Short sightedness on defence

India has short listed the Eurofighter Typhoon and the French Rafale, this is for a contract for 126 fighters worth between £7-£10 billion pounds. The one disadvantage that the Typhoon has in my opinion is that it is has no  carrier capability. Were as the Rafale has. Again this is the French thinking ahead as they did with the Jaguar aircraft that had both land and sea capabilities. BAe Systems say that they will work with the Indian aerospace industry to develop a "marinised" version something they were doing earlier on in the development programme but it did not materialised. If we had developed such a version we would not now be at a disadvantage in selling it. Also we would not need to have the JSF Lightning 2. these aircraft at a reported cost of £100 million each.This was or is a vertical take off and landing aircraft but there is a conventional concept that is cheaper, which we are now considering  with the new carriers that are now possible being modifies to take catapults and arrester hook retrieval  at a cost of another alleged £2billion, depending if we need a steam catapult or an electro magnetic propulsion system that would need to be developed with the Americans, just goes to show the incompetence of both the past government and people within the ministry of defence who have nothing but short sighted visions of the capabilities that the military will need over the coming decades. We were told that these new carriers could be used by our NATO allies but if there was no catapult system they could only be used by the Americans with their AV8 Harriers, the French haven't any VTOL aircraft. Even China and India are building carriers, whilst we scrapped ours and it will be another ten years before ours come into service if ever. This in my opinion just goes to show how incompetent the people at the top in this country are.