and we laugh at Indonesia
Two posts lifted from the "Should we be afraid?" thread regarding the Indonesians plans to buy lots of state of the art high performance Russian kit.
From
racedo:
As much as people dismiss the idea that somehow the Indonesians could buy these, maintain them and have a viable air force I would caution people that money talks.
Just because they did something stupid in the past doesn't mean they will do so in the future.
Acquiring the technology is easy but given the state of military salaries around the world it wouldn't be that hard to persuade young "retired" experienced personnel to move to a sunny place with mega nice salaries and perks.
It’s not as if members of NATO forces have not taken on assignments as "trainers" with Govt sanction with various militaries around the world often as an assistance to an arms deal.
and from
MTOW:
Of course, looking at the parlous state of much of the ADF's current high tech inventory, the reverse argument (that just because we used to be able to do it right in the past, we'll not necessarily always be able to do it right in the future) holds true too.
Food for thought...
It would seem from the comments above and some of the comments on this thread that I'm not the only one with such unhappy - but (sadly) looking increasingly realistic – thoughts about the current state of the ADF.
Col/Herkman, you touch on one glaring current shortcoming, the absence of a light tactical fixed wing transport aircraft in the ADF inventory after the recent retirement of the Caribou, virtually putting many of the airfields in PNG and the islands to our north out of practical reach of the ADF, be it for military response or disaster/civil relief purposes.
The real problem
(and one apparently totally lost on damn near everyone of star rank and certainly among the Defence civilian mandarins in Canberra), is the loss of aircrew skills in having our "light tactical transport squadron(!)" crews maintaining their currency in a motley collection of near superannuated Beechcraft King Airs.
I'd be willing to lay a substantial bet that there are people, both uniformed and non-uniformed, (some with an eye on a nice post retirement job with Bell or some other major defence contractor), who are entertaining fond hopes that we'll eventually replace the Caribou with Ospreys.
Gents, here's a fact that can't be ignored - we can't afford yet another overly complex, top shelf, incredibly expensive and therefore too small in numbers piece of equipment in the ADF.
And here's a prediction as certain as night follows day - if we go that route, it will go the way of every other project except the C17 in recent times. Delays, cost overruns, less than promised performance, expensive retrofixes... you’re all of you all too familiar with what amounts to a set in stone checklist.
The ADF needs something that:
- has already been proven to work
(who was the wise man who said a long time ago now "Never buy the 'A' model of anything"?)
- cheap enough to buy and to operate that we can afford to buy it and operate it in meaningful (read 'effective') numbers so that enough crews can be trained and kept current on it to provide a surge capacity in times of crisis
- is common with equipment operated by our major ally so that we can have ready access to spares and extra airframes at short notice if required.
Like damn near everything we’ve bought over the last few years –
(even the otherwise successful C17 suffers problem of too expensive and therefore too few) - the Osprey doesn't fit any of those criteria.