Not as much of a dither as it got certain senior RN officers into before the 2015 review...

You sir are a - .. -

Well said JTO.

Despicable comment from Wiltshireman.

What's really disappointing is that one of the signatories is a "senior mentor" at the Joint Services Command and Staff College.

Although there is is a minor chance that it's his much nicer doppelgänger, who genuinely has the same name and rank. Only two initials separate them!

Much better, though, to have one fleet of aircraft that can do both. Or not to have carriers at all!

Well said. Not long before his death, Sandy Woodward argued for CATOBAR QEs with the Super Hornet as the air component. One suspects that navalising the Typhoon would have used up an ocean of money but that might have been an option. BAE were keen at one point.

Whatever, we now have these 65,000 ton monsters with a F35B air arm that’s seriously challenged for range and payload and whose AEW is of necessity a low altitude helicopter based system. And don’t start me on the lack of proper missile defences.....

Engines has previously posted about the real technical and operational difficulties in navalising the Typhoon. BAe studied it for MoD I think.

If you want a good naval aircraft you need to design seaborne characteristics in from the first sketches, and there is plenty of evidence that adapting a land based design usually produces poor results. Trying to make one design suitable for two or three different operational environments has an even worse track record.
N

Quite correct. In fact it was a fairly exhaustive = expensive study. BAe did their best to make it look viable, but the reality was that there were 2 major problems: Typhoon was not designed to live in a maritime environment and in addition would require major redesign of the lower and rear fuselage structures to make it sufficiently robust for CATOBAR.

Now, now don't be touchy!

What will Sharkey say when they don't buy any more F35B's???

I have refrained from sticking my oar in until now but here goes.

I have only skimmed the document linked by the OP, but it looks to me like there has been little revision since the previous iteration. I hope it will be just ignored and not used as a stick to beat either service.

I was taught at BRNC, as gospel truth, that the RAF lied and moved Australia 300 miles close to Asia to convince HMG to buy the F111K and can CVA-01 etc. This was I believe reflective of the views of a significant number of the generation to which Sharkey, Linley Middleton and others belong(ed). They had seen a promised bright future of four fully sized properly equipped carriers snatched from them. They resented seeing the aircraft they had been promised used by another service. The saw the RAF as the author of events not the real culprits HMG. Unfortunately some of them never seemed to properly get over it and it clouds/clouded their judgement.

My very limited experience of today's RN suggests such petty rivalries are long forgotten and the current generation want to make jointery work. To which I say, "Good on them!"

I have recently been clearing out my late mother's house and came across a copy of the RAF Yearbook 1977. The keynote article was "The Royal Air Force and the Defence Situation Today" by ACM Sir Christopher Foxley-Norris. Although its main focus was the severe cuts to the RAF, he did not fail to mention cuts to the other services; cuts to the RN in particular (coupled with the reduction in the Nimrod force) as rendering the UK as unable to meet its NATO commitments in the Atlantic and effectively pretending our Southern Flank obligations didn't exist. I mention this because IMHO the only way to preserve any effective defence capability from political opportunism is for the leaders of the three services to have the vision to present a united front. The RN and its supporters providing the politicians excuses to cut the RAF will do the RN no favours in the long run and vice versa. What Sir Christopher and the then CDS Field Marshal Carver (whom he quoted) would say about subsequent cuts, I hate to think.

Asturias - Sharkey wanted CATOBAR carriers and F-35Cs the capabilities of which he considered far more suited to the RN's needs. However, I don't suppose he or anyone with the UK's defence interests at heart would be happy with an F-35 buy that prevents either service from doing its job properly.