Alpha
My comments on the F3 seem to be validated by one of its users here, and by most of the aircrew I've spoken to about it during the last few weeks. Yours, however, are outdated and unbalanced.
The Jaguar's record speaks for itself.
You talk about the need to pre-position these assets. I'd point out that it has always been quicker, cheaper and easier to deploy a FJ squadron than it is to deploy a carrier and its various support ships. Remember that in Sierra Leone a Jag squadron could have been there (operating from Dakar in Senegal) long before the carrier, had a political decision not been taken to send the carrier (principally to underline El Tone's CVF decision in SDR, I suspsect).
Moreover, once in theatre the Jags would have had 30-mm cannon, CRV7, 1,000-lbers, PII, PIII and RBL755 and CBU87 to choose from, whereas because 1,000-lbers were held to be unacceptable in the circumstances the only weapon available to the carrierbased GR7s was said to be "Noise!"
The carrier's USP is not rapid deployability, it is independence of host nation support (though for a carrier to operate close enough to the target for the SHar and GR7 to be useful an absence of outright opposition is handy). In this day and age however, if it's impossible to get basing in a neighbouring nation the operation you are trying to undertake probably isn't politically viable anyway.
Using a carrier just ensures that its economic viability is pants, too.
Even I know that your Nimrod bull refers and relates to the MR1 (and is biased, partial and in key areas factually incorrect even here), and that the in-service MR2 is the dog's whatsit. The 4 promises to be even more useful, if only they'll expand their thinking and stick Storm Shadow on it as well!
Nosey,
You say (on the other thread) that I should be Jagonicko - it's just that Jag mates have bought me more beer and bent my ear more than you and your lot!
