Okay people your opinion please, I know we are going for the F35c and I know we have already invested £2 billion of tax payers money in the project with good projected returns and I am happy about this of course. However if you were hypothetically in charge of aircraft procurement/budgets for the Navy and it was put to you that you could have 60 F18 Hornets exclusively for the FAA, plus FAA pilots, 4 Hawkeyes and both carriers converted to cats and traps instead of the F35.

I’m going to stay out of the RAF Navy argument (for now at least). But if it is a straight 60 F18s vs 60 F35c then I would take the F35c easily.

If however it is 60 F18s plus both ships CATOBAR plus 4 Hawkeyes vs 60 F35C plus only one ship CATOBAR and no fixed wing AEW then I would switch.

But that is a pretty loaded set of scales tbh

I notice that no-one has attempted to respond to the protestor’s main point, that these drone attacks violate international law. I suppose it’s easier to mock them for their rather daft behaviour.

The Economist recently ran an article on the subject and suggested that all UAV operations be moved wholly into military oversight, from the CIA. I suppose that’d be a start, but it still ignores the violation of sovereign integrity and presumption of innocence.

I think we can safely say that no UK operated drones are controled by the CIA. OK, I am being trite but AFAIK all UK drones are operated by military personnel. That was the Economists main concern.

There are/will be/could be issues if fully autonomous (rather than remote control or semi-autonomous with operator in the loop for firing) UAVs are allowed to engage. But that is not happening. Even if it did one could reasonably argue that as with all warfare, the person who sets the rules of engagement can be culpable. Thus anyone who programmes/configures/directs a UAV to engage if condition X is met would be the man in the loop. Note that exactly the same argument applies to more conventional weaponry such as self-defence SAM missiles which have an automatic enagagement mode.

To some extent NATO has been the victim of its own success, in that now we are expected to be able to defeat a substantial enemy without any casualties to our own forces or to civilians, and so any deviation from this gets attention whereas in the past it would have been largely ignored.

On the other hand this sort of pressure has meant that we have stepped up and improved the accuracy of weapons and targetting etc. It also helped get politicians to stump up money for the systems.

So even the smelly loonie hippies have their uses.

Which is not of course to defend the abhorrent hyperbole that they use such as comparing UAVs with Nazism.

Great images Jock. Thanks

I bet there were some nervous people when they started floating her.

CATOBAR does open up a lot of possibilities and I hope that the decisions on AAR, AEW and COD will be revisited. What is more I hope they are re-visited as a group, because whilst introducing a new aircraft type for (say) AAR may not be economic, when you consider it across all three it may be.

However presumably this too will have to wait for 2015.

I suppose for a carrier that will be in service for 50 years (as claimed0 then even if we don’t get it right first time, we will at least have the chance to get it round for subsequent cycles

@ppp

My post was explaining why we bought F35 rather than Rafale or Superhornet. You took issue my statement that F35 was better for UK purposes but we can’t discuss why on an open forum.

No, was not you who made that assertion, not even this forum.

I did read your posts, I thought I understood them. It appears I don’t.

I think he plagiarised Geoff B’s words!

BTW there is a colon missing after http in the URL

@flanker.

Capability and effectiveness of C4ISTAR on an open forum? I think you know the answer to that

As for cost, various sources give the UK workshare as around 20%, whilst our investment is around $2bn of the total expected $40bn investment and total buy of $200bn for 2400 aircraft. You can find various different figures but for the sake of argument here I have used wikipedia

Thus UK workshare might b expected to be 20% of ($200bn+$40bn)=$48bn

Now your guess is as good as mine about how many we will buy, but if we use the 150 figure then we might expect that to cost us
150 *£200bn/2400 = $12.5bn plus the investment of $2bn

Assuming the 2012 rate of corporation tax for main business of 25%, that gives $12bn. Now I know they would not pay corp tax on all of that, but tax will be paid on salaries, sub-contracts etc that will probably exceed that (as income tax & NI are at higher rates for example).

Thus overall, the UK will earn more in tax from F-35 than it will cost.

Whereas for Super-hornet or rafale, UK workshare would realistically be minimal.

Fashion, trends, pride and ‘bling’ factor

Regards
Pioneer

Or because the F-35 has a very different capability in terms of C4ISTAR, an aspect which is usually ignored in public forums and open media but which is critical to effectiveness

And also because the workshare gives the UK a greater proportion than her investment and costs, which means that when you offset the UK tax take from F-35 against UK government costs it is much “cheaper” overall than Super-hornet or Rafale where our workshare would be minimal.

So we get a better (for what we want) product for less money and retain UK skills.