OPINIONS
- We are declining towards complete impotence, if we had to
fight a war against Israel we would probably be thrashed.
- Defence projects still seem to be going badly awry
despite all the efforts to improve the situation. One of
the causes might be that the development of weapon
systems seems to be a stop go process. When a new weapon
system goes into production and service the team that
designed and developed it appears to be disbanded and
tries to find work on other, probably very different
projects. After the new weapon system has been in service
for a number of years and is well on the way to becoming
obsolete the procurement authority seems to start working
on the specification of it's successor. It then spends
several years deciding which advanced features it wants
the next missile or whatever to have without setting in
motion the development and testing of these features,
possibly because it thinks it may decide they aren't
necessary later. Eventually the specification is settled,
contracts are placed, the companies involved scramble to
recruit the necessary expert design staff, many of whom have
probably decided that accountancy is a better profession
to be in. Work now starts on designing, developing and
testing the new advanced features but, being advanced,
they are not easy, all sorts of unanticipated problems
are encountered, time starts to get short, costs mount,
those involved get dispirited. Eventually the project is
late, over budget and doesn't meet the specification and
quite likely is scrapped. It would almost certainly be
much more satisfactory to have teams working continuously
on each type of weapon system, so that when a new system
goes into production work starts immediately on the
parallel specification and development (in stages, one
new feature at a time?) of a more capable successor, to
the production ready stage.
- We seem to be ten or more years behind the United States
in every defence field and reliant on them for virtually
all our effective weapons.
- Apparently the RAF wants to change the role of many of
the Typhoon aircraft on order from Fighter/Interceptor to
Ground Attack. Surely the Tornado was specified to be a multi-role aircraft but the Typhoon wasn't, it isn't
likely to be a trivial task to convert it to a new role.
This type of aircraft isn't really suitable for ground
attack is it? Apart from anything else it's too expensive.
When Tornados were used for ground attack in the Gulf War
it turned out that they were flying near suicide missions.
I suppose ground attack is done from 30,000 ft now and
that makes a difference. The mind changes of the services
and MoD are another reason why defence projects go so
badly wrong.