Thanks Ninja-Lewis.
Agreed. Labour tried, within a shrinking Defence budget, to fight two wars but discovered our Army needed better vehicles, small arms, body armour and helmets and then paid for these using contingency funding. Meantime the other forces tried to carry on business as usual buying Typhoon, Astute and Nimrod MR4 etc perhaps hoping costs would work out someday. Government also decided to make longer term plans for the more sensible use of our remaining industrial base. Clearly an SDR was long overdue.
However, I blame not only the Labour Government but also the Service Chiefs and our Defence Industries for this situation. I have some sympathy for the latter when trying to deal with a customer that can never decide what it wants or when it's needed and then when it does, tries to alter their initial decision anyway!
Now we are ditching capability having spent huge sums, to save running costs. Is this SDR not just another round of cuts with more to come when we are out of Afghanistan? We still have to find money for enough JCA's but do we still need it? Seems we do. What will it cost? Dunno. What will it do relative to other platforms? Not quite sure. Is there another option? Eh possible but then are we not already committed by our need to maintain capacity post Typhoon, our Level One Partner status and contracts with BAe?
I gather from "Air Forces Monthly" that the cost to maintain the reduced Tornado Fleet of 80 aircraft will be £ 7.6 Billion. If we really are broke, does the RAF really need them and Typhoon given the perceived lack of threat we face pre 2020? And is another Astute SSN really just to keep Barrow in work until we decide to replace Trident?
