Originally Posted by
typerated
You obviously really don't know!
so the Tornado GR1 being withdrawn from low level attacks in GW1 was a sign of being unprepared and the Tornado being obsolete? or was there another reason maybe?
The problem is the constant errosion over the last three+ decades. The cause of all the bother is the political will to cash in on the "Peace Dividend". The attitude following the 1989 collpase of the Berlin Wall was that the world was moving on forward into sunlit uplands. Nothing which would intervene along the way was allowed to interfere with that. This has been the way of it for all western democracies, with the noticeable exception of the USA. However, the UK has a particular knack for asset stripping while wisely, perhaps, still investing in hidden assets. Intelligence, cyber warfare,and countering international terrorism have been seen as the only game in town while seriously thinking the days of industrial machine warfare was gone forever, despite all the evidence to the contrary. The decision to withdraw the Tornado early in all roles was purely a matter of the spending priority da jour. The decision to arbitrarily reduce the RAF's frontline to just two types instead of three was typical of that thinking.
FB
PS I now read on UK Defence Journal, that the government is looking to re-commit to the full order of 138 F-35s.