The RAF risks running short of pilots for operations over Libya as cuts to the defence budget threaten to undermine front-line operations, says Thomas Harding of The Daily Telegraph.

Since the conflict began, a squadron of 18 RAF Eurofighter pilots has enforced the Libya no-fly zone from an air base in southern Italy. However, a shortage of qualified fighter pilots means the RAF may not have enough to replace all of them when the squadron has to rotate in a few weeks.

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This situation arises (apart from the clinically insane decision to retire Ark Royal and the Harrier force) because RAF rules mean that pilots have to be replaced after about five minutes on the job. No sooner will they have found out where the bathroom is at their new airbase than they'll be sent home. Not that I'm suggested that the RAF is in any way over manned or feather bedded of course, perish the thought.

Still, the decision to sack 25% of pilots under training a few weeks ago is starting to look more statesmanlike avery day. God bless the Air Staff I say.

I've just seen, from Wikipedia (not, I assure you, a source I regard as anything other than by no means 'definitive') that the cost of a production Spitfire in about 1939 was £9,500/0/0, which means that the RAF paid about the same in 1939 for 116 Spitfires (or five and half front line squadrons, with reserves, as I understand the arrangements then pertaining) as it now pays for one bomb. Elsewhere I've read that 2,160 Spitfires were on order when war was declared, enough to buy about nineteen bombs, as I understand the prices. I know things have moved on a bit since then, and bombs are much more destructive (though whether the individual Bomb Destructivity Index - TLI: BDI - has inflationalised at a rate comparable to or greater than the Necessary Per Capita Tax Burden Quotient I am not qualified to assess) and the likelihood of actually hitting the actual target is very much greater (in 1940, I believe, bombs dropped within a ten mile radius of the target were recorded as a hit on the target, even if the damage was a crater in a field), but I cannot help thinking, given that mistakes must always be made, that the margin of error, calculated as a fraction of the effort, must increase when one's eggs are put into fewer and fewer more and more expensive baskets.

Does one one million pound bomb do as much damage to 'enemy' (Who are my enemies in Libya these days? - I must remember to kick Libyan dogs and smash Libyan shop windows in my patriotic outpouring of outrage, when I'm told whom to attack.) morale / troops / civilians / economy / industry as one hundred and sixteen Spitfires, all of which could be re-used and some of which outlasted hostilities.

I've always thought of war as an economic activity but we seem to have advanced to the stage at which war is now uneconomic. Will we get rid of money or get rid of those wasteful bastards who insist on making war while claiming popular support for doing so? We must do something for we cannot go on as we are.

I always thought a Spitfire was about £5000, but maybe Wikipedia is right, it had to happen sometime.

Obviously, a 1000lb bomb now does as much damage as one in 1940, but if you can ensure that it lands exactly where it is meant to, then you can do the job with one aircraft and one bomb that might have taken dozens of aircraft and hundreds of bombs in the 1940s, when you might have lost a few bombers and their crews. Obviously I am not defending defence inflation, which is at an absurd level, but some things have got better over the years.

My book on Spitfires, concurs that the cost was about £9,500.

Fuselage £2,500

Engine £2,000

Wings £1,800

Guns £800

Undercarriage £800

Propeller £350

Ancillaries make up the rest of the cost.

Yes, but a flyable Spitfire now will cost the best part of £1M.

Beer in 1940 was ~ 10d a pint or 240 for £10. Now it's ~ 3 for £10.
Factor of 80 sound about right?

I thought that until today, and I lack the means to prove what I grew up believing. No matter, what is twice the price where defence disposables, and the men who make them work, are concerned?

Having deleted the rest of your comment I cannot reply except to say that I acknowledged the advance of science, and its handmaiden technology, and asked, that notwithstanding, whether all that investment could overcome human frailty to such an extent that concentrating risk is worthwhile.

I think not.

That notwithstanding, I posed a question. We proceed apace and by our ingenuity have long since outgrown bows and arrows, and the economic system that paid for them. The weapons we have developed for wars that are purely economic now seem to exceed our ability to produce them economically as fast as we can use them within the current economic regime. Where do we go from here?

As much as the missile, while the aeroplane dropping it costs?

Pilots! The RAF wants pilots? I can do no less than recommend these guys because they are in fact indestructible.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7ixuf23 ... re=related