iyaayas01 posted:

Pretty much this, although if (and that's a big if) the "carrier sharing" agreement with the French pans out they will hopefully avoid some of the growing pains with restarting operating carriers after a decade while shifting from STOVL to CATOBAR to boot...but they'll only avoid some. The growing pains will be there, and that really brings me to my ultimate point: the UK needs to decide what it wants to have a military for and to fund it to that level. If it wants to maintain it's current structure and international presence, fine. If it wants to sacrifice its global mobility and maritime presence somewhat to provide a land army to NATO/EUFOR (like Germany) fine. If it wants to go in the opposite direction and increase its mobility forces (airlift and sealift along with light infantry) at the expense of heavier ground forces and some navy firepower (like Canada, Leopards notwithstanding), fine. If it wants to cut deeper and maintain a force more like the Danes, with a small well trained mostly lightweight army, small but broadly equipped air force, and a coastal navy, fine. Hell, if they want to go full blown Belgium and just have a few F-16s and infantry companies to look pretty and go play with NATO every once in a while, fine. But make up your mind and fund appropriately.

What they are doing is worse than making a decision to curtail the military and fund it accordingly, because they are a) maintaining a hollow force, which will result in it being called upon and failing, and b) wasting money that by halfassing it. Attempting to cut a budget while not cutting responsibilities (in other words, cutting across the board) leads to a worse drop in military readiness than if you make changes in the responsibilities and cut accordingly. It sounds intuitive, but you'd be surprised the number of defense ministers who think they can change that hard fact.

You guys are actually serving as a really good object lesson for the U.S...if we aren't careful, our military will be the bigger version of what yours is now in about 10-15 years. You can see this in Gates's comments a few days ago at West Point...the Army is going to be hard pressed to keep the bulk of their heavy mechanized units around. In an ideal defense world, you'd want to have them, but we aren't in an ideal world and the fact of the matter is we're a helluva lot more likely to need our maritime forces (navy and air) than we are heavy armor. The biggest reason of course is that unless you're talking about a very few specialized circumstances (the Fulda Gap, maybe the DMZ in Korea) heavy armor is not a deterrent force. It is a nation conquering force. Naval and (to a slightly lesser extent, admittedly) air forces on the other hand are much more of a deterrent force able to provide security/keep the peace.

Anyway, I've gone on for long enough...to answer your question, there was no right choice for the U.K. on their current path. Any one would have lead to severe issues. However, in my humble opinion, they should have made the decision to concentrate their power in the RN and a small but well equipped/highly trained light infantry reaction force along with a bit of armor to contribute to any NATO/EUFOR type contingency quick reaction force. This would mean scaling back the RAF drastically to probably only being some strategic mobility folks (C-17s, C-130s, and a couple associated tankers), a squadron or two of Eurofighters for air defense, and maybe a couple of enablers like E-3s or ISR assets if you can justify the cost. Can any land based strike asset completely and concentrate striking air power in the RN's carriers; also, get some frigates and destroyers that aren't horribly overpriced and so gargantuan you can only afford a few of them, although I suspect that Vincent can speak better to the naval piece than I can.

slidebite posted:

Cool photo, but it lost some of its "coolness" with me when I saw that the artist used the exact same background on pretty much every single jet imaginable. I actually thought I saw it with an Arrow, and in my search to find the print I found something by order of magnitude cooler.

Behold, THE piece of artwork:

Flanker posted:

70 foot tall radioactive Gtab's would overrun the US and rape all of your pets.

Sunday Punch posted:

Dude on the left seems to have a better understanding of their situation than the pilot, I think he accurately portrays the pants-making GBS threads terror of a hypersonic ejection and re-entry.

Diver Dick posted:

I ran into what I believe is a Yak-52 soviet-era trainer on the flight line a few weeks ago. I thought the guy in the little airport restaurant wearing a flightsuit was kind of a tool, but then he straps on a harness and climbs into this. My case of smug turned into envy pretty fast.



This thing absolutely belched black smoke when they started it up.

fake edit: Yep, it's a 52. Says so on the nose.

edit 2: probably manufactured in the nineties, just a neat paint job.

priznat posted:

That SVTOL F35 really needs GERWALK mode

Smiling Jack posted:

Try being in the middle-of-loving nowhere Maine in a canoe and then having a B-52 fly over so low I thought I could touch the goddamn thing.

Almost had a heart attack.

Forums Terrorist posted:

Well I guess that takes the F-35 from "utterly worthless waste of money" to "A modern day Voodoo".

priznat posted:

I remember seeing CF-101s at the Abbotsford airshow when I was pretty young, the only thing louder than them were the Harriers. Although that's probably because the harrier is hovering nearby instead of screaming past.

My Dad's cousin is the rarest of breeds: a CF-104 pilot who never crashed once!

LP97S posted:

Cyrano4747 posted:

If it wasn't for the fact that the entire country costs double what the rest of the world does, it really would be one of the most perfect places on earth.

Seriously, though, $9 pints of beer and $13 fast food combo meals starts to get a bit old.

Stroh M.D. posted:

To each his own I guess. You're looking a the Volvo L3314, known in Sweden as Personlassterrängbil 903 (that's translated to "All-terrain personnel carrier vehicle"), Its powered by a Volvo B18A 64 horsepower engine and runs on leaded gasoline. Has seats for six, weighs about a ton and half and can carry 650 kg of cargo. Max speed is 45 mph on road, 20,5 mph off road.

And you're in luck - a respectable number did find their way out on the civilian markets. There's even a website that can guide you: http://www.c303.de/c303-en/buy-c303.htm

Barring that, there's the Volvo C202 produced in Hungary which is a cheaper, civilian version:



Less armor, probably easier to get your hands on. Based on the number of German hits I got searching for it, I'd say you and the krauts have similar tastes. I can promise you one thing: they weren't kidding with calling it all-terrain:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=It84WUeqjp4

Space Gopher posted:

Looks like RAF 5 Squadron; their insignia is a maple leaf, and they flew Tornado ADVs.

iyaayas01 posted:

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA---HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Holy poo poo, like the story says those "requirements" were a joke shat out by the DND up there about a month before the decision to buy the F-35 was made back in 2010, and as such were tailor made so the F-35 would be the only aircraft that could fill them.

So the F-35 is such a clusterfuck of a program it can't even meet a requirement that was TAILOR MADE for it less than two years ago. The fact that it was the "game changing" DAS that caused this is just the icing on the cake.

"It will make maneuvering irrelevant!"

e: You'll still buy them, though. The JSF program is like the Borg. Resistance is futile.

Phanatic posted:

"The document says the plane must be capable of providing the pilot with 360-degree, out-of-cockpit visual situational awareness in a no-light environment."

What plane *can* do that?

iyaayas01 posted:

I thought you frostbacks had C-17s now, though?

AlexanderCA posted:

If you want to see rusty tanks in action, Somalia is definitely the place to be.

SgtMongoose posted:

My favorite is how the IJN thought ASW was just something those cowards and failures in England and the US did, and was totally unnecessary and beneath their brave samurai sailors.

Cyrano4747 posted:

The tl;dr version is that Goering started his own secret police (the Gestapo) when he got handed internal affairs in Prussia, but then was forced to hand them over to Himmler later on. He also had a contingent of regular police who were just good 'ol fashioned die hard Nazis, and in order to keep them under his control he had them reorganized as a paramilitary unit, and they later became one of the first parachute regiments when he was given the Luftwaffe.

Fast forward to 1941 and they were reorganized as a motorized regiment more or less because jumping out of airplanes wasn't happening any more and trucks were pretty useful in N. Africa and Russia. With that they started working more in conjunction with armor, and Goering eventually got it expanded to a full blown Panzer division. The whole process was expedited and driven by a lot of direct orders from Goering, who was at this point not only head of the Luftwaffe, but also the guy in head of German industry as a whole and basically 2nd to Hitler.

Vincent Van Goatse posted:

Fifty years of successive governments pissing your industrial base down their legs.