Bears and stuff

[uk 75]

Must stop listening to Radio 4 on my phone on the bus. Lady from the Green Party has suggested that stopping Bears flying around corner could be done by EU negotiation or some such instead of more "anti aircraft missiles"- I think that we her phrase.
Got me thinking. Do we have any anti-aircraft missiles these days? Bloodhounds long gone.
Also, Bears seem pretty harmless. Presumably they are snooping with electronics like we do with our Boeings.

 

[TomS]

They are probably being used for ELINT collection, but the Tu-95MS Bear H is a cruise missile shooter as well. Imagine the US flying similar patrols with B-52s.

I am a bit surprised to see that there is no British long-range SAM (either Patriot or equivalent). SAMP/T using the same ASTER missiles as the Type 45 seems like a logical procurement.

 

[Grey Havoc]

France and Italy did offer to bring Great Britain on board what would much later become SAMP/T, via a joint feasibility study in the late 1980s. At the time however, GB was not only involved in the general NATO M-SAM (also known as MSAM) studies (in particular being a party to the August 1989 IEPG 1 year MSAM study MoU), she, together with Spain had as well begun preliminary work on a proposed system called Local Area Anti-Missile system [LAMS]. In the same year GB also announced an anti-tactical ballistic missile system called WOLVERINE. Unfortunately, the end of the Cold War and the 'Peace Dividend' soon put paid to LAMS and WOLVERINE, as well as to most of the M-SAM work. For example Germany dropped it's own Taktisches Luft-Verteidigungs-System (Tactical Air Defense System) [TLVS] program in favour of what had been an ongoing stopgap program, the US dominated Advanced Tactical PATRIOT, which later become MEADS. In the mid 1990s IIRC, there were actually plans to buy a few Patriot batteries, but if I'm not mistaken Tony Blair killed those on taking office.

In the late 1990s, there was talk of developing PAAMS into a land based version ironically called LAMS, but that also came to nothing.