Originally Posted by
C195
Shame that a fleet of single engine fighters spread around the country could not just utilise some of our less busy civil airports and infrastructure. Would make more sense than having a lot of expensive assets at one or two major airbases. As an extreme example, having 2-4 up in Shetland would certainly reduce the response times from threats from the North.
But a detachment of 2-4 aircraft at a satellite base still needs an engineering establishment to maintain them and load stores, a weapons dump (presumably with the odd guard of two, ubless G4S are available!), a full sortie-generation capability (crew rooms, briefing facilities, mission-data generators) a communications facility of some sort etc etc. Speading the available air assets over a larger number of bases makes them MORE expensive to operate rather than less - the same reason why 2-SHAR detachements onto frigates using skyhooks was a complete non-starter.
Again, I stress that whether the actual aircraft are Typhoons or Grippens (or even Hawks) won't be the major cost-driver here.
PDR