I will apologise first then whine a bit…

Sorry for the grammar and spelling errors

When typing into a blog the text often starts as a rough cut and never progresses beyond that so I will go through all the posts and make a cack handed attempt at correcting them.

Typing quickly also means errors creep in.

Anyway, thanks for the compliment, keep reading

Do we build our own kit?
The truth is, no, and neither does anyone else.

DIS says we must build our own:
Fixed wing aircraft
Can we build our own Eurofighters if Germany refuses to supply us with any of the bits they build?
We don’t even pretend to build F35’s.
Armoured Fighting Vehicles
Our Tanks use a French sensor to see the target, a Canadian computer to work out where to point the gun, an American engine to point the gun, and soon, that gun will be German.
General Munitions
Well I’m pretty sure they went walkabouts years ago.

It’s a joke, BAE buys a load of off the shelf kit, sticks it together with selotape and then charges us a fortune for it.

But, ignore that for a second and pretended that our made in the UK kit is really made in the UK, but we buy foreign, what if our suppliers stop supplying us?
Well, in the short term, that can be a disaster.
Historically?
Had France not cut off supplies of Exocets to the Argentineans, the Falklands campaign could have been a disaster for us and a walk over for them, our fleet cut to shreds as we tried to land, or picked off at standoff range
But had they waited 6 months for the ground based units to arrive, that would have happened anyway.
What if use your own isn’t possible, Pakistan entered the Kargil war with 6 days of fuel stored, probably the most important of all military consumables, should France, with no petrochemical assets of its refuse to use it at all because it isn’t a sovereign product, and try and use biofuels in its tanks and jets?

Longer Term
Iran still hasn’t fully recovered from the loss of American sales since the Shah was overthrown, but apart from that?
Is there anyone else who hasn’t been able to just ring up France, or the UK, or Muscovy and as long as they had cash, get equipment?
We’d have to do something to annoy every weapons producer in the world at once, and even then, with a well stocked spares cupboard, theres no reason we couldn’t make knock offs of what we bought from overseas, at least for a while.

Even with DIS, and assuming what I said above about Challenger 2 is wrong, if we go to war with Russia tomorrow, the Challenger production lines are closed, even if they are built entirely in the UK, they’ll need to reopened, staff will need to be trained, or found and retrained. The UK designed and built parts will need to be sourced again.
Some parts will be easy, I can’t imagine the engines are still being built, but the design and machine tools will still exist.
But some parts will be very difficult, just how much Dorchester armour do we make a day currently?
None?
What’s the lead time for producing enough for 25 tanks a day?
Years?

STL
Read the about, its not a doctorate, its a rambling blog

Perhaps I am missing the point (as a newcomer to the site) and these are intended to be written in note-format.

(That said, it has taken me ages to get rid of a mass of my own spelling mistakes in this short comment !!)

Regardless – this is a useful site – thanks.