I give you boom boom long time
British Aerospace has in the last week announced job cuts at some of its UK plants including Warton and Salmesbury, but following on from this the Conservative leader David Cameron has said there will be a full defence spending review if the Tories end up in Government.
The pessimists have read into this that the intention is to axe the Eurofighter (Typhoon) contract and those feeding from these hysteria are up in arms about it.
I might be sat on my own on this, but I really hope they do axe this project. Eurofighter is far too conventional to even be required any more. Not only is it old technology compared with the likes of the F-35 Lightning, but how does it protect anyone from modern forms of terror and destruction?
The sole purpose of this project is in my opinion to keep skilled workers in the UK and rest of Europe. I’m obviously not against that, but I think it’d be better if we axed this pointless flying missile launcher and these engineers and scientists focused on projects that might actually benefit Britain rather than something that will probably never see any of the action for which it was conceived.
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what would you suggest we spend money on to protect us phil?
more trident subs?
missile defence?
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Difficult one really. They say knowledge is power, so a chunk of cash into intelligence could be a benefit if it improves our awareness. If you know whats going to hit you, you need less resources to handle it.
Trident, absolutely. Missile defence is a gimmick. If Iran fired one at us, we’d have ages to point our own missiles at it and shoot it down. Remember Saddam’s SCUD missiles? Most of them got shot down.
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What about these drones, Bae are making the Tanus?
A fleet of predators would be nice, save the lives of pilots as well.
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I’ve not heard about Tanus, nor can I find anything about it. What is it?
I guess we already have one drone of sorts – the cruise missile – except that doesnt come back.
Reusable drones are definitely the way forward for me – they could make them faster and more maneuvrable than any conventional aircraft. I guess this would make them a bit harder to shoot down and would mean they can reach their targets quicker.
And of course as you mentioned, the obvious benefit of no pilot risk.
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http://www.flightglobal.com/articles/2009/08/03/330420/bae-systems-grows-into-uavs.html
apologies, its the TARANIS, looks awesome.
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I agree it looks pretty mean!
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Well we have about 100 of these so I wouldn’t be too bothered about not buying any more.
As long as we get our 2 Queen Elizabeth Class Aircraft Carriers for the Royal Navy I’m happy. We need our defence capacity to be based on a small standing army with a strong blue water navy giving us the ability to project force across the world and to protect ourselves as an Island nation.
Construction has started on HMS Queen Elizabeth already so I don’t see that being scrapped I just hope we can get the second ship built HMS Prince of Wales.
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agreed, more trident subs as well
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Get rid of them.
Defence is just a massive job creation scheme – the prospect of giving our forces the right equipment at the right price, even if it comes from another country, is unthinkable to our MoD, politicians, defence industry executives and union barons, more concerned with their cosy concensus and massives subsidies for shit equipment.
Typhoon, Merlin, FRES, Cormorant, Nimrod MR4… All pieces of overpriced shit that are just as complicit in killing our servicemen as the Taliban and Al Qaeda et al.
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Can’t disagree with that.
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Typhoon, a piece of shit? You obviously don’t know much about the plane, then. It’s currently the most advanced fighter in the world. If it’s so awful, why are there countries queuing up to buy the thing!?
The typhoon is currently our first line of defence as the quick response team and is scrambled a stupid amount of times a year to turn back russian bombers who are showing an unhealthy interest in our country.
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Why didn’t they scramble it here then?
As for countries queueing up, it wouldn’t be the first time BAe had offered financial incentives to get orders for their products would it?
I’m not going to have a top trumps style argument about Typhoon in comparison to other planes such as the JSF, but if the only reason we “need” Typhoon is to scare off old bombers, then it should be immediately scrapped in favour of purchasing more versatile aircraft such as the aforementioned JSF. All I said was that the Eurofighter was conventional, and it is. It’s there to deal with an old problem that doesn’t exist any more.
If a Serbian can shoot down a F117A stealth bomber with an old tech SAM, why can’t our modern surface-to-air missiles deal with any real incursions?
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