Generally speaking, we don't tend to have mutliple platforms doing the same role - try listing aircraft under headings such as 'air defence fighter, long range bomber, long range transport, battlefield support, MPA' etc and you tend to identify one aircraft for a role, whilst accepting that some others can provide a degree of crossover. (C130 playing Puff the Magic Dragon doesn't count, as ours are C130's not AC130's). An island nation deciding to take a capability gap on its only MPA is obviously nothing less than a gamble, one that will pan out 999/1000 times, but which will be seen in retrospect as an act of suicidal folly the other 1/1000.
The ASW pieces interlock - MPA refines the datum well enough to hand over to a helo, then bogs off because it's really good at covering a large area and is much better spending its time finding all the bad guys while someone else kills the latest one to appear - and when your task group is belting along it takes a hell of a lot of helos to cover the area ahead, the MPA/Helo mix is special, and to remove either is to reduce the effectiveness dramatically.
Luckily we no longer have a navy, more accurately we have a splendid navy but they don't have very much to sail round in any more, so I guess that and the fact that our comissars don't expect any conflict to pop up anyway makes it all peachy. Funny thing is, nobody ever expects any of the wars we get involved in.
I'm emigrating to Luxembourg, where I will whip up nationalistic fervour and then invade the UK. I figure I'll pay less tax in retirement if I conquer the place rather than just try to live in it.
I wonder how they'll explain the RN capability gap when they cancel everything? With global warming (subtract cash from forces, hand over to global warming R us movement) I'd have thought we'd need more MPA and ships, not less....
Dave