A sound strategic case?
What, like your mix of outdated Cold War paranoia, your Little Englander
isolationism ('sendA sound strategic case?
What, like your mix of outdated Cold War paranoia, your Little Englander
isolationism ('send a gunboat'), your single service obsessive selfishness,
your inability to recognise the realities of a restricted budget and a
changed world, your inability to answer what I'll admit are hard questions
about cost effectiveness, and your constant harping on about the Falklands
(which are already protected by land-based AD)..........
Much better minds than mine have reached the conclusion that the SHar does
not offer a useful enough capability to justify its retention, and that
other assets are a higher priority for scarce resources.
They acknowledge that there will be a capability gap, but are happy that
that gap will be covered by our coalition partners, or by land-based AD.
They have taken on board the fact that we will no longer undertake
autonomous national operations, and cannot fund or structure our armed
forces on that basis.
They see the most useful role for the CVS in this post-Cold War world, with
its emphasis on littoral ops, peacekeeping and peace enforcement as being
power projection. They recognise that the CVS is too small to embark
sufficient aircraft to conduct OS and AD ops simultaneously.
This isn't rocket science, chaps.
Get defence spending back to Cold War levels and you can have all the
occasionally useful, 'nice to have' kit and capabilities that we had back
then, but otherwise, we must cut our coat according to the cloth, and must
concentrate resources on those core capabilities which are needed every
time, rather than on carriers, which might be useful one day......