Latest / UK Column Radio / Winging It- Why Is The UK Training Ukrainian Pilots?

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Winging It- Why Is The UK Training Ukrainian Pilots? · UK Column Radio

0:07
Tim Davis, thank you very much indeed for speaking to UK Column. Tim
0:10
is a twenty year veteran of the Royal Air Force, having flown fast jets
0:16
and trained other servicemen on such for that period of time. I'm sure he
0:22
can come on and talk a little bit about that. But Tim, what
0:25
I'd like to start with is a reference to the constant flare of information we're
0:30
getting from government about how the United Kingdom is helping Ukraine, to whether it's
0:37
supply equipment or arms or ammunition. But in this case, most recently the
0:43
training of ten pilots who said to completed basic training and some language training.
0:49
And I think really to put that in context for the UK column audience,
0:54
how significant is the training the basic training of ten pilots who may or may
0:59
not go on to fly sixteen And can you try and set that within the
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context of a training year within the United Kingdom on those sorts of platforms is
1:11
in fast jet but also thinking about the Ukrainians and the Russians. Yeah,
1:18
there's a lot in that. I'm not an expert, Charles, but it's
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lovely to come and chat to about it. So I taught on what's called
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Phase four fast jet fine training here. So there are four phases in effectors.
1:27
There's the clues and the name there isn't it really. So what the
1:30
Ukrainians have done is they've been given what's called Elementary, not Basic necessarily,
1:34
because if they're going to go into basic, they'll be flying a different aircraft,
1:37
which we have ten that's called the T six text the two and I
1:40
know that cause I brought them all into service myself when I was a requirements
1:42
manager. So this is the Hawk TEA two. Obviously we can't fly them
1:47
on. This has got engine issues at the moment. We've got twenty eight
1:49
of those of which probably five or six are serviceable now. Whilst they sought
1:52
the engines, there's no capacity, there's no capacity full stop. So they
1:56
did something called Elementary, which is on the prefect aircraft, which is a
2:00
big propeller at the front, but the actual cockpit layout is quite advanced.
2:04
And we have twenty three of those, and I also brought those aircraft into
2:07
the service back in twenty eighteen before I left. It's a much slower aircraft.
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It flies about one hundred and twenty one hundred and fifty knots. The
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Hawk here flew around about five hundred miles an hour four fifty knots, that
2:19
kind of thing. So what they've done is they've had an introduction to Royal
2:23
air Force fast jet training, but the very basic side of it, if
2:27
that makes sense, the very elementary side of it, and it will give
2:30
them enough to go on to an intermediate trainer. But I believe they're all
2:34
now going to go on to Alpha Jet out in France, which is very
2:38
similar to the Hawk here. So it's almost like they're missing a stage.
2:42
And I understand why they can do that because the Prefect it can be quite
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a fast aircraft. You can sort of bridge Prefect into Hawk or into Alpha
2:51
Jet. We don't do it in the Royal air Force because of the complexities.
2:53
It needs a lot of care. They're probably not going to get that
2:57
care, and there's a language barrier. I'm a guy that would say that
3:01
you're very unlikely to see F sixteen in Ukraine without a whole world of support
3:07
that we're probably not going to give. And I think this is a kind
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of stalling tactic where we pretend we're offering all this kind of stuff to Ukraine.
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It's going to come it's all these packages are going to happen. Norwegians
3:20
are going to give you their older aircraft because they want to get back into
3:22
some kind of future American deal for F thirty five or whatever. But I
3:25
think it's unlikely. The training is complex. I don't think it's I don't
3:30
think it's been comprehensive. We can't possibly make it comprehensive unless we fly him
3:35
on the hawk here, which we've got no capacity to do. So it
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is what it is. I think it's a bit of a smoke screen,
3:40
to be fair. I think that's exactly the impression that people have got.
3:45
And so just on the numbers, I mean, if given best case scenario
3:50
and the support that you describe was available and things ran to plan, First
3:55
of all, how long would it take to have an operation capability from those
4:00
ten pilots? But also how significant in the wider scheme of things is ten
4:06
pilots. It's not significant at all. Also, you don't have a sustaining
4:12
training capability as well, so that's another thing. You've got ten pilots,
4:15
you're gonna put in sixteen, presumably to be frontline. There's no way of
4:18
regenerating that capability in house you'd need. And this is I'll tell you what
4:23
the funny thing is here, Charles, to be fair, and we're all
4:25
hiding it. Of course, we're all hiding it. With Macron sending French
4:28
troops out there and that kind of stuff. It's almost not even a proxy
4:31
war anymore, do you know what I mean? It's a full on NATO
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versus Russian war. I mean, I remember, I don't want to get
4:36
into detail here because you're not asking these questions. That's absolutely fine. But
4:40
of course, when Russia asked if they could join NATO, they were told
4:43
you, yes, you could, and then a few months later they were
4:44
told no, you can't. You know, so it's obvious that data is
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an anti Russian pact. That's fine, we're not talking about that. But
4:49
the thing about it is, of course, is that they will have no
4:55
inherent indigenous capability to continue training their own pilots. F sixteen is a comp
5:00
located airplane. So here's the thing, So we can spin this now.
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So if I trained a guy into this, I trained people on my virtual
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flight school and they're very capable, of course, But then if I was
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going to put them in a real airplane. I need to put them in
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real jets. I need to give them that real training, so simulated versus
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real training. Someone coming through this airplane here in the Royal air Force is
5:15
probably taking about If we do it properly, it should take three and a
5:18
half years. It's never been done. Even when I went through, I
5:20
took about four or four in a bit. Now it's about seven because of
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the holes they've got to do in between, because we just you're backlogged on
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courses. The Ukrainians would be any different. Of course, British pilots don't
5:30
have that language problem that Ukrainians have, and it is a language problem still.
5:34
I've trained Katari's Saudis, I've trained Indian pilots, I've trained all sorts.
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Language is a huge issue. When you get into a cockpit like this,
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which is loud, it's hot, there's a lot of vibration. You
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need to be able to hear what's going on. I understand the language.
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So we've got to put someone even when they finish on this course here,
5:49
it's still going to go onto this aircraft here like the Tornado which we don't
5:54
fly, and them also Typhoon F thirty five that's going to take you a
5:56
year, possibly six months to a year to train up on that, and
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then you're not ready or limited combat ready. No one's going to throw you
6:01
into a fight. You're gonna get killed. So we still need to train
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you up. We still need another six months, maybe even more than that,
6:08
where you then progress through onto different leadership aspects where then you can be
6:12
taken into some kind of combat zone. So it's not as if we know
6:15
the reason F six things aren't in theater. Is it going to get shot
6:18
down? Full stop, there's no tow ways about it. I was an
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electronic warfare instructor, so I'm very familiar with the surfers to missile strategies that
6:25
the Russians use. I don't speak out of turn about it, of course,
6:28
but you could read about it on any kind of decent website. Now
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they are masters at ground based deair defense. That's why we don't have the
6:34
permissive air environment over there. You see the Ukraine aircraft flying at treetop height,
6:40
of course they are they flew any higher, they're going to get shot
6:42
down. This is why we have Royal Airport's aircraft over the Black Sea targeting
6:46
into Ukraine and telling the Russian sorry, telling the Ukrainians where everything is,
6:49
all the Russian stuff is. We have that there because they can't be over
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Ukraine. The RF cannot be over it. They be shot down. They're
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almost shot down over the Black Sea. Remember weren't they in the aircraft were
7:00
using there. So it's it's a bit of a ploy. It's a bit
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of a you can imagine this coalition is basically saying, look, we're gonna
7:08
make it happen, but we're just kind of dragging it along a little bit.
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It probably means we can print more airplanes. American jobs always popular,
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of course, isn't it. You know how defense works, people's stock goes
7:17
up. Of course, let's hold it long enough so we can all cash
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in on the death of young men, of course, on both sides.
7:23
But I can't see it happening, to be fair, I hate to be
7:26
that guy. I can't see it happening. And if you listen, I
7:28
was listening to Richard Sheriff, General Richard Sheriff recently at Oxford Union speaking against
7:31
George Galloway. Absolute warmonger, There's no two ways about it. There's absolutely
7:38
When you listen to him. You listen to Richard Sheriff, and then you
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go and listen to Dubias Elwood and these kind of people. You're thinking,
7:43
you're literally you're wanting to send young men to their deaths for no reason.
7:46
This thing will end in a stale mate, we know it will. It's
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going to be Oh, let's stop here showing. Oh that's the same thing
7:51
we had about two years ago. Was it where we've lost a lot of
7:54
third of UK? Yeah? Absolutely, So what did we do as two
7:57
years ago? Oh? Because Johnson went over there January last year and he
8:00
kept you fighting because you want to increase all the defense stocks and we can
8:01
get rid of our arms. I mean, the whole thing's it's a Smedley
8:05
Butler, isn't it. War is a racket thing. But it's just so
8:07
it's so transparent now it's kind of brutal really. So in short, I
8:11
don't see it happening. Ten pilots isn't enough. We couldn't train anymore anyway.
8:16
We haven't got the capability to train our own right now. So it's
8:20
a bit of a sad state of the first child. That was actually going
8:22
to be one of the things I was going to ask you about what,
8:24
in having had to have given space to train ten pilots all be in an
8:28
elementary capacity, what will the knock on effects have been for Navy or Air
8:33
Force pilots here. Yeah, exactly, so they're not training. If you're
8:35
training Ukrainians and not training British, that's the end. The funny thing is
8:39
when I was training here, we used to get messages in saying we've got
8:43
we've gotta what do we do? We sold some We sold some typhoons to
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Saudi Arabia I think it was, and on the back end of that deal,
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I know it was Qatar, that's right. We sold Typheens to the
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Qatar. On the back end of the deal, we gave them I think
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it was five or six Hawk ttoss It didn't really want. You can't really
8:58
do much with six of these Ara planes because you're going to have some maintenance
9:01
the whole time, and you need a bigger fleet. They've got a bigger
9:03
fleet now, but at the time they didn't. And then we were told
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in about three weeks time, there's a bunch of Guitaris coming over to start
9:09
training, and we said, well, angle Nele's talked to us about this.
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We've got British guys training. We also had some other countries, but
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we've got British guys training. So we've got to stop those British guys training
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and we've got to train the guitaris or because the government has said we made
9:20
a promise to Qatar to train some of their part. That's all well and
9:22
good, but no one's spoken to us. And even they had spoken IU,
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it wouldn't have mattered. We would have said, don't do it just
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yet. We've got British guys going through and they would have said, well,
9:30
we made a promise. There's a disconnect. There always will be,
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and it's quite harmful really because the sceniors in the service will always go along
9:37
with it because they want their They want the knighthoods and they want the lords
9:41
and whatever whatever is going to get afterwards. They want to They're going to
9:43
be a systems and the highs. I'm not cynical about that, because a
9:46
lot of people my age obviously want thisactly the same thing. However, I
9:48
never did. I wanted to just get guys through the flying training system to
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make this country more secure, and I didn't want to I didn't want to
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disrupt their training. So if you have a Ukrainian training, you don't have
9:58
a British pilot tre And if you don't have that British pilot training, this
10:01
is the thing that people forget. You don't have that bridge pilot going on
10:05
to the front line. What you don't have then is another person coming back
10:07
into the training pipeline as an instructor. So you have this double whamming.
10:11
Now that means you haven't got any instructors now to train the pilots you don't
10:13
yet have and you're going to have. So it impacts on two levels.
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And that's why when flying training breaks, doesn't break a little bit, it
10:22
breaks a lot very quickly. But this is what we keep telling people,
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don't interrupt flying training. Keep flying training being the front line. Do tathing
10:28
with the front line, mess around with the front line. Yet that's absolutely
10:30
fine, but you've got to keep the output from flying training into the front
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line. If you stop that, you've got no one coming back to be
10:37
instructors. And now you have this huge crash. And that's what we're seeing
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at the moment all across what we call the United Kingdom Military flying Training system.
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In different bits and pieces. We're seeing the fragmented failures. But so
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with that in mind, what's your assessment of the overall capability of the UK's
10:52
capability at the minute and over the next sort of five seven years. It's
10:56
funny as in a war fighting capability to me, yeah, yeah, well
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we'd obviously go with we Union flags on our back, and we don't go
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and we do the best we could. But you know, if you look
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at the I think I think the airports is thirty three and a half thousand
11:11
something like that. Now anyway, if we look at Tesco's of three hundred
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and thirty thousand, I mean, it's a funny thing when we place so
11:16
much importance in such a small amount of people. And I've said this recently,
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I think diamonds out in the diamonds out, isn't she fighting hooty rebels?
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One of the only Type forty five is that we really have that can
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actually do it. And that's not sustainable in any shape or form. I
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mean, it doesn't take much to impact one of these ships where you lose
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that capability. And when I was a naval officer for five years before transferred,
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you just don't have that ship there, it's not as if you can
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replace it. And I say this again with the aircraft, the amount of
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aircraft we have, they're so expensive now we don't have combat mass. We
11:50
have a very technical, small amount of air I mean, this is why
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I mean when we talk about peasing, people talk about peasing Hitler and the
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peasing putain noise kind of thing. We are peace Hitler because you weren't ready
12:00
to fight at war back in ninety thirty eight. That's the whole point.
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And when I'm saying no, no, we need to appease hit Her a
12:05
little bit, sorry, appease put in a little bit here that there's many,
12:07
many reasons for that, but we don't have the combat strength in any
12:11
capability to deal with what Russia would present and is presenting now. And we
12:16
are seeing of course, so you know it's not it's on multiple levels.
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It's not just here are our tanks here or your tanks we're going to go
12:22
to war. There's a lot of cyber now, there's a lot of things
12:26
that we don't see and we're not really aware of. Drones weren't something that
12:30
people talked about until Ukraine really happened. All that technology was there, the
12:35
efficacy was still in doubt, but of course now it's proving that it's it's
12:39
worth something. So there's lots of capabilities, especially in the electronic magnetic spectrum
12:43
EW electronic warfare, but we may well, we may well be a little
12:50
bit more capable of But when it comes down to fighting forces, I noticed
12:54
the Army the other day was going back in the trench warfare. The thing
12:56
is we always lag as well. That's another thing. The The thing about
13:00
the military that I realized having spent twenty years there is we were reactive to
13:07
a lot of things, so it wasn't there was no real time for innovation
13:11
as such. That tended to come out of the boffins in London, but
13:13
there wasn't anything. It was all done in house on squadrons. And the
13:16
problem with being in the military is you have no time to think of anything
13:18
other than what you're doing. So if I spoke to any of my guys
13:22
still flying now about Russia, they would have one ATV on me because all
13:26
I do is read podcasts. I listened to things, you know what I
13:28
mean, very experienced people that know more about it than me. International relations
13:31
scholars guys like yourself, whatever, you have a great chat when you're in
13:35
the military. You don't have any capability whatsoever to do that. There's no
13:37
time, no time whatsoever. You're very good to doing that and very good
13:41
at doing that. But your opinion would be Russia a bad, America good
13:45
And that's almost like a good thing, Charles, to have that, because
13:48
you don't want people questioning things in the military. This is why I argue
13:50
against diversity in the military. I'm like, hang on a second. You
13:52
want everyone thinking the same, you know what I mean, Let's not start
13:56
mixing up some ideas as the wrong place for it. But so I push
13:58
it against that. But that's not the reason I push against him, many
14:01
other reasons. But I just think that you don't really have you don't really
14:05
have it thought through at all. You don't know what you're doing. There's
14:09
no end game in sight, there's no conclusion, there's no I was chatting
14:15
to a guy the other day that's a very arrogant man who is in intelligence,
14:18
telling me that he's got all worked out his plan. I said,
14:20
what is the endgame for this? He said, oh, it's all a
14:22
bit you know, hushash and I said, do you really know what it
14:24
is like? Have you got an endgame? Is it really breaking up Russia
14:28
in the fifteen independent? I mean, is that what you're really trying to
14:30
do? And if so, how do you control that? By the way,
14:31
because if Peterine's not there, you're gonna get something a lot worse,
14:33
and you're gonna get fifteen of these a lot worse people. You know what
14:35
I mean. It's not but of course you know, so I don't think
14:39
we know. I don't think we have for the capability. Oh my god,
14:41
there's a country we don't, absolutely not. We rely on America,
14:43
we rely on everyone else. And if you look at what's going to happen
14:46
to France when France goes in, you will see French deaths. There's no
14:48
two ways about it. This is all to do with losing control with the
14:52
African colonies. Is to do with the uranium. They're trying to get out
14:56
of well, they can't get out of now, and they're trying to feed
14:58
their their nuclear you know more. But as than me, of course,
15:01
about sixty three percent of France is nucleus like ludicrous like that. So it's
15:07
a lot of control and they're going in there now because the Russians are taken
15:09
over these African colonies. And also what happens when France gets attacked, which
15:15
will happen. Is that then a justification? But natively going because something's got
15:20
to justify it, because right now we're not justified. Charles, Oh,
15:22
that's the thing. There is no justification. So we're looking for something.
15:26
So in short, no, of course, no we're not. We haven't
15:26
got any capability whatsoever at the moment. I don't think really to work out
15:31
how this thing ends. Yeah, no, I mean that provocation is I
15:35
think exactly what people have been concerned about since this started. I mean,
15:37
it really is drones you mentioned, and I wanted to ask you about that
15:41
and now tell me how how much has the drone capability changed and indeed the
15:48
countermeasures to any drone capability and how does it affect the overall airspace? Okay,
15:56
I'm not an expert on drones literally what I've read, that's all.
15:58
When I was flying, I didn't have any connection with drones orsoever. I
16:02
don't want to speaking to your people pretending I'm a drone expert. You get
16:04
a lot of people doing that, well, I think you're fine with drones.
16:07
I've got one because I use it to look at the roof of my
16:10
house and stuff with all the tars are cracking, you know what I mean.
16:11
And then I send the report to a guy comes to charge lots and
16:14
money to fix it. Insofar as drones, I did fly with one guy,
16:17
actually, a very clever man came through MIT and he said he was
16:19
still the worst person at MIT. That's how clever this guy was. He
16:22
was absolutely phenomenal F sixteen pilot on exchange with us, and he went back
16:27
when he left us, he was training with us on this air, teaching
16:30
with me as an instructor. Went back to America. He was off the
16:33
command of an F sixteen squad and he turned it down to go into drones.
16:36
He said, no, the future is not these aeroplanes. The future
16:40
is this was going back now, Charles, it must have been going back
16:42
to twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen. That guy knew then that drones were the
16:48
future. And all us laugh at him, said go and fly F sixteen's
16:49
again. It'd be amazing. No, no, no, I know where
16:52
the future is and he's on them now, and I haven't spoken to him
16:55
since but he's obviously you know, this is all his kind of work.
16:57
It has rapidly changed the battlefielders two ways about it. If you start looking
17:00
at what they're doing two main battle tanks for a mavig pro or whatever it
17:04
is with the whole world of explode, I mean, it's it's completely changes
17:07
it. And this is where it comes down now to appreciating the electromagnetic spectrum
17:11
and how if we can control all these waves going through the air electronic warfare.
17:15
If we can control them, we can jam them. If we can
17:18
deny that permissive environment to the enemy, we can get inside their ood loup
17:22
things like this. Then obviously we stand a chance of winning. But I
17:26
feel personally, like I have done for ever since things started, that we
17:30
are on the back foot. We never really It's not that we didn't expect
17:34
it as such. I think we did. I just don't think that we
17:38
realized that we didn't. I didn't honestly believe that we were going to be
17:41
naive enough. I'll say wee because I don't include myself in this. Our
17:45
politicians were going to be naive enough to think that they stood a chance of
17:48
winning a conventional war with Russia on the Russian border. I don't know why
17:52
anyone would have thought that. And it's it's not even the amount of sacrificial
17:56
elements of it's not even that it's the at the end state. It's this
18:00
hybrid conflict. It's this these drones, as you say, it's the trench
18:04
warfare. It's the fact that Russia's got five kilometers of depth of trenches,
18:08
which is dug with the machinery. It did it within the first two months
18:11
of the war and knew what was happening, and we're expected to take that
18:14
ground back. No, it was never once that happened. Once a civil
18:17
war from twenty fourteen carried on, you know, and Russia went, hang
18:19
on a second, if you stop now, we'll average. It was going
18:22
to stop in January twenty three, wasn't it. If you remember, Putin
18:25
got together and he said, let's have a chat. You know, we
18:26
don't want one a buffer. We don't want you to be something in neutral
18:30
state. And it didn't. I think I don't, Yeah, I don't.
18:34
I think that. I think drones are one of the many aspects.
18:37
Not just that I think drones are there's many, many things in this that
18:41
we didn't really see and we can't really counter, and I don't think we
18:45
really have the appetite for it if you look at you know, the state
18:49
of British politics at the moment. Yeah, no, I think I think
18:52
you're right. I mean, I think unrealistic is probably the word that springs
18:55
to mind every time Grand Chap tapens his mouth, So that will that will
18:59
resonate, I think with the AD's just as a far you know, this
19:02
is all part of a much bigger picture which I think is completely misreported by
19:08
politicians and indeed the mainstream media. So I hope this doesn't sound like too
19:15
rudimentary a question, but I think it would be such useful context You just
19:19
describe the significance of the airspace, or rather control of the air in the
19:26
overall battle picture, and how that manifests in this day and age. What
19:34
are you saying, Well, no, I mean, just just an overall
19:40
description of control of the air. I mean, how does it work,
19:44
How does that fit with land and sea? How significant is it? You
19:48
know, in its entirety? I mean, I suppose specifically with reference to
19:52
what's going on in Russia and Ukraine at the moment, but I think for
19:56
a lot of people, they hear, you know, we hear stories about
19:59
pilots trained with his stories about new trains being brought. I mean, okay,
20:02
we've we've discussed trains, but I think that the thing that will never
20:06
come across from Westminster or intermediate at all, bit is what any of this
20:10
really meet. Yeah, yeah, well, how many military men do you
20:14
ever have now within that political sphere. I'm not saying you should, I'm
20:18
just saying it's useful to have. Yeah, control of the air well,
20:22
it's everything, isn't it. One of the thing about the British Army at
20:23
the moment is they haven't fought battle in the last one, going back to
20:26
what the Falklands now where they haven't had control of the air, so they
20:30
haven't been they haven't experienced anemy aircraft coming in and targeting them at all.
20:36
So the relationship between air and the Army really was one that was a bit
20:37
strange because the Army had never seen the opposite. The Army had always had
20:41
the Royal Air Force over the top, or the United States Air Force or
20:45
the Coalition Air Force, so it never felt that when it was digging in
20:48
or anything that anyone was going to put unless you twenty five over the top
20:51
and be rocketing them whilst they were trying to do their operations. It never
20:55
had it. It didn't have any experience of it. And until you have
20:57
that experience of it, you fail to appreciate the importance of control of the
21:00
year. I'm not saying it's a panacea. I'm saying it's one of many
21:03
aspects. You know, you did the control of the intelligence. The first
21:06
thing that happened in the Gulf War, I think this was ninety one,
21:08
was the night before the big push all the tornadoes went and everything else.
21:11
All the commanders of the surface to wear missile batteries and the triple A to
21:15
the anti aircraft batteries, they had a phone call go into them, so
21:18
they picked up their mobile phones and on the end of it was someone from
21:22
the CIAM I six and they said, we know where your kids go to
21:25
school. They knew the guy's name. We know you command this battery,
21:26
we know your kids go to school, we know the name of your kids,
21:29
we know where your wife goes to work. If you go to work
21:30
tomorrow, mate, if you go to work tomorrow in the morning, we're
21:33
going to kill your kids, we're going to kill your wife. We're gonna
21:36
come and find you. We're going to kill you as well. And then
21:37
the phone went dead, So something like seventy five percent of those commanders didn't
21:41
turn up for work in the morning, and therefore we were able to go
21:44
in. We're able to target those surface they missile systems. And this is
21:47
what I mean. It's not just a kinetic war of dropping bomb on head.
21:51
It's not just about that. A lot of it is that control,
21:53
that intelligence, that how do we get rid of these senior people? How
21:57
can we do do we know who these people are? So control of the
22:00
air as important as it might be, isn't something we have right now.
22:03
It's something that Russia is very good at. Because we went down the fighter
22:07
route. This is actually bomber, but there was a fighter, AARIONT as
22:08
well. Let's have fighters. Russia went, well, we're gonna have some
22:12
fighters, but we're also going to mainly have surface to a missile system so
22:15
we can saturate the airspace so anything coming into it we can target and shoot
22:18
that down. That's something Russia did very well. It's something that we've really
22:22
got a problem with because it's really hard to target those things with anything other
22:26
than special forces, So we need to have special forces on the ground.
22:29
Even when you do a special force on the ground, you still have military
22:32
guys protecting those sites because they're so important, and the mobile as well.
22:34
We don't always know where they are. This is one of the big problems
22:37
that we've got on the moment. We can't just put aircraft in to use
22:41
Harmer missiles against the radars that we don't really know where they are. We've
22:44
got to have other aircraft up there to triangulate positions, to have a low
22:48
down a battle picture, an electronic warfare picture of where the emissions are coming
22:52
out of. We can't build that picture necessarily unless we have aircraft in there
22:56
to build the picture and then other assets to target. So the coal needs
23:00
to be very big. This is why in Iraq it was a very big
23:03
coalition that went in there. We had to saturate the airspace first. We
23:06
had to make sure we're to control of it, and then we can fight
23:07
the ground battle. You do not want to be fighting a ground battle when
23:11
you don't have control of the air It's ridiculous thing to do. Everyone's going
23:14
to saturate, everyone is going to target you. You've got tanks, challenge
23:17
of tanks rolling across being whapped by SU twenty fives and all sorts of stuff.
23:21
I mean, it's hopeless if you don't have control of the air.
23:23
And we don't have control of the air, and now the other control.
23:26
What we don't have, of course, necessarily is these drones that are independently
23:30
targeting. Although very local. Of course, the drones tend to be within
23:33
a couple of kilometers of the operator, so that is a bit different.
23:37
So yeah, it's very important, and we don't really have it. In
23:41
order to have it, this is what I mean. You can't just put
23:42
up some F sixteen's in Ukraine. They need to be fully supported with tankers,
23:48
with airborne warning and control units, with electronic warfare platforms to tell them
23:52
where these servers and missile systems are and what happens when they get shot down.
23:56
It's like when the Leopard two tanks get hit. It's like when the
23:59
Challenge get hit. Who wants to buy a Challenger or a Leopard two where
24:02
you know it can get taken out by a drone? Do you want to
24:03
buy an F sixteen when you know it can get shot down over Ukraine.
24:07
I mean, are you really going to buy an Are we gonna give more
24:08
there? Trynic Warfair jamming capability as well. That's an entirely secret as well.
24:11
We don't want to have that stuff over what happens in the Russians get
24:15
it we cut. There's no way we can go and get it back.
24:17
If we have a ground picture and an air picture built together and we lose
24:19
an aircraft, we can saturate that. We can bomb our own aircraft.
24:22
We can get those things back. We can get the jammers back, we
24:25
can get the munitions back if we given to Ukraine as we can't. I
24:26
think they found some Starstreak missile shoulder launched missiles in Columbia. You know the
24:33
weapons we put into Ukraine all over the world. Now we knew it was
24:34
going to happen, of course, because the money's gone as well, isn't
24:37
it. So Yeah, the command and control of the air, the air
24:40
picture is incredibly important. I can't see how we're going to build up without
24:44
an absolute commitment from NATO to go in which I think I don't know what
24:49
they are. I don't know I'm so despondent of it at the moment,
24:52
Charles, to be fair, and I think a lot of us are.
24:55
I get attacked by a load of X colleagues all the time, and all
24:57
I say is, look, if you read this book, have you spoken
25:00
this guy, if you chatted to this guy, listen to this none of
25:03
it. They've listened to none of it. And I think that's what makes
25:04
it inherently dangerous, like almost they have too little knowledge. They think,
25:10
well, they haven't thought that. This is the danger that there is no
25:12
thinking going on, and it's almost makes it more dangerous. Then it's like
25:18
Finland joining NATO. It's more dangerous to do that than it was to remain
25:22
neutral, which is but they can't see it. So I don't know.
25:26
Maybe you've got an answer, Charles, maybe your reader's here, you've got
25:27
an answer. I'll certainly be much better in full No, Tim Davis,
25:32
thank you very much. Indeed,