"A NATO Fighter?" Topic

"Just imagine it: Airbus teams up with Lockheed Martin or Boeing on a program to build a NATO fighter.

Detached from reality?

Not, apparently, to Domingo Ureρa Raso, Airbus Defence and Space executive vice president for military aircraft.

Speaking on a panel at the 2014 NATO Industry Forum in Split, Croatia, on Nov. 13, Raso was discussing the need to collaborate more with industry from various countries on issues such as cybersecurity when he was asked if that meant he would be open to teaming up with Boeing or Lockheed on a new fighter. His response?

"Why not? Why not?"…"
Full article here
link

Amicalement
Armand

Pie in the sky. F-35 has effectively cornered the European market.

The only major European players not buying F-35 are France and Germany who operate a grand total of 400-ish jets between them.

Both are currently acquiring Rafale and Eurofighter. In fact French Rafale orders are set to restart in 2020s after a period where the French aim to be catering exclusively to export market.

So what country is going to back this?

What the West really needs is a cheap export plane or two to counter Chinese and Russian efforts. Using some common parts of the expensive types it would bring the cost of these down, the availability up, keep production lines going and adversly affectt the Russian and Chinese military efforts.

GarrisonMiniatures, the West has a cheap Western fighter – the SAAB JAS-39:

Selling quite well – Thailand, South Africa, Czech Republic, Hungary, Brazil and probably Slovakia. A Swiss buy was canned by a referendum.

Chinese export JF-17 jet is a failure and has sold to 1 customer – Pakistan. They did better with MiG-21 knock offs even in 21st century.

MiG-29s are brought by poor countries who can't afford better.

Su-27/-30 Flankers are brought by those who want a large heavy fighter and for various reasons can't get F-15s.

Everyone else generally buys F-16 or for top end users F-15 and very occasionally Eurofighter (F/A-18E/F is also an export failure – 1 sale to Australia).

It doesn't get better for Chinese or Russians in future. In fact China is losing customers to bankruptcy (e.g. Zimbabwe) or Russia (Myanmar) or lack of need (Sri Lanka).

A lot of Russian customers are going broke too or now buy Western.

The Russians and Chinese have not adopted large numbers of advanced new fighters (in fact Chinese main jet is still MiG-21 knock off J-7 and will be up to 2020s). Main Russian "new" jets are overhauled jets formerly grounded.

New Russian T-50 is proving to be expensive and even the Chinese have subtely admitted to problems with J-20, engine design and export FC-31 appears to be trash by all accounts.

I don't think there's any threat no or in future from either China or Russia and F-35 will be more than capable.

In fact the more F-35s they build, the cheaper it's going to get.

Textron Scorpion:

link

More of this please.

Wow. That is an ugly bird. It looks like an Alpha jet, Tornado, Hornet and Tomcat got thrown into a Lego bag and out came the Scorpion!

I rather like it! Decent performance and easy to support in the field. If I was Taiwan I would by about 600 of these and hang tons of missiles on them.

If it does the job it can look like a Brewster Buffalo for all I care! It is the support aspect of it that makes it a great buy.

Not the craziest idea, and not the first time it's been floated. The G91 was supposed to be a mud-mover version of this for NATO back in the late 60's(?) and Europe already has several collaborative efforts (with admitted different levels of success). No reason why something like this shouldn't be seriously considered.

-Will

Typhoon and Rafale were born out of a NATO fighter programme. They went their separate ways when the French insisted on making it carrier capable.

Future fighter programs aimed for export will be international in participation. The F-35 has parts built by BAE and Israel, and a condition in foreign fighter sales is now for importing countries (with the capability) to build some parts in their own country to enhance their own industrial base and jobs. The technology is exported as well, not just the airframes.

Nice one General.

That Scorpion is ugly in all the sexy ways.

Textron Scorpion

That's not a fighter. It's not even a proper ground attack jet.

It's a light COIN bird with some ground attack capability.

As it stands nothing can compete with F-35. F-35 has economies of scale and has sold to most European and several North Asian states.

Any NATO fighter is lacking in economies of scale, especially as main customer USAF is focusing exclusively on F-35 and has no intentions to develop or buy a new medium fighter (let alone light fighter) in the next couple of decades..

It can act as a missile Bus in large numbers, which is all most nations not fighting Russia or the US really need.

It has no radar or networking capability to plug into a radar. Start shoving those kind of electronics in and the cost goes up.

Also most countries can't afford large numbers even if the jet is free. Indeed many countries have not accepted US deals for free F-16s (only pay overhaul and whatever upgrades you want) because of this.

The problem is recurring costs – fuel, maintenance, costly munitions and most critically human resources in terms of training, salaries and wages, accommodation etc.

Then there's things like infrastructure costs too – airbases need maintenance, fire services, traffic control, base security etc etc.

Most countries can no longer afford any of this, especially due to declining tax revenues (tax is more evil than jihadis)and increased spending in all sectors of society (I work in health and our cost growth is massive – an MRI machine might cost $50 USD-$60,000 a year just for regular maintenance. And then there's human resource costs – about $400,000 USD AUD for a specialist doctor and $100,000 USD AUD for a nurse).

Typhoon and Rafale were born out of a NATO fighter programme. They went their separate ways when the French insisted on making it carrier capable.

The long game has kind of proved the French (mostly) right – in that they have Carriers and aircraft to fly off them and the UK….

Except that when the EFA/Eurofighter project was conceived in the late 1970s/early 1980s, the RN had just got out of the large fleet carrier game and there was no intention ever to field them again, so the additional expense of developing a carrier-capable aircraft was (quite rightly at the time), pointless. The RN simply weren't interested or involved in the project.

The German, Spanish and Italian partners in EFA/Eurofighter similarly had no need for a carrier-capable aircraft, so why should four partners have gone to massive developmental expense purely for a single French requirement?

That's rather like criticising the USAF for not making F15 carrier-capable.

Large fleet carriers were once again put on the table by the Blair Government, long after Typhoon was already flying.

One word – Variants – carrier borne and land based.

Don't we wish we had Carrier Typhoons now?

Eurofighter does : link

And the French were clearly right – Typhoon wasn't for them because they needed a naval variant. Really they'd have been dumb to stick with a plane that wasn't going to deliver that capability.

And who was going to pay for the development for a variant we simply didn't need in the 1980s/90s?

You can't use a carrier variant of the Typhoon on the new carriers, because the last government decided it wanted carriers on the cheap and thought it could get them through STOVL and F-35s, thereby avoiding the massive cost of adding catapults and arrestor gear.

One of the first things the present government did was assess the cost of doing what SHOULD have been done in the first place: i.e. use conventional aircraft and catapults/arrestors, but found that reversing the decisions made by the precious bunch was going to be even more costly than sticking with the present plans.

You seem to be missing the point.

The French took a lot of stick for dropping out of Eurofighter – but for them it was the only sensible solution. They did need a carrier aircraft, Typhoon could have had a carrier variant – but at the time it wasn't needed by the others.

Now that the UK is back in the carrier game it turns out that a navalised Typhoon would have been a good idea after all. We could all have had the same plane, if we'd listened to the French. Had naval Eurofighter existed then the UK carriers would have been ordered as a design that could use it from the start.

That's not where we are – but France definitely made the right decision for them. And they have the carrier and the aircraft to prove it.

If if if…

Spain, West Germany, Italy and the UK did not need a carrier fighter when EFA/Eurofighter was being developed and were not prepared to spend the vast sums of money required to develop a naval variant so that France could have one. All were out of the fleet carrier game (Germany was never in that game) and saw no possibility of ever re-staring that capability.

France took a lot of stick because it tried to move the goalposts after joining the EFA project (which at no point was intended to include a carrier variant) and then threw its teddies out of the cot when the other partners refused to pay for France's development costs.

The UK Labour government only proposed new carriers in the late 1990s, long after Typhoon prototypes were already flying and just before it was about to be delivered to the RAF.

You've also missed the point that EVEN IF we'd had a crystal ball and could see 20 years into the future to predict Labour's love-affair with aircraft carriers, a navalised Typhoon would still be unable to fly off Labour's carrier-on-the-cheap.

France already has a carrier capable of taking conventional carrier aircraft. We do not. We will not unless an absolute fortune is spent on converting HMS QE & HMS PoW.

Isn't 20/20 hindsight a wonderful thing…

That's not where we are – but France definitely made the right decision for them. And they have the carrier and the aircraft to prove it.

To be honest the naval requirement was only one reason among several for France leaving Eurofighter. (Actually, come to that, I think it'd be more accurate to say Eurofighter left France….) France's overall requirements didn't mesh well with Britain and Germany's in particular, and having a carrier variant was only part of that. Ironically some of France's requirements have, in the 30 years since the split, come to be seen as desirable by Britain in particular, but at the time they weren't. With all that said, unless you're seriously saying Britain, Germany and Italy should've ponied up the development costs for a carrier variant that only France wanted, it's all academic. France's exit wasn't because there couldn't be a naval Eurofighter, but because they were annoyed that countries with no interest in it wouldn't split the navalising bill with them.

As for building a 60,000 tonne carrier with no CTOL capability, well that's just wittery of the highest order, and yes it does completely negate any point in navalising Typhoon now. Yes, I take your point that *if* there was already a naval Typhoon we'd have been less likely to fall into the moronic STOVL carrier concept that we've ended up with, but frankly if my auntie had balls she'd be my uncle…. In 1984/5, when the Eurofighter split actually happened, there wasn't even the faintest notion that the RN would be back in the carrier game a generation later, and for Britain, Germany etc. to go subsidising a French naval aircraft (in Britain's case a couple of years after getting ships sunk by other French naval aircraft….) would've been counter-intuitive to say the least, and possibly electoral suicide….

I don't disagree – but the point (the only point I'm trying to make) stands as true: France did the right thing for France. If they hadn't they'd be in the same boat as us – carrier and no planes.

(of course we could also have all bailed on Typhoon and bought Rafale instead – then we'd have had a common european fighter)

As an aside – the UK government wanted back in on carriers in part because of the existence of the Charles De Gaulle. That's a decision that could have been forseen ("How will the RN feel when the French are flying Rafales off their carrier and we have nothing ?" Hmm….I wonder)

My point is that France did *a* right thing for France, not *the* right thing…. Nothing was stopping them from simply saying "we'll pay to navalise Eurofighter, since we're the only ones who want to navalise it" and staying on board. You seem to be presenting a false dichotomy – it wasn't the case that France was prevented from having a naval Eurofighter option, but simply that they were quite rightly told to get stuffed when they expected its development costs to be shared out….

To be honest the naval requirement was only one reason among several for France leaving Eurofighter. (Actually, come to that, I think it'd be more accurate to say Eurofighter left France….) France's overall requirements didn't mesh well with Britain and Germany's in particular,

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From memory project management work share and industrial benefits were other big reasons.

I actually think the RN's new carriers are more liability than asset:

1. Diversion of massive amounts of capital investment whilst other areas languish.

2. Diversion of massive amounts of recurrent revenue whilst other areas suffer.

3. Will chew up a large chunk of the RN's remaining surface warships (19 left) and attack submarines as escorts.

Leaves precious little else for other duties. Indeed the RN srtuggles maintaining it's commitments now. Add a carrier to escort and it becomes problematic.

4. Diminishing other forces. Rest of British military is in terminal decline numberswise. They are losing capability to deploy much at all.

basically the French wanted to control the program and reap a lot more out of it.