knew from an old conversation with a chap from the ministry that the US weren’t ‘holding a trump card’ with regards to granting use of the runway, but, hadn’t got around to looking it up to be honest. Thanks for saving me a job.

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It wasn’t just French AF Mirage interceptors that bested Sea Harriers during ACM practice. RNZAF A-4 Skyhawks also killed many Sea Harriers with missiles during a 1992 training exercise in the South Pacific. There was a big difference in technical capability of the Skyhawks used by Argentina and New Zealand. The Kiwi A-4 was of later manufacture, upgraded with HOTAS cockpit, improved avionics, more powerful engine, far superior APG-66 radar, and armed with the AIM-9L Sidewinder missile.

So what?. SHAR FRS1 took down F-5’s, F-104’s, F-15’s and MiG-29’s on exercise. FA2 with Vixen embarrassed the best the USN had on offer in the Purple exercise serials over the US side of the Atlantic. DACT is a learning lesson thats always painful for someone.

Argentina had been embargoed by the U.K. and U.S. long before the Falklands war, cutting them off from technical support, upgrades and spare parts for aircraft and weapons sold to them earlier. There is no doubt that if the Argentina’s air forces had the latest bombs, missiles, radars and fire control systems (like those issued to frontline American, French and Israeli pilots) the British invasion fleet probably would have withdrawn from the Falklands after several days.

….and if they had nuclear weapons, SSN’s and all the bells and whistles the garrison on the Falklands wouldn’t have been a few squads of Royal Marines with light weapons would it?.

They could barely withstand the pounding they received anyway, despite all of the dud bombs and missiles that hit British shipping.

Again you need to understand why the bombs were dud. There were few problems with the quality of Argentine ordnance, much of it was British after all, the freefall bombs were, largely, not exploding because they were released out of envelope. Had they flown the attack profiles necessary for successful ordnance deployment they would have been exposed to the full defensive fires from the task force. It was a direct consequence, of RN action, that those bombs that got through weren’t fusing.

As for ‘barely withstanding’ that’s an irrelevance isn’t it.They withstood it and completed their mission and in ships that were fitted for the cold war battle of the Atlantic NOT for expeditionary ops in a littoral 8000 miles from home port.

It was in the sense that the British pilots had them and the Argentine pilots did not. Even your Prime Minister was able to recognize that technological advances in weapon systems was more significant than any difference in the airframe that fired them.

Right, so, its your assertion that the US won the Falklands War for Britain because our pilots had the warm snuggly feeing provided by having ‘slightly more reliable’ missiles under the wings of their fighters. Thats a unique viewpoint I guess.

If Reagan told her to forget about using U.S. facilities on Ascension, I don’t believe that Thatcher would press the issue over a meaningless pile of rocks in the South Atlantic, whose few human inhabitants were not actually British citizens.

The forces were en route to the Falklands before the Haig shuttle diplomacy failed. You can work the rest out yourself from that one simple fact.

The Prime Minister could not hide that inconvenient fact from the general public forever, and it was not worth starting a pissing match with the Americans.The Argentine junta was not a threat to British national security, it was only a threat to Thatcher’s national pride.

So you have shifted your position now from “Removing the Argentine armed forces was strictly impossible without military aid and technical support from the United States” to the statement that it wasn’t worth fighting to recover the islands anyway. Presumably this shift has happened because you now understand that the US’s role in the conflict, to use Adm Woodwards words, was that of a friend ‘holding our coat’ and nothing more!.

Hawker and British Aerospace were deeply frustrated by the poor export sales of Harrier throughout the history of production. They were so desperate for new customers that Harriers were offered to unsavory dictators in places like Red China, Iraq, Uganda, and Zimbabwe. All of them politely declined. McDonnell-Douglas got a similar response when they tried to attract more buyers for the AV-8.

I’m sure they were frustrated. Sea Harrier was always going to be a niche aircraft built off a niche aircraft though. As for limited export success I can only think of one other design we sold to the US off the top of my head and that was the superlative Canberra. The fact that those operators with a requirement for STOVL wanted more of a light striker than a fighter was proven when McDD hung those barn doors on the side of the fuselage and created the bomb-truck Harrier II. As for doing deals with dodgy regimes you have turned a blind eye to Peace Pearl maybe?. Your feted APG-66 in the pointy end of J-8’s not ringing any bells?. Shall we stop throwing rocks while we are in the greenhouse?