“Not that shocking really ever heard the line “don’t waste ammo, that bullet costs 50p you know” there must be a reason that things like that appear there is no smoke without fire, maybe that’s enough sayings for one day.”

Whats really galling is that the Treasurey saves that 50p at the cost of £100k.
Instead of adjusting to the fact that the Afghans, knowing are weapons are useless over 300m, are engaging us at 900m, and increasing the numbers of LSW variant rifles carried, our forces are instead using anti tank weapons to engage single Taliban at long ranges.

Anyway, on post.
Cancel the JCA, indeed, I dont get why the RAF usualy has 3 combat aircraft and usualy wants 3. Ok, there are advantages inherant in different platforms, but at the end of the day, BUILD A BLOODY RUNWAY, its a long strip of concrete, it cant be that difficult, especialy since you;ll save a small fortune, more than enough to have an entire battallion of engineers who’s only purpose is to build a runway very quickly.

2. In theory yes, in practice, its porbably all we’re going to have to operate off those big shiny carriers any time soon.

3. Now Tornado, ok, they arent brilliant aircraft, but they are pretty decent BVR Interceptors, theres going to be a limited export market because (I assume) they have restricted radar, however, selling them off now could get us some extra Typhoons.
The Ozzies have a fighter gap dont they? And there airforce is primarily suppoased to engage incoming aircraft beyond visual range?

4/5/7 should just be standard practice really.

6. Although I agree in principle, I think we’re going to have different idea about what that means.
Armed Predator Equivilants are quite cool tools.
But it is pretty limited.
I was going to give examples, but they were long and boring, so, networked cruise missiles.

The RAF using one fast jet type is the most logical and sensible thing to do in a time of stretched budgets and manpower. Concentrating on the one type will bring all of the benefits pointed to by the author which invariably is good for the Armed forces as a whole. One problem that is rapidly approaching the RAF Eurofighter fleet is the accumulated flying hours will approach the airframe life far faster than previously thought. This will either cause the fleet size to drop or would mean more airframes would have to be ordered to fill the gap, the most likely choice for bean counters is to shrink the fleet although this will have knock on effects in training and deployment. Although hopefully UCAV’s will come online in time to replace retiring Tranche 1 Eurofighters.

I feel that the Eurofighter should be aggressively updated over the coming decade to include AESA and other sensor systems, TVC, conformal fuel tanks and many other things. This should help its progress in the export arena as it should be the best or one of the top few aerial dogfighters on the market. There could be a bright export future for the Eurofighter if progress is made soon possible customers could be Japan and Greece but possible sales could be threatened if the F-35 shows to be anywhere near the hype.

My original thinking for organising the typhoon fleet was as follows.
8 Squadrons of 14 aircraft = 112 airframes. These would form the UK air defence fleet with 4 operating bases although this might be prohibitive from a cost and support point.
4 Squadrons of 18 aircraft = 72 airframes. These would for an expeditionary air wing and would be equipped with the latest mark of the aircraft for deployment abroad.
This would leave 48 aircraft to be used for an OCU and 1435 flight. I’m aware this means there are no designated attrition spares but these could be taken from the large OCU and new aircraft could be ordered depending on the timeline.