Proone,
I am not looking at today, yesterday or even the last 10 years-but some of us were around before Iraq and Afghan when we embarked with the Fisheads for long periods of time. With Bosnia being the focus in the late 90s our deployments were predominantly to the Med, but who knows where they will want to park their '65,000 tonnes of diplomacy' in the coming years.
Looking to a future beyond Afghan I reckon that politicians and senior officers alike are going to want to see their lovely big carriers do 'something' -and without any jets for quite a while that something will be amphibious which means you and me-which doesn't exactly fill me with much joy.
And as I have tried to highlight it is not just aircrew that make an amphibious capability, there are a whole load of aviation, engineering, fire fighting tied jobs that have certainly seen CHF personnel deployed for 6 months and quite frankly not the kind of jobs that I want to be doing and not what I joined up for.
It's not where we have been, it is where we are going that worries me!