"Just a thought, and I know it always dangerous to resurrect the Sea Harrier topic, but I was pondering this and thought it best to come here for an answer. The current RAF Harrier Fleet has been very overworked on Herric over the last few years, and with Tonka's deployment being delayed even more I was wondering, if we had kept the SHAR FA2's instead of binning them, how useful would they be?"
You'd have had to have spent a fortune on them to put on the UOR kit required to get them to a standard where they could operate effectively in the environment. Given how much we spent on GR7/9 and will be spending on Tonka, I don't think it would have saved much.
Also - would the engines have been able to cope with it?