US Air Force Light Attack Aircraft draft request down to two contenders

If you are looking to see how they would fair in a environment with MANPADS look up the South American insurgencies. These militias or cartels depending on country have access to pretty much anything money can buy. They have been known to shoot down low flying aircraft like helicopters and small planes as well as recon drones relatively routinely.

Quite a few countries do, and the RAF during the 80’s augmented the Tornado interceptors with armed Hawks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAE_Hawk

Cheers!

The hawk is excellent as a light fighter platform. I have always thought we should have bought a number of Hawk 200s to carry out light ground attack operations. It is cheap to buy, run and maintain and every fast jet pilot in the RAF know how to fly one.

Aren’t you glad the US relied on military power and intimidation to further its foreign policy from 1941-1945 and later? I hope the Germans, Italians, and Japanese were intimidated, and then later the Soviets.

The height of the Reagan Era was 6.8 percent of GDP. 1980 when he took office was the Carter budget. The 3.3 number proves my point. The sequester cuts hit the US Military after 2010 hitting the Military in FY2013. Those cuts bit hard and much hader than at first glance.

Most countries in the world did cut back after the Cold War. The term for that is parasites and political cowards who threw away investments in military infrastructure that took decades to make. All so they could handout goodies like they were Mardi Gras beads to buy votes.

Your Tide class tanker were a good choice for South Korea not the UK. I am sure their workers enjoyed the job security. A little inconsistent of you to defend that particular choice considering how much you rant about poor English shipbuilding.
Your Carriers are budget models that do not have catapults and thus little variety of aircraft. Have to depend on a helicopter for AEW. Due to the lack of commitment on the part of your government to provide planes and pilots has borrow some from the USMC to fill out the air wing. That should be considered a National embarrassment.
The T26 is theoretically the best ASW Frigate. Most expensive I will grant you. Obedience to this tinfoil hat conspiracy theory about what you call “US Incorporated” is not barred it’s entry. That would be the UK’s own sloth and stinginess in starting their own build program for their own Frigate.
Have you ever heard me make excuses for the LCS? I still think whichever idiot thought up that cluster should be going to the scaffold.
Ground vehicles where the MOD spent all of the time assisting in developing the Boxer. Then pulled out started the FRES program then cancelled that. Started a new program and ended up buying the Boxer anyway after more than a decade of lost time and possible joint sales had it stayed in the program. Best MBT in service? Once again in la la land the thing has a incompatible main gun with any modern ammunition and if the MOD thinks returreting or changing the gun is going to be cost effective I have ocean front property in Arizona to sell them. It is slower than any other western tank, hasn’t been continuously upgraded unlike it’s contemporaries so it’s current service life extension is going to be eye wateringly expensive.
Instead of buying the latest CV90 from BAE the MOD purchased a upgraded ASCOD from Spain built off a a Austrian design.
Acquired vehicles quickly? Well that’s what happens when you send Snatch Land Rovers to Iraq. Politics will at least fix that particular idiocy.
RAF on time with acquisitions and on budget? Eurofighter late and over budget. MPA capability gap due to the Nimrod debacle. A400 late and over budget for every country involved.

You constantly seem to think that their are vast conspiracies undermining British development programs. Coming up with things like “US Incorporated”, “Japan and South Korea might as well be the US”, or “France undermined our efforts to sell aircraft”, the list of excuses goes on.” Take some damned responsibility for once.
The fact you think that the US furthers it’s goals through solely military force and coercion is ignorance of the highest order. Were we this fanged beast you portray people wouldn’t be so eager to come here. Citing feel good studies where people think that giving out welfare to dictatorships makes you listened to or respected. Makes one think you missed a rather large dose of Prozac this morning.
People like you also rant and use the “if you can’t defend yourself adequately with this amount,” argument. However they don’t want the United States to defend itself. They want it to guarantee NATO. Keep the sea lanes open and the oil flowing. Smash terrorists and send whatever tin pot dictator stepped out of line this week to hell. While also keeping whatever their particular boogeyman is from haunting their dreams.
For whenever we don’t we are accused of being isolationists, selfish, and cruel. Whenever we do we are called warmongers. Damned if we do and damned if we don’t. Given the choice I would rather give the Military what it wants not what bureaucrats THINK is necessary.

Their is a difference between fabricating small lots for individual repair jobs and series production/continued parts production.
M7 doesn’t make any new aircraft only parts. More recently it was bought by Elbit to increase it’s US holdings so that may change but I doubt it.

“The problem with how the military works is that top brass are an era behind where the modern world has moved to. We saw this very obviously in WW1 when the focus was still on house warfare in an era of machine guns.”

Every major power at the start of WW1 used horses for cavalry and mounted infantry, the British get a little stick for using them the longest when the Germans got rid not long after the start.

But while that is fair you have to put that next to the British military leaders revolution in battlefield methods, and laying down the parameters of the modern style of warfare still seen to this day, by 1918 the British Army was undertaking high intensity rapid tempo engagements dominated by industrial weaponry, and the arrival of air power now meant combat took place in three dimensions, battle became deep, trying to break out of fixed positions, replacing tactics that were still used by all major powers that were pre Industrial Age. All these new tactics had to be backed up by a brand new logistic and communication structure. No other country saw this coming, so why do people expect British military leaders should have?

The military “top brass” has constantly throughout the ages had to adapt and redifine warfare through the dynamic situations that appear on the battlefield with new tactics and weaponry, Boer war, WW1 and WW2 being prime examples of a very high learning curve that ended in consistent military victories at the end of those wars, that should be appreciated as well.

Its now appreciated that much that modern historians over the last few decades, have changed the term of “lions led by donkeys” into “civilians led by soldiers” when referring to the world wars.

Steve, horses were still valid as transport and part of an army in the early 20c, you have to remember that it was only the very specifics of trench warfare in a specific theatre of war that was unsuitable for horse Calvary and they were still very useful in other theatres.

Horses still even had a use in the Second World War as many armies had not fully mechanised. Even the vaunted panzers divisions that sliced through the third republic were backed up by horse drawn logistic and artillery units. Infact going into the Second World War it was Britain that had the most mechanised forces, every other nation ( France, Germany, USA, Russia) even had actual Calvery units. German and the Russia used over 6million horses in WW2.

The question i am struggling with, is how do you apply this logic to the navy.

The navy’s role is predominately one of defense (ignoring the carriers), the role of almost every ship is to defend something, whether it is to defend troop carrying ships, carriers or merchant shipping or defending troops as the ship ferries them to land and defensive roles generally call on more high tech capability.

This is why the OPV are pretty useless in a shooting war, since they are incapable of defending against anything other than unarmed ships/boats or insanely lightly armed ones, which wouldn’t be sent on an offensive role, for the same reason.

Add some basic defensive weapons on them and suddenly they come useful, for example the seaRAM. With some basic defensive weapons they could be useful for escorting lower risk ships and freeing up high end ones, for example they could escort the supply ships as they enter or leave the bubble provided by the top end ships or just act as a final line of defense for the capital ships.

The part i can’t get my head around is whether this is actually sensible, is it better to just chuck all the available money at the high end hulls and leave the low end ones behind should a war start. Since unlike ground warfare, naval warfare has in theory advanced a lot since WW2 or even the Falklands, and could a lightly armed ship be harm than good.

You hit on one of the biggest problems with the NHS there, it is not one organisation, but should be or at least the buying side should be. It was split into local trusts as a political decision of it doesn’t work, so we need to be seen to be changing things, without thinking it fully through in the long/medium term.

This is the same thing with the trains, they split into local trusts thinking that they were creating competition, which in theory should create a better service. No question that if they actually created competition this would be right, but in practice they created a lot of inefficient local monopolies, which has the compete reverse effect of creating efficiency, less buying power, more scope for corruption (harder to track it when its not central) but no competition. Now they can’t be merged because people will complain and unions will strike to stop it, mainly because it would result in heavy job losses.

This is the same with the 3 services, there should be one procurement / strategy unit that works across the military and frankly there should be one service. The problem is no politician is ever going to force it through, because it would cause huge amount of short term pain (how many people here are ex service men that initial reaction is negative towards this, and how many of you when you think about it, realise it is mainly sentiment/history and not really based on logic.) but would not bring any benefit for at least 10 years if not more (i.e. no benefit for this government or the next).

The main problem here is that we live in an era where morale in the armed forces is at a all time low (or near it) and this change would make that worse, at least in the short /medium term. I have no doubt, in my mind, that in the long term it would help improve morale, as it would fix the underlying problem around poor equipment etc with some actual strategy around expenditure. but in the short term for sure will cause problems as your merging forces that have always felt different from each other and there would need to be a lot of job cuts due to massive overlaps in roles in the back room (not front line forces)