Procurement is not a logical process. Scrap the capability you have in order to buy something twice as expensive for a bigger kickback. Or, create a process that hides that while pretending that just in time delivery is a concept that collapses space and time into post-modern logistical certainty. What they don't mention is that zero capability means potentially exponential costs in the interim.Chopper wrote:IIRC RAF types have been serving in NZ on the P-3k's to keep provide training until the Nimrods are replaced. Pretty good mothballing carriers and surveillance aircraft before replacing them. I'd imagine the rational is the cost of maintaining obsolete equipment can be poured into the purchase of said vapourware.
The P-3's are an incredible aircraft, like the A-4, UH-1 and the C-130 they will outlast religion.
But if you're a UK defense advisor with a foreign passport on the payroll of a foreign defence company fixated on terminating or torturing goat herders at the highest possible price then capability is not the issue, the size of your 'fee' is. Nor does the real world interfere with risk mitigation strategies as target practice takes place in a desert far, far from your Aston Slingback and 18th hole.
463 gets the last word.paul463 wrote:I believe a replacement Maritime recon aircraft will be announced during the 2015 defence review. It is complete bollocks just now.
When the RAF were told to look for a lost yacht this summer they had to fly Spain-Azores-Atlantic in a C130 with people scanning the horizon from the cockpit with binos. No wonder they don't get (t)asked to go out in the Atlantic much. Home in time for tea it is then.
And, by the way, that scheissheap mono-ELINT crap-u-like scheissbag third-hand KC130 or whatever the wretched thing is does 20% of what the Nimrod did, and mainly still in US colours, or, at least it did so at least until recently. Was never required after the flawed Nimrod upgrades. But they were scrapped after being upgraded. So it was all a fiddle somewhere along the line.
