It's about as valid - the French and Italians never intended to buy the numbers you quote and only ever committed to the numbers they actually bought - that's the reason the UK pulled out of the Horizon project -- the French and Italian naval forces wanted workshares that were disproportionate to the intended buy (the UK were looking to buy more than the combined total of the Franco-Italian purchase but the Italians and French wanted workshares based on their maximum intended buy.

You claim they intend to tear out Aster-15 from the Italian carrier but maintain they're cancelling an entirHorizon Project history...e frigate class despite the fact that (as you suggest) it'd be very easy to install ESSM) - these seem to be competing views, and I suspect neither are referenced or sourced. Please provide links that are relevant. Why wouldn't the French or Italian Navies just do what the RN did and test it, discover it wanting and ask for a fix?

And yes of course the Compte would never *rely* on the Aster-15 - in the same sense that none of the CV-N's used by the USN rely on ESSM or RAM - they have other resources that are first in line. That's got nothing to do with their expectation that any particular system will work however.

All of this is by the by - can you provide any links or any official material to support your continued and extraordinary claims that the Aster missile doesn't work, or that most of it's tests are faked, and that somehow these fake tests have gone un-noticed by even the customers of foreign governments with no connection to the missile system itself.

I've cited what is usually held to be a reasonably authoritative link to the source material, Beedalls Navy Matters page, which, though no longer updated, is still accurate for the timescale involved. As many of the forum never check sources, I'll quote..

"The Horizon Project was mired in bureaucracy, with every decision requiring the approval of all the partners, and even the numbers to be built were constantly changing.  The Royal Navy needed 12 and stuck to that figure, whereas the French originally wanted  four and then cut that to two, while the Italians started at two, raised it to six and then finally reduced the requirement to two ships again. Given that it appeared that the UK was going to build three-quarters of all the ships and contribute 75% of the funding, the British also got increasingly annoyed with the Paris based French domination of the projects management, and the unfairly large French and Italian work shares proposed which right to end still assumed they would be buying 4 and 6 each."

 

And this was all before a single Naval test of Aster..

Ian