Sorry to hear Moggy….but glad you are ok….this place would not be the same without you ; -)

Simple sound business principles…..a crude analogy in business is “just-in-time” stock replenishment….means you free up working capital and funds for other activities….that’s why shops keep just enough stock in hand….wait for cash flow in from earlier sales to better spend what funds are to hand (or in this case: what national defence budget is available in the year).

…..only people who would want unfettered expenditure, even in straitened times, are shareholders of defence companies…..a good example of unchecked and unnecessary expenditure is the massive expansion during the Reagan years when even world War II battleships were re-activated at great cost (huge expensive manpower required as well) only to be de-activated after a relatively short time at great cost that could be better spent elsewhere.

Winners? People who owned stock in defence companies….never underestimate simple human greed for money as a prime driver of where a nation’s budget goes…..if you throw enough money at any weapon system, including stealth and generation-6 or whatever-number-I-say differentiates-my-system and even the F-35 (!) , you can make it work! …..followed of course by the usual iterations of countermeasures by the other side.

Hopsalot, you said you don’t get why people think highly of Gripen NG and are puzzled why people question the need to spend money on say the F-35 when the only country that needs “day one” offensive weapon systems is the good old US of A….most of the smaller nations could get by for their “normal” mission needs with say Gripen NG at a fraction of the cost.

….if they want to join in on the coat tails of America to “regime-change” another country that I contend will become increasingly more difficult to do and it will be more difficult to take public opinion with you due to it being more difficult to pull the wool over people’s eyes with so much information available to the public instead of just a small elite or political class.

….forget Iraq I just found out after 1914 cabinet papers were released after the 100 year rule that the foreign secretary Grey simply didn’t tell the Prime Minister Asquith for three years of a policy and plans to ship over a British Expeditionary Force to assist the French under the Entente Cordiale….these secret provisions and agreements some suggest, amongst other factors, led to a chain of events with a involuntary momentum of their own, to the First World War I…..secret addendums to treaties are more difficult to keep secret in these open and transparent times….that’s what we’re fighting for isn’t it?

Err . no. Firstly, Sevastopol wasn’t threatened at all. Where was the threat?
Therefore, saying that Russia is doing exactly what the USA or UK would do is false, & has been proved to be false.

As or Syria – profit for the USA? That’s crazy. There’s been no profit. The USA hasn’t been pumping weapons in to the Al Qaeda lot. Indeed, it’s been reluctant to give arms to the secular anti-Assad forces for fear of them getting to the Islamist nutjobs, though recently it seems to have opened the taps, to allow the FSA to fight the Islamist extremists. Get that? Not arming the al-Qaeda lot, trying to get arms to those fighting the al-Qaeda lot.

BTW, the rebels seem to have mostly Russian & Chinese weapons, perhaps bought on the open market. So who’s profiting?

Swerve, I don’t want to go too much off topic so I’ll try to be brief….but you haven’t proved anything just because you say so!

Put yourself in Russia’s shoes (just like we do for America)…firstly unlike the Americans in Guantanamo in Cuba, they are there legally in Crimea with the approval of the Ukraine with a legal agreement until at least 2042 with approx. 26,000 men already there…with an unstable situation (genuine grievances of the populace stirred up by external agents or not) they cannot take any chance their strategic base is compromised….the people in Crimea are mainly Russian and if they have a referendum for self-determination just like the one supported by NATO and the EU in Kosovo would that be ok and confer more legitimacy to the facts on the ground?

The UK base in Cyprus is perhaps not a good example as it was never under any threat in 1974 by Turkey….the Turks were reacting only to the Coup d’etat engineered by the military junta in Greece ousting Archbishop Makarios to enforce union (enosis) with Greece and this led directly to the collapse of the Greek colonels’ military junta a few months later.

Glad you agree that the American base in Guantanamo is on very suspect legal grounds as the sovereign power there do not want them there because the treaty was imposed by force “in perpetuity”! A bit like the carve up of the Chinese coast into various European enclaves and unequal treaties with poor treatment of the natives that lead to the Boxer Rebellion.

As for Syria, clearly you appear to have missed that Hague only changed his tune after a public outcry….he was gunning for war (just read his nutty statements before the Houses of Parliament vote that stopped him in his tracks…..). You appear also to have missed both the direct aid and that given through proxies to Al Nusra/Al Qaeda insurgents (surely you’ve seen that photo of ole Senator McCain’s smiling sweetly with that looney who cut out the heart out of that poor prisoner), CIA providing direct training to insurgents, French special forces France operating in Syria for ages and you clearly missed Kerry’s crazy swivel-eyed pronouncements before the mat was pulled from under his feet when Obama wisely decided not to send US forces (I would say there are also one trillion wasted US dollars that say the second gulf war was an unnecessary waste of money, decent men from the US and UK and others, plus 1 million Iraqis that died for nothing).

There is a NSA document released in 2006 (look it up it’s in the public domain) that proved that they made it up to go to war with Viet Nam (faked an attack that never was in the Gulf of Tonkin on a US ship ) and they made up the evidence to show weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (Bush admitted none found…even the fake connection of 9/11 to Iraq (it was mainly Saudis of Al Qaeda) meant many Americans thought that was reason to invade Iraq!)… …what makes you think that they’re not doing the same bamboozle trick on the public now? (Tony the weapons sent to the Syrian jihadis are not made in the UK or US!)

As for using Chinese or Russian weapons what do you think the Americans (and interesting the same allies Saudis) used to supply the Jihadis in Afghanistan in the 1980s? They weren’t going to use US or UK arms, but those bought on the international arms bazaar so as to give plausible deniability….remember Air America operating…a CIA front operating in the South-east Asia to give the same plausible deniability? What about more recently….Israeli missiles supplied to the sworn enemies of the US Iran! That also by Reagan (poor Ollie North took the rap for that) and paid for using drug money (ironically the famous Mrs Reagan drug campaign was “just say no!” to drugs) from drug smuggling operations in South America….you couldn’t make it up!

Even the Israelis have come to realise the agenda to dispose the secular Asad was a mistake because the rebels are all shades of Islamist nutjobs….any genuine grievances against the Asad regime (and there are many) was hijacked by the Saudi and Qatari paymasters who are involved in a sectarian dispute with Shia Iran and want to get to them using US, UK men and material and anyone else that need the money (French)…..lucky the public saw through this and that’s why parliament voted against the Syrian strikes….I’ll say again in case you missed it first time: one trillion wasted US dollars later say that the second gulf war was an unnecessary waste of money, decent men from the US and UK and others, plus 1 million Iraqis that died for nothing….and similarly we should not get involved in a similar misadventure in the Ukraine.

Alenia might find the An-70 an attractive product, complementing its C-27J. Who knows?

That’s an interesting prospect Swerve….there might be some Italian link up possible in the same way as the M-346 / Yak -130.

As far as preserving the in-house skills in the Antonov design bureau I am sure that some talent might already have flown to the highest bidders in Russia and China….it’s just sad that a legacy going back 70 years and 22,000 planes (!) later may just wither away…

A400M isn’t an EU project. The majority of EU members aren’t participants, including two major countries, Italy & Poland. Airbus & BAe don’t control EU industrial policy.

I agree that Airbus don’t control EU policy. However, you know how it works….if they tell their local MPs where the factories are based or employ a lot of people that financial support to Ukraine may indirectly affect A400 sales (a contentious suggestion IMHO as there is no direct link and only indirect general support of the overall economy to stop it collapsing which is in no one’s interest) they in turn will lobby their minister who can then approach the non-elected and non-accountable EU commissioners….

My local MP lives 20 doors down from me and if I was really concerned about something I would see if she could take it further….if a MP is a minister or in the cabinet they could make sure it reaches at least the ears of someone who could state their case…that won’t of course mean that they will act on any such appeal or lobby as there could be wider strategic reasons to support the Ukraine….more important than the narrow interest of the shareholders of Airbus.

….one such reason is to try and wean them away from the Russian orbit (not going to happen as they are neighbours and a lot of Ukraine’s market for selling their goods is next door to Russia) and as Freehand said the naval base at Sevastopol is too important for Russia to let go….analogous to the American Guantanamo base in Cuba 90 miles from the US whereas Russia and Ukraine are contiguous.

Yes, I agree…that’s why they tried to mitigate their risk by transferring assembly to Russia itself from the Ukraine….just like the Il-76 MD is being built in Russia rather than Uzbekistan where the original factory was in Soviet times…

My query was the selection of the Il-76 in the first place….it seems it was more to do with the reasons you mentioned rather the merits of a 40 year old design….seems the Il-76MD was the only show in town for them while the Chinese have gone their own way with the Y-20….Trident nailed this over about 20 pages a few months ago in the Russian thread

Good point about the Crimean naval base being too important for Putin to let go….

They can’t let Ukraine join NATO or make it easy for them to join the EU….country is dependent on Russian gas supplies so little wriggle-room for them even if most of them wanted to….big Russian minority on Russia’s doorstep does complicate things.

….probably little chance of Russians having to act in certain circumstances as they already have forces on the ground in the various bases in Sevastopol similar to US forces based in Guantanamo in Cuba.

It’s not just the aviation industry, the whole country is on the brink of economic collapse & bankruptcy and desperately needs money and alot of it. Right now Ukraine is asking for $35 billion (basically 1/5 of entire GDP) in immediate foreign loans & aids to stave off bankruptcy in 2014 & 2015. 2014 & 2015, obviously not going to be much investment in Antonov (state owned) and probably massive cuts to the air force budget when the entire government is struggling with default. The next several years after that shouldn’t be much better as the country will be busy and probably struggling to pay off the increased debt from 2014 & 2015.

Actually I understand that the request for $35 billion is over two years and just $6 billion would be sufficient to service the debt in 2014.

They already have received $3 billion of the $15 billion loan from Russia while the balance remains in doubt…

….choice is simple….become like Poland and move away from a old-style Soviet command economy….or remain tied to but not with Russia…Ukraine did not implement reforms required by IMF in 2010 and have to be careful of cutting gas subsidies for fear of unrest….billionaire oligarchs like Yulia Tymoshenko who made billions from the last gas deal do not help in the lot of the average Ukrainian whose annual income of $3,500 is three /four times less than Poland who have started from a similar low base ten years ago but appear to have successively made the transition..

As far as Antonov is concerned, with Russian funding the proposed sixty-odd An-70 were to be made in Kazan, Russia with just parts sourced from Ukraine…remains to be seen if they slow down co-operation but seems no point in doing this as there is a strategic requirement for these aircraft and having the aircraft built in Russia goes a long way towards this….will this mean the end of this distinguished design bureau over time?