You are wrong my friend,, who is running down the RN are british politicians not me, I would like a RN stronger bcause this would be good not only for BRITAIN BUT FOR ALL WESTERN DEFENCE It,s not my fault if British politicians are not sensible to defence matters.
Read the post down of yours, this person also wants to run down the R.N. ??
Have a look at some of his posts in this thread., or even this thread here:
Any future SSBN will be an evolved ASTUTE class, so in effect the RN will be using a standardized platform. The ASTUTE's large size allows for increased numbers of not just weapons, but SF personnel. The large sail is designed specifically for the benefit of the latter. The only issues will be the size of the hull plug to host balistic launch tubes. Britain has a very strong track record when it comes to submarine design, and I'm convinced the ASTUTE's incorporate a lot of unique features based on this heritage (hull shape for one), so why would they go for Virginia class?
Thanks for the answer, I did not certainly mean UK buying Virginias but rather using the US idea of inserting Trident tubes for them instead of single-purposes VLS Tomahawk tubes. I just think that why not give every RN SSN the 8 vertical tubes? This would spread the SSBN commitment further, would enable more flexible deployment and ensure that all SSN's would be able to have a decent land-attack punch. If (and it's still if) the carriers won't get built the RN would still have long-range attack capability via using cruise missiles, with 56 VLS missiles per SSN.
How about the usual suspects in South America? Chile wouldn't benefit from an ex-RN carrier but this being South America this doesn't matter. Brazil might be quite good candidate. They operate ex-RN ships and a ex-RN Invincible (or why not even two, with one for operational duties and one for spares) would be quite good partner for Sao Paulo. An Invincible could be used as a helo deck for a carrier task force carrying either ASW or marine helicoters (together with whatever light intervention force Brazilians have).
Considering that Brazilian Navy currently uses A-4's I think there's a lot of more modern Harriers available.
Around 400 Harrier II's have been produced, many of them during late Cold War which means many of them have seen very little use. Some of them will be eventually sold, in fact if someone was interested in buying an Illustrious or two I'm certain RAF would be forced to sell some.
If the F-35 comes into RAF/RN service the Harriers are superfluous. Also, if there's a commercial opportunity I don't see a reason why Lab-Con cabinet wouldn't sell them in advance.
How is this possible since the operational squadrons use only roughly half of the Harriers originally procured and they're being put through renovation (GR 7 to GR 9) program which has been finished, what, two years ago?
Just because it appears that only half are being used doesn't mean the rest are just rotting in some shed somewhere, aircraft are rotated through periods of maintenance and activity to preserve their working life instead of just being worked to death.
I can't think of a single Harrier user which expects its Harriers to have enough airframe hours left to be worth selling by the time F-35B replaces them. The main concern of the UK & the USMC is how to keep them going long enough.
Officially the F-35B will come into service in 2012, in real life before 2020. What's the real problem as Harriers are rather underutilized by USMC and RAF due to post-Cold War cuts as shown by numbers? One must remember that there were so many Harriers that RN prematurely retired it's Sea Harriers, some of which were built in 1990's.
mainly due to the harriers being used in AFG. so more harriers are available for ops