It is a pure judgement call, balancing risk against resource.
And that, Sir, is the nub of it! The Defence Board (for it is they who sign off the Military Tasks for all the Services) have directed the level of QRA required. This has forced CAS to make the judgement and balance the perceived risk of real-QRA usage against the resources available across the board - he has, IMHO, cut the hours required to undertake QRA safely too far already (and that is the whole thrust of this thread - nothing to do with RAFAT, or poseurs or anything like that). He is also being forced to cut the GR4 force (currently on ops) and the GR7 (the best thing since sliced bread
). Cut the Typhoon any further and not only will you not have QRA or fast air available for the FI but you won't have a CAS platform to support LAND in AFG / Iran / wherever.
Doesn't SH come under the LAND budget .....?
RAF Regt are being expanded. Guess they must already have got funds from the QRA pot .....
Medics is a purple organisation - the RAF can't be held to account for the shambles which was DCS 15.
AT - if the RAF/MODs hands weren't tied by the A400M saga ....
And finally - the 9/11 scenario is still a very real threat. IMHO.
You're right about one thing. You do have a very different view to most people on this board. But to call AD and RAFAT REMFs is a bit rich coming from a weekend volunteer. About 6.2% of the TA deploy on ops each year (figures taken from
this article - and thats probably the same ones over and over again). And thats from an annual budget of £143,000,000 (same article). So how about we reduce the TA budget by 93.8% [approx £134M] (to plug all those gaps we desperately need to ..... (and I know there was talk of cutting back TA training but did it ever happen
)
Anyway - back to thread. Apologies. If they (the government) want the MOD to do everything required of it then they need to fully fund it. Regardless of what GB says - they don't.