On Mar 9, 7:46*pm, "Paul J. Adam" wrote:
In message
,
hcobb writes

On Mar 9, 11:09 am, "Paul J. Adam" wrote:
There's also the point that we find ourselves operating away from home
rather often these days, and thus rather closer to potentially or
actually hostile air arms.

Which is why the perfect fighter for the UK is the F-35C, operating
off Nuke carriers. *(Place an order for two with the Americans and
pocket to lower price to pay off the Scottish yard workers.)

You're not really up to speed on the costs of current kit, are you?

(There's a hint - if we could afford CVNs we'd be buying them. Since we
can't, we're not)

For those following along at home, the pair of CVs the Royal Navy is
currently buying is slated to run somewhere around 4 to 5 billion
pounds, which is around $8-10 billion US. The most recent Nimitz
class CVN cost about $6 billion, meaning that a pair would be much
more expensive than the Queen Elizabeth program.

And that doesn't even get into issues like manning, O&M costs, &c.
Note that even at the current program cost there's some doubt as to
whether the RN will actually finish the program- they've had to
downsize the _Astute_ and _Daring_ classes by quite a bit to afford
the them and there's some speculation that the Treasury will wait
until a "main gate" decision has to be made and then announced that
the carriers have to be canceled since there's nothing to escort them
with.

And I imagine that the people in the UK who squawk about Henry Hyde's
antics with the JSF source code would have a collective stroke if a
move like that were announced.

-JTD