The review said the Canberra strike-reconnaissance aircraft needed replacement by 1970, while the Anglo-French variable-geometry aircraft would not arrive until the mid-1970s. It therefore proposed the smallest possible F-111A purchase and V-bombers released from the nuclear mission by Polaris. The financing story then narrowed: the White Paper described a loan to be repaid through foreign military sales, but Healey presented those sales as money that had to be secured before the purchase. TSR-2 had already been cancelled on cost grounds in 1965, leaving this bridge plan to cover the resulting capability gap. The F-111 was cancelled in 1968 and the Canberra remained in service, making the sequence an example of promised replacements disappearing while older equipment continued by necessity. The watch point shows how procurement can lose coherence when every successor is justified on progressively narrower fiscal assumptions.
Chapter · 1:28:04-1:35:02
TSR-2, F-111, and the shrinking strike-aircraft plan
The cancelled TSR-2 and proposed F-111 purchase expose how the White Paper tried to bridge a strike and reconnaissance gap on restrictive financial terms.