What happens when U.K. and American interests clash?

Most likely, British politicians and decisionmakers back down in order to preserve “the special relationship”.

In the event of an actual act of defiance, the best case scenario is what occurred with the AIIB recently: the UK was the first western country to defy Washington, but in doing so provided cover for a bunch of other nations — including my own — to do the same. With so many offenders it becomes impractical for Washington to punish all of them.

Worst-case scenario is something like the Suez Crisis, 1956, where the US pulls the strings of power and the UK is forced to retreat in domestic and international disgrace and humiliation.

And of course anyone who looks remotely capable of defying Washington on anything is going to be subjected to extra-invasive scrutiny from the NSA/CIA. Merkel is both a case in point personally, and the subsequent sweeping-under-the-carpet an illustration of the conniving and corrupted relationships between western elites & institutions.

USMC F35Bs will regularly fly of the decks of the UK carriers:

http://aviationweek.com/defense/us-marines-could-play-major-role-uk-carrier-operations

“What began at some point in the 20th century as an unsavoury means to an end – trying to use American military might to leverage the waning British military, with the end of maximising British influence – floated loose of its original aim. Preserving the means became an end in itself. The goal of the British military establishment became to ingratiate itself with its US counterpart not for the sake of British interests but for the sake of British military prestige.” (James Meek)

@BarnesW

You are confusing the function of a system with the specific means it employs to accomplish that function (and their broader merits). A highly sophisticated aircraft that cannot take off because a combination of dust and humidity has obscured the sensor apparatus that it uses to judge whether or not the runway is clear and therefore whether or not to permit release of the brakes has failed at being an aircraft whereas the crude Wright brothers’ contraption succeeded. The broader merits of the advanced system are irrelevant. The aircraft has failed to take off. The A400M has experienced an unintended intersection with the ground. The missile has landed in Iran.

I addressed the difficulty of the problem because it’s the difficulty of the problem that counts. Whereas your F-35 analogy was looking at two different problems, since an F-35 is not doing the same job as an F-16A.

My analogy was deliberately broad. In many cases the F-35 is performing the same tasks as an F-16A — in ways that are far more complex and hence failure prone. The braking system in a modern car is vulnerable to all sorts of largely computer-related failure modes that a car from 40yrs ago does not have to worry about. Any number of examples along similar lines can be found. There may be good reasons for such increased complexity, but this does not change the fact that the more advanced and complex system is subject to new and exciting failure modes that may, under certain circumstances, render it less reliable at performing basic functions (in this case, stopping the car on command) than older systems. Would the recent A400M crash have occurred if it was a boring old C-130H instead of a cutting edge aicraft? Almost certainly not.

Ignoring the F-35 comment because it’s the best policy. But in this case, with cruise missiles, the complexity of the system and task it’s performing is the same. The only difference is that a missile during Desert Storm was doing that task with the likes of a very slow Intel 8080, with very little RAM/ROM, and probably 8-bit mnemonics (assembly language) as a result of that. A modern missile produced in 2012 is, at very least, using a 32-bit system, and has enough RAM/ROM to use either a high-level language or more advanced 32-bit assembly code and possibly some FPGA in there too.

To put it another way, take FCS. Imagine controlling an unstable design with an Intel 8080 and 1970s flight sensors, now imagine doing it with 32-bit/64-bit RISC processors. Which plane will crash more? Store 0.6 as an 8 bit number and add it too itself 1 million times during integration component of PIPA control. The answer is 600,000 right? Wrong! It’s 593,750. See the problem? For many of these applications in digital control you need 32-bit arithmetic or better and to do that with 8-bit hardware requires algorithms, just to do simple maths operations, programs to do basic mathematical operations.

You address the difficulty of the problem, not the reliability of the solution — these are two distinct concepts.

Also, I doubt that the guidance hardware employed missiles is as far advanced from US 1991 standards as you would have us believe. Others have already spoken to this point regarding the age of the Russian design. I would add to this both the limitations of the Russian electronics industry — never a strong point even in the Soviet era — and also Russia’s comparatively strict budget limitations. And of course, guidance failure is merely one of many possible failure modes that could be experienced.

It is amusing how all the mainstream, non-specialist outlets have jumped on the cruise missile failures. The real question is to what extent we’re looking at an official propaganda campaign aimed at discrediting Russia (clearly the answer is “some”) and to what extent the coverage is organic, reflecting the widespread Russophobia of the audience. Of course, trying to disentangle one from the other is a difficult and unrewarding endeavour. After nearly a hundred years of anti-Russian propaganda, the people think what they are told to think. I doubt there is any subject on which US public opinion and the (bipartisan) political establishment are so aligned. Of course we should not give Washington too much credit — encouraging and directing the people’s ire towards a demonised other has always been a simple and reliable game.

Regarding plans for additional Il-76/Phalcon AEW birds, how does this mesh with production & service plans for both DRDO’s existing ERJ 145-based AEW platform and the recently tendered A330-based program? Do additional Phalcons mean backtracking on the plan to put the smaller ERJ 145 AEW into production/service? Alternatively, does it mean the A330 program will be kicked further down the road? Or is everything going ahead and IAF to end up with 20+ AEW birds?

I was thinking primarily of Japan, South Korea, and the US itself. Japan also inducted the F-2 in that time period, and ROKAF the F-16 Block 52.

Incidentally, this little diversion prompted me to go back and look at the evolving ratios of military spending (as estimated by SIPRI using constant 2011 USD) between US and China:

1990: 27:1
1995: 18:1
2000: 11:1
2005: 8:1
2010: 5:1
2014: 3:1

Of course it may take the best part of another decade to reach 2:1. The rate of closure has been hastened these last couple years by the American “sequester” which will probably be removed sooner rather than later.