Comment by sam-cop-vimes
20 hours ago
Indeed - the UK needs to rely more on home grown solutions. No harm in using foreign components/expertise to make progress, but we have to constantly strive to achieve self-reliance. This may never happen, but the trajectory needs be in that direction.
I think the word "selfish" here is doing a disservice to your argument. Nothing selfish about trying to achieve self-reliance. It annoys that even a lot of seemingly simple software used in the NHS relies on American SaaS companies.
“Self reliance” in military terms is overrated because it means redundancy which increases costs and sourcing everything domestically means missing out on comparative advantage of different countries). The UK doesn’t have nearly enough colonies to source materials anymore.
The US already created 3 variants of a 6th gen fighter available to all of NATO and some other countries. AFAIK, the UK hasn’t even built a 4th generation fighter, something EuroFighter, Dassault, and Saab have done (in Europe) and the US has done 4 times over (later variants of F-15, F-16, F-18, and all F-22s).
The tradeoffs depend a lot on how reliable the external dependencies are. Sourcing from Europe seems pretty low risk high reward for the foreseeable future. Relying on the US seemed really safe 10+ years ago but is much less so currently. If I were any non-US country right now I wouldn't want to find myself in a war critically reliant on US resources.
Agreed - all I'm saying is we have to keep trying. There are benefits in just trying to achieve an almost impossible goal.
Citation needed.
In a world of scarce resources, how you choose to invest is incredibly important.