FighterControl

Maybe a singular small drop in the defence budget, however... £105k+ to take out a truck...

Shortage of strike aircraft!!!!!

The SDR put paid to that with the Harriers being sold to the Yanks and the Tonka Squadron's being disbanded and a lot of faith being put in DAVE

Surely the cost of the truck is irrelevent it's who or what were in the truck and what they were doing with it that matters. If the pickup had a soviet .50 cal or even a 23mm then any low level attack would have put the attacker at risk (small but real), a low level attack would also have risked warning the target. Using a PGM from attitude was the sensible option. I remember seeing some figures suggesting that an F16 costs round 35-40 thousand dollars an hour to run, I would expect a GR4 hourly cost to be about the same and a Typhoon's significantly higher.
I also thought it was the tranche 3 Typhoon's that were due to receive Brimstone. Is this going to be an expensive refit of tranche 2 aircraft, that will go then into storage once the tranche 3 aircraft are delivered two years later.
Losing the Harrier fleet prematurely, does seem an increasing poor decision.

The Tranche 1 jets are supposedly due to be retired starting from 2016, and either placed into storage, or sold onto other countries (well that was the plan anyway)....

They have never planned to store any tranche 2s and the fleet is supposed to be around 107 in total once they get round to delivering all the trance 3 jets

Tim S