Reply to post: Re: It's great to know the price of everything ...

Wheels are literally falling off the MoD thanks to lack of cash

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

Re: It's great to know the price of everything ...

Ditch the American F-35's and you'll have billions to play with.

With MoD's procurement skills, you don't think we're already on the hook, and would pay a vast sum in cancellation costs? And the RAF has no proper strike aircraft to replace the Tornado, so we'd have to buy an alternative strike fighter (few visible options there). And we'd be left with two very expensive helicopter carriers that couldn't do anything useful in military terms (I know, even with F35 they probably can't either). A disaster though the F35/carriers programme is, unfortunately most of the costs are incurred for the ships, and contractually committed for the aircraft.

This is what happens when MoD don't keep options open properly - so the carriers should have been cat'n'trap fitted regardless of the aircraft they intended to buy (not only because they wouldn't be tied to F35, but also to give NATO inter-operability); they should have explored other options like funding a Harrier 2020 design concept to cover navy and RAF strike needs, as well as evaluating Rafale M for the carriers, since that's already navalised. And they should have set red lines on F35 performance, so that the UK taxpayer didn't pay for the failures of Lockheed Martin to get the damned thing working, and included a clause that required LM to provide suitable alternative aircraft until they had the F35 fully operational. The LM delays on F35B mean that Queen Lizzie will spend the first five years of a c40 year operational life without aircraft - so 12% if its working life as a useless toy.

It was the same thing with the Nimrod MRA4 - MoD didn't keep their options open, they tied the avionics to an ultra-high risk airframe and engine concept, and ended up with nothing. If they'd had the avionics in modular form, they could have stopped the airframe work when that went out of control, and stuck the avionics into some near off the shelf A330 (even second hand A330 airframes).

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