French Arms Exports

Australia wont like that... I suspect the French lowered the price or made offers to sweeten the deal to make sure it went through perhaps?

They can keep adding zeros to the cheque for all they want - there's no money in the account.

Any claims of reinvestments in military contracts are always bullshit. They never do these offsets. Going for anything other than lowest price is always a scam.

The problem with going for the lowest price is that they will just lie... F-35s dropped in price to 80 million an airframe... but only because that is all you got... an airframe... without the 30 million dollar engine to make it an aircraft.

Of course the French are no innocents they entered an aircraft into a 10 billion dollar programme they had no intention to sell for 10 billion.

8.4 billion for 36 of the 126 required is cheating too, but India had its eyes open and made that choice so you can't really blame anyone but India for that one.

Is anyone going to make a chess joke?

Indonesia should have waited 5 years and then make their decision to checkmate the west...

US threats are only effective while the Indonesian economy is dependent on US trade. If Russia and her allies can replace the US in trade terms, perhaps offering better conditions, Indonesia might be freed to make decisions for its own security rather than giving in to US bullying and threats.

Sounds cheap but it is not because they are turning down a 90 billion dollar deal for modern capable SSKs so they can design their own SSNs which is going to make two times the 90 billion Australian dollars for those SSKs look cheap.

But SSKs lack the endurance to sail up to Chinese waters and harrass the Chinese navy for a month or two at a time, so SSKs are just not good enough for US interests in the region so they have to turn down the French offer and go with a joint American UK design... I guess the UK bought in to the programme by deciding to spend big money upgrading Trident at a time when their healthcare workers were put under enormous pressure and got no decent pay increases...

If only everyone who worked for the country was as well paid as politicians make sure they themselves are...