Originally Posted by
Not_a_boffin
QNLZ was about to embark f/w and is bombing up in Scotland, PWLS is progressing well...
This is delusional Royal Navy thinking at its best. Your new ship eating itself and needing extensive repairs is precisely the reverse of an actual military capability. Only a fool would claim a positive for the speed at which an unplanned, lengthy and expensive repair is taking place.
QNLZ is not much better. In terms of 'bombing-up' it is doing so with the bare minimum of stocks (from a stockpile the resembles a puddle) that with the exception of some forward stocks, is almost entirely based at Kineton. A home they share with the vast majority of all RAF and Army ammunition stocks. Even with our depleted supplies and slow destruction of obsolete weapons, we have allowed DM 'eggs-in-one-basket' Kineton to become the largest ammunition dump in Western Europe.
Embarking fixed-wing is another way of saying that we are deploying some of our F-35B pilots, the entire cadre of which we could fit in a minibus. Bombing-up for war, or even capable of it, it is not. Wallace publicly points at our hollowed-out capability and calls it a strategic risk - he is not wrong.