First my heart goes out to the families, friends and collegues of the men who died or were injured. RIP.
I have no idea if the root cause of this had anything to do with a lack of British CAS equipment but there is no doubt that there is indeed such a lack. Two peices of equipment spring immediately to mind the Jaguar and the Sea Harrier. The Jag was fit for purpose and taken out of service 5 years early to save money and so to was the Sea Harrier. Had the Sea Harrier still been in service there would be more Harriers to provide CAS and the Jag would still be working overtime but doing the job nonetheless. The army requested 97 Longbow Apache gunships, an asset that the troops on the ground regard very highly and if they had 97 then there would be more to deploy, obviously but, to save money, the government gave them 67 and it isn’t enough.
I read about soldiers saying they need a bigger slice of the defence budget but I think the answer should not be a redirection of available funds, the funds should simply be increased to ensure everything is covered. The RAF still need their ‘shiny new jets’ and the Royal Navy still need their ‘shiny new ships’ but the British Army still needs basic equipment and raw manpower and the British government will not listen. They don’t care, they are removing perfectly suitable equipment from the duty roster to pay for the shiny new stuff which is still a year away from even basic CAS capability but that doesn’t mean that the new stuff is not required.
The British government has two choices so far as I am concerned, either provide adequate funding for equipment and personel or withraw Britain from the world stage. We should be over the imperialist bug by now but if we are not we can’t send people into the firing line unless they are properly funded and properly supported. 😡 😡
The Sea Harrier with that variant of Pegasus would have struggled. It put restrictions on where it could operate. The Jags were out of airframe hours.
http://forum.keypublishing.co.uk/showthread.php?p=1108265#post1108265
From Canopener Al
“The aircraft have little flying time left as there is no depth maintenance support and most airframes are extended by the maximum to the latest possible date of October. All the kites will go to Cosford to become training airframes that are more relevant to modern combat aircraft!!”
The Jags, if they had been deployed to Afghanistan earlier, would also have operated under constraints due to the Adour.
http://www.pprune.org/forums/showthread.php?t=273270&page=6
‘We looked very carefully at the option to go to Kandahar and it was possible. We could not have operated at the peak of the hottest days but we were only ever looked at to augment the JFH, not replace them, so that they could have a less punishing op cycle. The Harrier is an excellent CAS platform but we could have credibly relieved some of the burden.
It is certainly nice to be given credit for all the effort we have put into CAS over the last year – I don’t know where you have been Serf but providing we were physically in country, I don’t think we have ever turned down a CAS request and we have always been given positive feedback. We have trained FACs on every one of our dets, except this last one. That is a direct contribution to current ops – fact.’
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