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Farewell Harrier
Former Member
Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
Hello French Military Coalition?????
Brits who pay attention to news on the forces will know, Camerons had a fabulous idea to demolish an ISLAND nations Aerial and naval defences. He has plans of scrapping our marine fleet because oh we can share with the French, I personally don't like trusting the French with my lunch let alone my countries defence.
Oh another Brilliant brainwave was scrapping our VTOL(vertical Take Off and Landing) Airfleet, farewell Harriers, and with the farewell to harriers comes a royal cock up if ever we have a distant conflict involving fast jets, since unless we plan on base hopping we cannot deploy there rapidly since we have nothing capable of take off from a carrier.
I like military shizz and i saw nothing to interest me, thus i made this. So do you guys think good ol Cameron's throwing away our safety for the sake of a few bob, or hes making a practical tactical sacrifice.
READY SET GO
Brits who pay attention to news on the forces will know, Camerons had a fabulous idea to demolish an ISLAND nations Aerial and naval defences. He has plans of scrapping our marine fleet because oh we can share with the French, I personally don't like trusting the French with my lunch let alone my countries defence.
Oh another Brilliant brainwave was scrapping our VTOL(vertical Take Off and Landing) Airfleet, farewell Harriers, and with the farewell to harriers comes a royal cock up if ever we have a distant conflict involving fast jets, since unless we plan on base hopping we cannot deploy there rapidly since we have nothing capable of take off from a carrier.
I like military shizz and i saw nothing to interest me, thus i made this. So do you guys think good ol Cameron's throwing away our safety for the sake of a few bob, or hes making a practical tactical sacrifice.
READY SET GO
0
Comments
I for one at first thought it was a little of an odd thing to do, but try looking at it from a different viewpoint. If Britain and France were people, and were the best of buddies (even though they had friends who didnt like them, re:the population) then if you put views about the french to one side, and looked purely on the cost saving measures then I think it isnt too much of a bad idea.
Defence procurement is the main problem here, new bits of kit get requested by and designed by normal people, then politicians and civil servants decide it needs to do extra bits. Such as a recent vehicle (shall remain nameless) which the MOD decided had to be made air dropable therefore costings millions more on the contract, never mind the fact that we dont have our own capability to drop the vehicle in question without getting help, or that we have not done a large scale air drop for some years now, they did it anyway.
Maybe this deal with the French could well have been avoided if we hadnt had this global financial crisis, but then again the MOD would still have had a budget defecit anyway. If you step back and really think about why you dont trust the french, I suspect (and I mean no offence) that it is just mass hysteria, then you could come to the conclusion that it is an effort on the part of BOTH countries to foster a greater spirit of cooperation and to save money.
We cant really do comparable jack shit without the help of others anymore. We deployed something like 45,000 troops in one go to Iraq at the begining. These days in Afghanistan we can only run about 10% of the army in Afghanistan in one go, not just because of budget constraints and manning caps, we just cant physically do it.
If you look at the below
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/227598.stm That was a story from 1998, co-operation with France is nothing new and doesnt seem to have harmed us too much in the past. I see current efforts with the French as helping cure our military ailments rather than being a cause of them.
we actually are capable of doing that, we have chinooks for it. We also have the aircraft to get them into the countries so we also have the capabilities to chuck the vehicles out of said aircraft.
As a nation everyone should be assumed to pose a threat, Even France.
we shouldnt trust a possible threat with our forces stuck within their country/property
scrapping our vessels to share theirs is a new thing
and a bloody risky one at that
it means if we engage in a conflict
France has to tag along, or if France gets involved
We get dragged along.
Air transportable and air dropable and transportable by air are two very different things. We do not have the capability on our own (without US help) to conduct an air drop offensive of vehicles on any reasonable scale. Being able to do it on a small scale is not the same as having a capability.
Chinooks can only usually fly for around 2 hours with a decent load, I'm not sure if thats a full capacity load/underslung load but it aint that long. Its an hour in each direction. Hardly strategic lift. They can only carry 12 tonnes on an external load, and thats with nowhere near a full internal load.
We would have enough chinooks to do some form of air drop, but you would have to negate the medical evacuations, general troop transportation, also the fact that you drop one vehicle off and its occupants, what about the rest of the seats spare in the chinook?
That is exactly what we are doing with the US, the Danish, Estonians, Tongan's, French, German etc etc every day in Afghanistan. One of our guys goes man down then if a US medivac chopper is the closest to assist then the US chopper assists.
We as a country in the UK have a grossly over rated view of what our armed forces are capable of if standing on their own. We have a very good armed forces who do wonders with what we are given, but the US spends more than 20x the amount we do on their defence budget, we are but a small speck on the other side of the pond.
Which is something we have been doing inline with the US for many years, and likely many years to come. I believe what you show fear of in that statement, is exactly what these new agreements intend.
but sharing armed forces is very different to buddying with them
im on about a defensive
if were defending England and a part is taken then we have the capabilities to drop support in
Chinooks can only usually fly for around 2 hours with a decent load, I'm not sure if thats a full capacity load/underslung load but it aint that long. Its an hour in each direction. Hardly strategic lift. They can only carry 12 tonnes on an external load, and thats with nowhere near a full internal load.[/QUOTE]
rest of the seats, infantry support
or leave them empty and boost the range of the flight
as i said, sharing is different to an alliance
And how much smaller are we than America?
thats out of choice, not because we have to
Air dropable concept would be to fly into a country from a base many miles away to drop the kit.
As for defending england, we could air transport kit around (which is not the same as air droppable) but I would just shoot the chinook down.
Not really if the alliance is about sharing.
This is to do with crap use of contracts and budgets when building or at least attempting to build our own.
we already had the ships and jets
they've scrapped running them
Because of cost, therefore we would not have had them.
Also the alliance/treaty is about equipment sharing, our men and women of the armed forces do not have to go anywhere we dont want them to period, if we really didnt want them to go somewhere then we just say no.
We are one of the only militaries with ships and landing ships capable of moving battallions of troops and machinery (including main battle tanks), something that only the USA and Russia are currently capable of. Yes it's reduced, but it's still capable.
All this talk of China being the new world threat is one thing, but when you realise they have a million troops and absolutely zero ability to move them, you'll realise that the only countries that should feel threatened by them are their immediate neighbours.
Also, including Afghanistan we currently have about 18-20,000 troops/support units on foreign deployment. That leaves approximately 120,000 troops at home ready to defend the nation (which incidentally is their job). I doubt there is a nation on Earth with the exception of the USA, or perhaps Russia that would have the military force capable of launching a sucessful invasion of the UK, and remember we have the open seas, and NATO allies standing between us and any potential attacker.
Once you've thought of that, then look at the hardware we have. The Challenger 2 is still regarded as the most advanced and deadliest tank on Earth. The only thing that can destroy a Challenger with one shot, is another Challenger (the only tanks we lost in Iraq were to another Challenger). It's armour and fire control systems are more advanced than anything the US posesses which by extension means they are better than anything anyone else might have as well. Then we've got Eurofighter with the JSF coming on-stream soon, more warships than most other nations and a lurking submarine deterrent armed with 200+ nuclear warheads.
We may be small, but we're like a hedgehog.
Its just when we invade somewhere else that we have to get help from america
Unfortunately Britain lost it's engineering edge and has nothing, really, to replace them with.
Joint strike fighter in a few years. VTOL and stealth. Mainly an American project that we'll benefit from.
Quite. We have nothing to replace them with so we're using the same stuff as everyone else - notionally good because it's cheaper, allows us to interwork better with others; but actually bad because we lose the money and the distinctiveness that helps give our fighting men an extra edge and the self reliance.
And who's to say we'll keep it the same anyway, there won't be anything stopping us modifying the JSF in much the way we continually modified the Harrier over the years.
Ummm... I thought that's what I said.
The problem is in those 50 years we've turned from a nation of engineers into a nation of shopkeepers, and from there into a nation of bankers.
Yes we are in conflict in a certain place at the minute, but overall we have to plan for a war, not THE war.