Can any other country do this?
If the only source was this forum, one might be forgiven for thinking that our military was entirely pointless/useless/toothless, around 80% of posts being negative to greater or lesser degree. Yet night after night we've been successfully conducting the most complex long-range missions through potentially hostile or diplomatically sensitive airspace three thousand miles from our shores.
Of course some will respond, rightly, that the military gets on with it and makes do, whatever. This is certainly true, now and always. But it's also true that the RAF HAVE been given the tools for this job. Not just obvious things like aircraft and missiles. The difficult political, logistic and diplomatic groundwork has clearly been done. How many other countries, other than the US would be capable of this?