blablabla

In January 2008, it was confirmed that Blair would be joining investment bank JPMorgan Chase in a “senior advisory capacity”[152] and that he would advise Zurich Financial Services on climate change. Some sources have claimed that his role at JP Morgan will pay more than $1m a year.[152] This additional salary will contribute to annual earnings of over £7m.[153]

Blair’s links with, and receipt of an undisclosed sum from, UI Energy Corporation, a Korean company with oil interests in northern Iraq, have also been subject to media comment in the UK

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7180306.stm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/jan/29/uk.tonyblair

Speculation places his personal wealth at £60 million, mostly earned since his tenure as Prime Minister, and owns nine properties around the world.[158] In July 2010 it was reported that his personal security guards claimed £250,000 a year in expenses from the tax payer, Foreign Secretary William Hague said; “we have to make sure that [Blair’s security] is as cost-effective as possible, that it doesn’t cost any more to the taxpayer than is absolutely necessary”.[159]

That’s just what was published in the press.

Nic

See above. Where’s the profit? You’re claiming that politicians engaged in a vast & complicated conspiracy in order to do something, but you can’t show any way in which they could have gained. Show me the money.

Will have to wait till they leave office. Tony Blair seems to be doing just fine since he left office.

Nic

That doesn’t mean there has to be conspiracies around each corner Nicholas10. The events of SSDR 2010 are the result of a severe budget crunch, general mismanagement of the defence budget over several decades and short sighted bungling. To suggest that somehow there was a grand conspiracy by the people in power to get rid of Harrier and ensure STOVL adoption into the future by selecting CATOBAR is absurd. If they wanted STOVL in the first place during SSDR 2010 then they could of ditched Harrier then, kept to the original plan in respect of the build, save £100million on conversion R&D and pocket the money from selling Harrier to the Americans.

Coming from a dude who links to a TSR2 story in his signature. Sigh… I guess some people never learn.

Nic

mmalaya are you trying to compare a dassault representative & a biased journo.

A EADS representative would have the same credibility as a Dassault representative. A biased journo with a huge agenda wouldn’t.

Nic

Indeed S300, 400 & 500 are not something the Rafale was designed to attack. A sealth UCAV & stealthy cruise missiles are going to be used for that kind of work, and the Rafale is versatile enough to take care of all the other missions (and it can use the Scalp cruise missile anyway).

However if it had to attack some serious defense, it wouldn’t drop AASM from 50km away in my opinion, but it would hug the earth to sneak below the radar coverage, and with terrain masking and offboard guidance updates, the Rafale could launch AASM from more than 15km away, while targetting could be done by another Rafale (with SPECTRA and RBE2 mapping+damoclès) that stayed outside of the SAM threat or even awacs or ELINT platforms.

The off-boresight capability of the AASM means the Rafale never has to fly less than 15km from the target, so depending on the terrain I think it has good chances to be able to hide from the adversary radar, manpads & short range AAA.

Also, with 2 Rafale shooters you’re talking 12 AASM, that’s probably enough to overwhelm the defenses, if it isn’t you send 4 of them, & with good timing and preparation you can add a couple of Scalp-EG for good measure to make the operators busy.

What do you think?

Nic

With the ongoing problems with the oxygen system, maybe they don’t want to hide anything because if it is ever discovered, one may think it is related and it was covered up.

Nic

I am always amused when people make dogmatic claims and present them as ‘fact’. How do you know that no such photos exist? Do you have access to the Dassault and Armee de l’Aire picture archives?

Well advertising pictures are used for advertisement. As such they should have been exhibited to the public, or to mangasines. Professionals wouldn’t care less about such pictures, but would want to see operationally relevant loadouts. So if such pictures had been made of the Rafale, then they sure haven’t been used in advertisement purposes enough for any of those pics to surface in magasines or in the internet.

If you have not, then all you can say is that you (and any friends you have consulted) have not seen any. The editor of a major aviation magazine might be in a position to say that none had been released by the Dassault PR organisation, but that does not mean that none exist.

Ok we have unpublished pictures of unseen loadouts of the Rafale. Let’s NOT publish them! Rrrrright. I’m sorry I don’t buy this story.

When I’m at Farnborough, it might be amusing (if I have the time) to visit the Dassault chalet and ask if they can provide any photos of these aircraft with a heavy weapon load.

I’ll send you a bottle of great wine from a branch of my family’s property if you post one of them in the Rafale thread. 😀

But what do such photos prove in practice? At an air show some years ago, one of the show dailies published a photo that showed that the impressive weapons load being carried by one aircraft in the flying display consisted of an array of empty casings.

To me, such pictures of the Typhoon prove that BAe can’t find an operationally relevant picture that is impressive enough, so they have to make publicity pictures that have little operational value.

Nic