This reply was written before M2's post
And may well contain errors.....any FAA guys (or girls) gong to join in?
The list I put in the above posting was a list of events which involved the deployment of naval/maritime forces, in response to Jacko's suggestion that the Navy is no longer important. Perhaps I should also have included Granby as well, or East Timor, or patrols in the Med and Indian Ocean as part of the "War Against Terror"? It was not meant to be a list of places where the Sea Harrier was deployed, although it was deployed in some of them.
Saying that the involvement of the Sea Harrier was for political reasons instead of military ones, and therefore it should go seems like a dangerous and illogical argument. What precentage of coalition aircraft did the RAF provide in the Gulf? 6% wasn't it? Perhaps the involvement was political? I'm not saying the RAF should be cutback, in fact I think the opposite, it needs boosting up, but if you apply the "scrap it as it seems insignificant compared to the Americans" argument then you would scrap the entire Armed Forces!
Yes, there were no hostile aircraft in Sierra Leone - but what if there had been? Imagine for a minute that a neighbouring African country had been involved in the civil war, and did not take too kindly to the presence of British forces. "You think you can come here and fly around in your big helicopters do you? We'll show you". If they had started using MiGs, armed helicopters or whatever to interfere with our helicopters then would you not agree the Sea Harrier would have been very useful in putting an end to those sort of antics?
pr00ne In a previous post you said that you consider that fact that France, Italy and Spain have organic air defence, and have taken the troble to acquire a shipborne BVR capability to be irelevant. Don't you think that the fact that they consider it a "must have" tells you something? An don't you think that this might be because they studied the lessons of the Falklands?
ORAC I think Admiral West made a fair point. If we find ourselves at war without the US it will probably be against a nation with a capable, but not huge, air force. (I'm using lower case as I'm also including naval and army air arms.) The Sea Harrier was vastly outnumbered in the Falklands, yet we won, despite the predictions of the doom and gloom merchants. Today the Sea Harrier is more capable, with Blue Vixen and AMRAAM, and has the adavantage of working with AEW, either from the Sea King Mk7s of 849 NAS or from land based RAF AWACS aircraft. The ships of the fleet are better armed too, with all RN frigates having Sea Wolf, shipborne radar being better, better decoys, Phlalanx/Goalkeeper systems and so on.
I think you are thinking that only five or six (or eight) Sea Harriers would be deployed. It could be many more than that (more than one CVS could be deployed) - at least until the cuts start next year. Extra pilots coul be found doing other duties elsewhere in the RN, and the RNR Air Branch would no doubt provide much needed back up.
Also we are not talkng about totally defeating the enemy air capability and completely dominating the air space over their territory, just providing a reasonable degree of air defence (to prevent ship base defences being saturated by sheer numbers of enemy aircraft or air launched missiles - ie multi layered defence) in the area around/over a naval task group or amphibious landing, or until an expeditionary air base can be secured from which land based aircraft can be operated.
Who can say where British forces will need to be deployed? There is trouble and strife all over the world, relying on Uncle Sam all the time is probably not a good idea.
Only the dead have seen the end of war Plato
If on the 10th September 2001 you had posted on PPRuNe saying that you were worried about terrorists hijacking airliners and crashing them into buildings you would probably have been laughed at, and told that you had been writing too many Tom Clancy style novels. Yet that did happen the following day.
In 1980 a study was conducted at the Maritime Tactical School that consiered the defence of a task group. One of the recommendations was that organic Airborne Early Warning was neeed. John Nott (spit) ignored this, and drew up his 1981 Defence White Paper on the basis that we would not need to go to war without the Americans or outside the NATO theatre. We all know what happened next.....
As Jacko says it is a matter of paying for it. Is there any truth in the rumour that the cutbacks of early 2002 happened because the Trasury refused to underwrite the costs involved in the initial phases of Operation Veritas?
Will it once again take major loss of life to convince the Government that it has made a mistake?
M2 - I've only read your post quickly, can I suggest that you read some of Nozzles' (ex SHAR pilot) posts. Anyway I thought the idea of Joint Force Harrier was that the FA2 did air defence, and the GR7/9 did the ground attack? And wasn't the GR9 ASRAAM integration scrapped?