Nope, not my point at all, simply put, Wildcat was ill devised, designed, developed and procured at huge expense, with almost zero chance of foreign exports.wargame_insomniac wrote: 26 Aug 2023, 17:04You sound disapointed. It is if you think it is a shame that another country did not see the light (in your view) of buying expensive US alternative imports.....mrclark303 wrote: 26 Aug 2023, 14:14I'm afraid not, the lingering death of Wildcat keeps grinding excruciatingly onwards....
I for one am glad that British based employees get to work even if it is just another 24 helicopters, and thereby keep their skills fresh and up to date. We have underinvested in our UK based Defence industry in general for years, allowing too many companies to be purchased by foriegn competitors, and often for the British factories being closed and the work shifted to overseas, cheaper workforce.
The combination of Covid and the Russian invasion of Ukraine has shown the importance of having local, secure, resilient supply chains, and not relying on cheaper overseas production,over which we have no control. So for me every bit of British based Defence production is a small step in the right direction.
The RN would have been perfectly happy with new updated Lynx.
the Army couldn't have new Lynx because it lacks the crash worthy seats and installing them in Wildcat rendered it capable of carrying less people than my old 110 Defender!
It carries no scouting specific avionics, no pylon mounted weapons, It's quite frankly about as useful to the Army as Chocolate teapot....
It stands as a glowing example of absolutely piss poor UK procument policy and a good example of how we spend 50 odd billion a year, yet have sod all to show for it...
I don't have an issue with UK based procument, I do have a 'massive' issue with purely politically driven vanity projects that utterly waste tax payers money, as we all should....
