I am slightly puzzled over the constant attacks on the FJ fleet and numbers of aircraft. Between GW1 and 2, there were continual deployments of FJ operating on Northern and Southern Watch for Iraq. During this time Serbia and Bosnia kicked off and the FI and UK commitments had still to be fulfilled. If memory serves me correct, we dropped more ordinance on Iraq than Kosovo during the same period of time.
My recollections of this time were that we struggled with the fleet size that we had then and training had to be curtailed to meet these tasks, particulalry while the GR MLU was going on.
There is a tendency to lock on to the flash points to justify a capaility. But over that decade the FJ fleet was flat out but it was everyday news and rarely made headlines in the papers. Carriers have their place but how many would we have needed to sustain these commitments for that duration. How effective would the RW been at these tasks. I am 100% in agreement that we need more helicopters but believe that across the board there are too few resources to meet our political ambitions. There needs to be readily available balanced force mix to meet the operational drivers. I recall the phrase of "punching above our weight", the boxing analogy is apt as we may be punching ourselves out.
regards
retard