Fighting Wars
With all this controversy about CAS that's going aound, it seems to me that we may be knee-jerking to what's going on in Afghanistan.
Wasn't it received wisdom throughout the 90s that aircraft such as the A-10 had had their day, and didn't the USAF get rid of many of its Hogs?
Now we have people on other threads (kind of) advocating bringing back the A-1!! Maybe the Typhoon we should be buying is the one that was built by Hawker, not Eurofighter.
Close Air Support is (rightly) in the spotlight at the moment, but if and when the fight in Afghanistan is over, will we still insist on maintaining CAS capability over all others? Because that wouldn't be a case of fighting the last war again, now, would it?
But if we do concentrate on low intensity fighting, what happens when China gets all belligerent, with its SU-27/30 etc? Easy to dismiss, but with global energy requirements becoming all the more important, it's not too difficult a stretch of the imagination to see the quest for oil fostering a 21st Century version of imperialism and expansionism.
Maybe we need to spend a bit more time thinking of where the next battles will be, although now that Tone is on his way out, perhaps we'll have a rest from Labour's bleeding hearts imperialist arrogance.
Or am I just a bit paranoid?