Originally Posted by
Asturias56
I suspect they're worried that the Australians are only the first in line - if the US started selling SSN's to Japan, S Korea and maybe India it would make the PLA (N) look a bit .. exposed - all that money in surface ships.........
Japanese are absolutely on the cards, the top candidate to replace Suga said it during a televised debate, dont think korea will be in the short term and india is doing their own and are not signitories to the NPT which has a section that covers naval reactors
Kono Taro, who has a commanding lead in polls to head Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party and succeed the outgoing Suga Yoshihide as prime minister, expressed support for building nuclear-powered (not nuclear-armed) submarines this week. While being questioned alongside other candidates in a televised forum, he
called the development of nuclear submarines a “very important” capability for Japan.
Originally Posted by
WE Branch Fanatic
Pity that they have no V/STOL aircraft to go on the twp LHDs with ski jumps.
I got a captains tour of the canberra, with the EO, way back when it was first commissioned. Someone asked this question the EO had the reply already to go, he said the canberra had been modified to make sustained flight ops impractical. The things he mentioned was that some aviation fuel tanks had been converted to diesel for vehicles it carries, some ammunition elevators had not been installed and part of the hangar had been converted to light vehicle bays. Dont pretend to even have a clue how easy or not it would be to reverse these.
There was rumors that one of the british aircraft carriers would be one deployment to the horn of africa, assume Dijbouti, but with aukus it might be more practical to do it to sydney. That might give us a some impetus to buy some or convert some the existing order to F-35bs to fly off the UK and possibly reverse the mods on one of the a Canberra to fly F-35's