IIRC the UK was trying to keep the family of weapons memorandum alive. The US wanted the FoW memorandum dead; but unless Britain broke it’s obligations the US needed Britain’s consent in order to dissolve it. So by continuing to meet its obligation Britain was able to extract concessions out of the US in exchange for cancelling the MOU (they were after a significant discount an the price of AMRAAMs if I remember correctly). Got to love geo-politics!
The FoW is also how the US ended up lumped with AIM-9X. They were banned from developing any new IR missiles, but the were allowed to upgrade existing ones, so had to go down the rout of fitting a new seeker and TVC module to AIM-9M.
Poor guys are gonna have to wait for block 3 for any real range improvements XD. Even then, i doubt it would have ASRAAM type range. Maybe better than IRIS-T, But not by much.
Thats even worse for the MICA tho, not that much more expensive compared to the other AAMs, yet its only really used on the Rafale/M2Ks, with india ditching the MICA for the ASRAAM on their jets entirely it seems…
Interesting, so the US and UK screwed eachother in a nice lose lose situation (with some advantages for both tbf), while everyone else went their own ways…
Oh it definitly will, except they wont try, they’ll just force ppl to buy the AIM-260 on anything they havent already allowed Meteor integration on already.
Thats if they dont invade Canada first or collapse under the economic idiocy of their current admin and populace.
Pretty sure they are doing/did the same thing with AH-64E and JAGM iirc?
Well it’s more that the US tried to screw everyone else over by locking them into AMRAAM purchases, and then refusing to buy a European SRAAM, and the UK saw that they had enough leverage left to at least benefit from the situation. There were other factors two like Hughes promising to move work to UK on other programmes.
The UK also believed that Hughes had a strong enough lobby in the US that they would be able to convince the US government to allow exports, as they would have a stake in the sales.
The AMRAAM-AXE would fit in the internal weapons bay, but since thatd be a cheap an effective miasile, the US aint integrating it despite it being developped and offered.
The US defense industrial complex is at best a jobs program, and at worst just a money printer for the owners and their friends.