Liberal Democrats leader Sir Ed Davey is calling on the government to start building a “fully independent British nuclear deterrent” to end the UK’s reliance on the US.
The UK has operational control of its nuclear arsenal, including British-built warheads, but it depends on the US to supply and maintain the Trident missiles that would deliver them.
In a speech to his party’s spring conference in York on Sunday, Sir Ed will argue the UK’s continued reliance on US support is an unacceptable risk to national security.
F35 are only such planes. If you want air domination, you need those.
It obviously would be better to have European 6th (I think) gen jets, but we don’t have them
You do realise the whole x-gen fighter is nothing but marketing bullshit from the US defense industry, right?
The worst plane in the world, is the one sitting on the ground. And the F35 cannot sustain prolonged operation. Can barely sustain intermittent operations. It’s gonna sit in the hangar, mechanics desperately trying to maintain it, all while your airfields and hangars are being shelled day 1. Good luck with that.
Nah I don’t believe you, Ukraine has been able to close the skies over Ukraine against Russia, so Russian planes can’t enter Ukrainian airspace.
Although the Russian planes are not as good as the American, I think that whatever Ukraine is doing could be done against F-35 too.
Saab Vigen with AWAC support will probably do well enough, even against F-35. Especially if they were designed for it.
But that’s irrelevant for now, because they are definitely good enough against Russian equipment, which is what the traditional enemy is using.
If we came at war against other F-35, who would we be fighting against? If it’s USA, we wouldn’t be able to use F-35 for anything leaving us utterly defenseless.
If it’s against Russia, and Trump decides to help Russia, we wouldn’t be able to use F-35 either.
F-35 is useless, because USA has become an unreliable ally even acting like an enemy. It doesn’t matter if it’s technologically superior if it’s rendered useless by USA.
I also seriously doubt F-35 is very good in a prolonged war, because it requires insane amounts of maintenance, a plane standing on the ground because it requires fixing isn’t worth anything. And that’s a clear danger with F-35, because it requires about 5 times as much maintenance as Vigen AFAIK. F-35 is also extremely demanding in other way, like the quality of airbases. So a bombed airbase can easily ground F-35 too. Where with the Vigen you can take off and land on a decent road.
F-35 is only superior when you disregard all the downsides. Pressure the enemy to have their F-35 constantly in the air, and the F-35 air defense will quickly collapse.
Please read anything about modern fighter jets.
Ukraine doesn’t have air superiority over Russia, which is the thing modern military doctrines aim to achive.
US, despite being unreliable, needs to maintain some trust. If they turn off one F 35, which I’m doubtful they’re able to do, the global trust in them will significantly decrease.
It’s only 2 years to be back to business as usual anyway.
They don’t have to turn them off, they only need to not “delay” armory and spare parts, because of “supply issues.”
That’s right. Notice me when that happens, so I can short Lockheed Martin.
I’m not saying it will happen, but that it can happen. And if you don’t realize that’s how far relations between USA an allies gave fallen, that that is a risk. Then you haven’t been paying attention.
Why would I read outdated stupid bullcrap? F-35 is in no way proven to last for a long term conflict.
You can’t have air superiority with planes that can’t fly because of lack of maintenance or suitable airfields.
Did you even read what I wrote?
Furthermore the skies belong to drones now. If a $5000 drone can shoot down a 300 million F-35. It’s such a huge assymetry that the F-35 will look like something as useless as if it was from ww2.
It’s delusional to invest in F-35 at this point in time. Despite it’s technologically sophisticated it is just as outdated as it is expensive.
It’s the same assymetry we are seeing in Iran, where Americans use 1 million dollar missiles to shoot down $50k drones, and some times they even use more missiles for 1 drone. Resulting in the Iran war costing $6 billion for USA in just the first 3 days!
Instead of just reading old worthless shit, you should also apply some critical thinking.
Drones are no more than intelligent missiles.
I would love to see any drone (or an older plane) shooting F35 down.
Our (western) systems are adapting to the inteligent missile warfare, give them few years and one or two wars.
Our Western systems already gave adapted, and all of Europe are working with Ukraine now, be because Ukraine is the global leader on drones.
You sound like someone who believes American superiority is a given. Even when USA is winning every battle in Iran, but losing the war.
You clearly don’t understand what asymmetric war means.