I for one agree with John about where the priorities need to be. Herc's, Frigates, MPA's and Broad band secure comm's. ACF would be nice but deal with it later. Where I disagree with you is that now is the time to talk about it more so than the immediate years following retirement of ACF. State to state relations have not been so complex and regionally far reaching as we have seen in the last couple of months. Examples this month are Japan and China provoking each other.
So if these guys want to talk about it, what cost is it here? I know it might be frustrating but they may spark a solution and all it might cost is some patience.
NZ may need to rapidly put on combat weight and reach very quickly. An ACF is probably not the most viable (in my opinion) way to do that but best to look at the options. And just to stoke the flames Beleed a paper in South Africa claims the SAAF Gripens may be sold as maybe the A109's to alleviate budget pressures. Sounds unlikely to me but couple more A109's - opportunist buy. We trade them the Tri Nations and get a couple more heli's. I'll pass on the Gripen's unless Gareth Morgan doesn't mind shouting for a couple.....
Anyway I am not convinced regarding drones for MPA, maritime enforcement etc in peer to peer high intensity conflict scenarios and would consider them risky to introduce for such a "niche" defence force as ours. Modern high intensity high tempo conflict will involve a heated battle for the signals space and band width could be put to better use in my amateurish opinion.
S-3B the more I look at it is a far better proposition. It has a an E/O turret already. There was a site (still trying to find it- might be the dreaded Wikipedia) that mentioned an 11,000 hour airframe life following a rebuild in the post 2000 mark so say they got half way through that to be conservative? would that give us sufficient years if we bought sufficient hulks to pillage for parts.
And besides I am working in 3D metal powder printing (particularly sintering) and experimenting with different forms in 3D scanning with different means and frankly if a part can be homogeneous and sufficiently evacuated following forming, spares will be less of an issue (It is not magical though, some internal shapes we can't do yet.). Bespoke spares and R&D cost will dramatically fall in cost. Maybe even fit Block 2 Aim-9x for self defence maybe......went too far? How about a trainable 25mm gun pack with optics to turn them into a gunship for Army support border/fisheries enforcement. Again too far?
I still don't get why you want to introduce a fleet of S-3's into the RNZAF? Wouldn't that money be more wisely spent on the future replacements for the P-3's?
So lets say, for the sake of it, the NZ Government goes to the special 'money tree' at the bottom of the South Island and finds it is in full bloom with millions of unallocated dollars and pushes the 'go' button today on a dozen S-3's.
You then pick the 12 best available airframs for refurbishment, reactivate them from storage and fly them to a LM facility, there they are stripped down and basic airframe or age issues are rectified (you probably also selected another 6 or so airframes and ship them to NZ to be used as a source of spares), while the airframes are being refurbished do you also decide to upgrade all the sensors too? Possibly some, possibly not all, but enough is spent so that you get a reasonable amount of years out of them (you don't want to spend even more money later on performing a midlife sensor upgrade in a few years time).
You then purchase a whole bunch of spare parts, simulator and anything else necessary, you also purchase a load of weapons and other expendable stores for them too.
As this is a 'new' capability for the RNZAF, you also have to increase manpower, sufficient aircrews, sufficient ground crew, etc, and also admin staff too.
So by the time the aircraft are operating at full capability, how long has it taken and how much has it cost?
Would it reasonable to say that at least five years to get to FOC, maybe a year or so more? Maybe a bit less? How much has it cost in aircraft and manpower, $200m, $300m, more?
By this time the RNZAF is starting the process of selecting the replacements for the P-3's, but guess what? The Government discovers that the 'money tree' is bare so no replacement for the P-3's! Everyone standing around says.... Buggar!!
What would I rather see happen? The money saved and put towards the replacement of the P-3's with, say, six P-8A's and three Tritons. By this time the USN and RAAF also have their fleets of P-8A's and Tritons operating too.
With the vast area of oceans that NZ has responsibility for, the Tritons can be up and out there patrolling for around 24hrs at a time, scanning vast areas of ocean, if something of interest (or threat) is spotted then a P-8A can be tasked to take a closer look and provide the appropriate response.
It could also possibly work as a intro to the P8. Big thing would be is how buggered are the airframes, how many hours they have on them and the cost of the airframes, their reactivation, upgrades and fitting out. Put it this way, not much point if we are only going to get 10 years out of them. For it to be viable we'd want around 25 years.