Phil, ----- you re joking ----- arent you????
Fair to call current Tornado obsolete?
Fair? in 2015?
When I was a schoolboy in1976, yes
seventy six, the bloody thing was still called MRCA and was universally known to be obsolete then. Before it even entered service!
Obsolete, now???? It's been a concrete-toting fuggen dinosaur for well over a quarter century!
It's no doubt great fun (bwahahaha) and trendy to ridicule Sharkey Ward but he has consistently highlighted some of the daftest shortcomings of the UK defence system. Sure, he's been pretty outspoken with an unfashionable (big problem) though often militarily sound philosophy. As did Rickover, for instance, and who was right there? Lets not write him off altogether shall we? Anyone who proposes big carriers equipped with anything but cats and traps is simply delusional (or on a bung from Lockheed) and anyone who thinks we can't project our influence as we wish to without those big decks ditto.
Sharkey may make a spectacle of himself from time to time by being too outspoken but more than often than not there is a sound point behind his rhetoric. His dislike of the RAF is soundly based on Strategic lines, there is little doubt that had the defence budget been spent more on Naval aviation than almost exclusively on the RAF then we would be
far far better placed to respond to the global threats and challenges we see today. We still suffer from the insane delusions of the '60s defence reviews that said the RAF could supply air cover globally - if it couldn't do so then it can do it a hundred times less now. If we want to do tis now then we must have a credible Naval carrier force, there is simply no other way.
By far the most useful military airfield we can possibly own is a seagoing one, each one is far more useful to us than any five in Lincolnshire for God's sake!
Thanks Sharkey, keep shaking the complacent politicos and doubters up!
But why is there apparently nobody prepared to publicly voice a reasoned and positive account for what the RAF's currently doing?
Perhaps because what little the poor old RAF is capable of doesn't really merit much positive comment?
Thanks for your reasoned and no doubt fully Professionally qualified opinion on one of our true war heroes, Sh!tNone. Not. Are you even fit to criticise the polish on his boots? Shame on you.