Britain's fighter jet problem has only one solution
Air power brings with it a level of complexity and agendas that makes warship planning look easy. But there is no getting away from the fact that here in the UK, we have a problem: the path we have from the fighter aircraft we have today to those we need is very, very unclear.
At the moment we have the now ageing fourth-generation Typhoon, manufactured by the UK, Germany, Italy and Spain. The RAF finds that it can afford to keep 90+ of its Typhoons in a potentially flyable condition. It received 160, but 53 were the Tranche 1 model, never much good for ground attack and now basically obsolete and being got rid of. The Typhoon can at least carry lots of powerful weapons nowadays, including the long-ranging Meteor air-to-air missile and the well known Storm Shadow standoff cruise missile (though we have given away a lot of ours to Ukraine).
The only other jet we have is the F-35B, jointly operated by the Royal Navy and the RAF. It is Britain's only modern, fifth-generation fighter. We have the B model, the vertical-thrust version, because this is the only one that can fly from our no-catapult carriers.
The problem with the B is that where you want to find weapons and fuel you instead find fans and flaps. Its combat radius and weapons load-out is forever limited compared to the other versions, and to add insult to injury it costs more to buy and fly as well. We also don't yet have many weapons we can put on it: just an American medium-range missile, a largely British smartbomb and a British short-range missile (but sadly this can't be carried in the internal weapons bays, so the plane is not stealthy if this is used). We don't have any gun option. At the moment we have just 34 F-35Bs, four of them test birds kept in America. We have ordered 48, for now.
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