He clearly didn't read my letter published in the Sunday Telegraph on 12 June written in order to refute the garbage spouted by an AAC Lt Col, the Captain of Ocean and Cdre K (all sitting drinking their pink gins off the Libyan coast) in the same paper the previous week (5 June) who were all quoted as stating that because helos can fly lower and slower than fast jets and carry smaller weapons they are, consequently, more accurate than Tornado and Typhoon!
I cut and paste it here but have removed my sig block in case I end up getting the Sharkey treatment from the opposition!
Here it is:
Inaccuracy of Apache Attack Helicopters
It beggars belief that some Army and Royal Navy officers make extravagant statements to the press in an attempt to 'big up' their role in operations against the Gaddafi Regime ("Strike by British helicopters signals an escalation in the Libya conflict", report, June 5).
Fact: helicopters, generally, fly slower and lower than fast jets. Fiction: helicopter weapons are smaller and more precise. Rockets and cannon, as deployed on Apache, suffer from greater ballistic dispersion and are, therefore, more likely to cause collateral damage than the highly accurate Storm Shadow missile and Paveway guided bombs currently deployed on Tornado GR4 or Typhoon aircraft operating from Gioia del Colle in southern Italy.
Hellfire, launched from Apache, is exactly the same missile as Brimstone, launched from the deployed fast jets. But unlike the American-built Hellfire, Brimstone has a British-made, more versatile seeker on its Hellfire missile body, thereby providing not only greater accuracy against a raft of different targets, but also making it more flexible. I was involved in the procurement of all of these weapons during a four-year stint at the MOD.
Back to Sharkey, he also falls into the 'beggars belief' category and talks uneducated and out of date cr@p from the comfort of his deck chair in the Caribbean! The Harrier cannot, never could and never would carry the missiles that are available to the Tornado GR4 (Storm Shadow, for example). Indeed, it was removed from that very programme by the Harrier Mafia themselves whilst I was doing that four-year stint (see above) in MOD! Moreover, many Harrier weapons were never cleared for storage in the magazine of the 3 through-deck cruisers that the Navy had at the time. AND, he has clearly never read a doctrine JSP in his life! WHY, tell me why, would anybody want to do CAS of any description when there are no blurred boundaries between our own troops and those of the enemy - our troops are not ashore (at least, so we are led to believe)!
Bloody Navy and Bloody Army - just because they came first does not make them masters of the sky - indeed, it qualifies them for the complete opposite!
Foldie (getting more f
g p
d off with these morons than ever these days!)
And relax
