It is not to our liking it is theirs and Churchill was correct - but he had fuelled Russia's victory with the North Atlantic supply fleets. Does anyone have any idea how much of the Russian war machine was supplied by us and America in WW2? We turned our backs on several nations and it was wrong. Defeating one tyrant and accepting another, history now, but wrong on our part. Mmmm, Bulgaria and Romania, lots of lovely chicks live there :Wideyed:
Judging by the media, there seems to be a widespread public misapprehension about what diplomacy is for. It's not just about having nice, pleasant discussions with reasonable, trustworthy allied nations - that's the easy bit. Diplomacy is mainly about holding difficult, awkward discussions with appallingly intransigent, murderous, deceitful tyrants and trying to wring some concessions out of them. This is extremely hard work and the people who undertake this poisonous task deserve respect and support. Bizarrely, any democratic political leader who shoulders this tough task, talking to tyrants, gets criticised savagely for doing so.
I don't care what they spend on defence now. The worst thing in the world was to cut the RAF a few years ago and get rid of the Harrier. Perhaps I spent too much time living in the German woods with the Harriers and enjoying every minute of it. I suppose that I should be happy living in France on my RAF pension with 4 bikes in the garage.
Why did they get rid of the Harrier? It was a pretty impressive thing. Is there anything else that can do vertical take-off? And if not, why was it considered that vertical take off wasn't useful?
And the low payload and range. It hasn't stopped our government going for the F35B VSTOL though :Banghead:
Pissing around in jets with pilots is old tech. Waste of money and airspace. Drones are the future. Programme it in the morning, send it on its way. While its out killing everything it finds, it will back before you have cleaned the flies of your visor.
The main reason was that the Harrier was designed to support the Army in northern Europe. It needs no runway so could be hidden in supermarkets using the car parks for take off and landing. That sort of threat no longer exists according to the politicians, as the Ruskies are now friendly - or were till Ukraine happened! The Harrier GR3s that I used to work on had a reasonable payload and range for the purpose of its design, but like a Ducati could be a bit labour intensive to keep in the air. I think I remember a figure of 30+ maintenance man hours to a flying hour. The other great use was with aircraft carriers, but as has happened in history, we will give up the British built aircraft and buy American ones that are not as capable. We did that many years ago when we scrapped the TSR2 to be nice to the US, and ordered F111s instead, but they all fell apart before we took delivery. We were then sold second hand F4 Phantoms which we tried to make decent by fitting British Rolls Royce engines into. People seem to forget the way that Britain has sold every thing to do with aviation in the past. Britain invented the Jet engine and in the ' 40s and '50s the US and Russia bought them from us. We also invented the steam catapult on aircraft carriers, but we have not got any of them left now. The Harrier and the hovercraft are two things that are now widely used by the US military and built there despite being both British inventions.
