Doors Off, and now
reacher, if you both are serving officers, I find myself hoping you're really junior serving officers, for the open disrespect you display to a retired officer - and veteran - who's flown more real combat sorties than you've had kindy lunches is distressing, to say the least, and could only be forgiven by allowing for the exuberance of youth.
If you're not junior officers, you're something infinitey further down the food chain - Russell Hill
PR lackeys employed to preach today's ADF heirachy/multi national arms companies line
(which, let's face it, for far too many years now has amounted to the same thing, almost verbatim).
Rather than dismiss what
Bushranger71 says out of hand as you sprout the "company line", apparently without question, (as you,
Doors Off, have done with some regularity with totally unnecessary personal abuse thrown in on this and other threads), why not take a moment to ask yourself if Bushranger might not have some basis for his (to you) apparently silly ideas.
Have either of you actually taken the time to do a comparison of the hot and high performance of the Tiger, MRH-90, Blackhawk with the Super Huey? If you're serving officers, I can only assume the information should be easily available to you. How long would it take you? An hour or two?
(Just a hint for young players though from one with considerable first hand experience of promised performance figures from EADS versus actual performance figures, be very, very skeptical on any figures you get from a European helicopter manufacturer. But if either of you are even remotely associated with either the Tiger or the MRH-90 programmes, I'm assuming you'd know that already.)
You might not accept it, but it's a fact that money available for Defence spending, both acquisition and day to day operational costs, will become increasingly hard to find in any future government.
(Don't think that the Libs, if they ever get the Redhead out of Bogan-villa, won't pull a David Cameron on you, while if Labor stay in power, they'll have to find the money to give Bob Brown what he wants from somewhere [as well as the carbon tax], and you can bet Defence will be the proverbial canary in the coal mine - the first to fall off the proverbial perch from oxygen starvation.)
I can assure you,
Bushranger 71's call for the retention and upgrading of existing airframes, along with his championing of the Super Huey is not the rantings of an old war horse who wants to stick with the old charger he knows. It's more a voice in the wilderness saying that almost nothing we've spent (far too much) money on lately is delivering (or has yet delivered) the goods. The one exception, as you'll find
Bushranger 71 agrees with you on, is the C-17.
However, if you'll take a moment to read what he said about the C-17 in his last posts, as great an asset as it has proven itself to be for the ADF, it, along with the Navy's new aircraft carriers, simply cannot do the job a C-130 or a C-27 could do in getting an ADF force close into a crisis area in what could righly be called our strategic backyard - PNG or the Pacific Islands - in good time.
In our current situation, with the bulk of our Army committed to the Middle East, another C-17 at the cost of not acquiring more C-130s (or a real Caribou replacement) makes sense. However, some seventy years ago now, this country was in exactly that same situation, with the bulk of its Army, Navy and Air Force committed to the Middle East and Europe, when the situation at home changed dramatically - and very, very quickly.
If there's anyone out there who is absolutely certain we'll never find ourselves unexpectedly in a similar situation again, I have a bridge I'd like to sell you. One owner, freshly painted...