Quotulatiousness

March 25, 2011

Libya operations do not support UK’s recent defence decisions

Filed under: Africa, Britain, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:15

Lewis Page is doing an analysis of the current British involvement in Libya. He points out that many of the recent decisions by the British government are not being proven by the actual pattern of combat:

Recent combat operations by British and allied forces in Libya are beginning to tell us a lot: not so much about the future of Libya, which remains up for grabs, but about the tools one actually needs for fighting real-world wars against real-world enemy armed forces.

The vast bulk of our own armed forces are set up, equipped and focused on this type of mission — rather than the hugely more common one of battling guerillas and insurgents, as seen in Afghanistan — so the Libyan operations of the last week are very important to us at a time of shrinking budgets and worldwide turbulence. Libya is telling us how well the Coalition government did in its recent Strategic Defence and Security Review — and bluntly, it is showing that the Review was a fiasco.

Mr. Page has not been a fan of the Eurofighter, and sees the initial stages of the Libyan campaign as proving the investment is so much wasted money:

. . . highly advanced specialist air-to-air combat capability has not been necessary here. The RAF has rushed Eurofighter Typhoons to Italy — they were the first British aircraft to arrive there, in fact — but they are pure air-to-air planes at the moment (the RAF doesn’t expect to have them properly ready for use as bombers until 2018). The odds are that they will not fire a shot — and if they do it will be to swat down some rusty old MiG flown by a suicidal pilot. For this job, much cheaper fighters would have been more than adequate: say American F-18s or F-16s, or even our previous embarrassing Tornado F3, now retired.

So, point one: buying the Eurofighter remains a stupid idea on our part.

Canada’s F-18 aircraft have seen more combat in Libyan airspace than the RAF’s Eurofighters, because the F-18 has a ground-attack capability.

On the other hand, Mr. Page rejoiced at the overdue decision to scrap the Nimrod, but the ancient-but-terribly-expensive aircraft appear to have a valid role to play in Libya:

Point two: electronic warfare and AWACS planes are useful, even against the minor regimes who we might genuinely fight in the real world. The decision to keep both in the recent UK Defence Review was sensible (the Nimrod R1 Elint planes were marked for the bin — and have been temporarily been reprieved for duty in the Libyan situation — but replacement “Rivet Joint” aircraft are on order).

The use of the Tornado aircraft for very long range attacks seems like a waste of time and resources:

We are told in official announcements that some 112 Tomahawk cruise missiles were used in the initial strike at the weekend, launched from US and British warships and submarines off the Libyan coast. We are also told that “a number” of Storm Shadow shorter-ranged cruise missiles were launched from Tornado bombers. The Tornadoes had flown 3,000 miles from Kent Norfolk to do so, requiring the aid of repeated air-to-air refuelling assistance both on the way out and on the way back.

We can be pretty sure what the unspecified number of Storm Shadows was, as the Tornado can carry only one Storm Shadow into combat and we are told that a total of four Tornadoes have been assigned to Operation ELLAMY, the British contribution to the Libyan fighting. Some accounts suggest that in fact only three Storm Shadows were fired in the initial long-range Tornado raid.

[. . .]

Our lesson from a shooting war against a national air force — the first we have fought since 1982 — is that you don’t suppress enemy air defences of the sort you actually meet in the real world with deep penetration bombers and clever air-launched weapons (far less with stealth planes). You do it with AWACS and Elint planes and Tomahawks launched from the sea.

And speaking of the sea . . . what about the Royal Navy contribution to the Libya campaign?

Don’t we just wish we had a carrier off Libya now? Shame we scrapped ours just months ago. Nice work, Mr Cameron

There can be little doubt that the Harrier would also have been better for Libya. The Harrier fleet actually had more aircraft modernised to drop the latest smart weaponry — it was a superior battlefield strike plane — and it was cheaper to run. Best of all, it could operate from our also-recently-axed pocket aircraft carriers right off the coast and thus reach the theatre of action in minutes rather than hours. France and the USA both have carriers operating off the Libyan coast right now, but our foolish decisions in the recent review have left us on the sidelines.

Mr. Page still thinks the Royal Navy got royally shafted by the RAF:

Point four: The decisions taken over many years to whittle down the Harrier force to the point where it was barely viable – and then finally axe it in the Review — were totally wrong. Instead the Tornado should have been scrapped. Our present-day fleet of more than 130 of these cripplingly expensive-to-run, slow, lumbering low-altitude jets, assisted by similarly costly tanker planes, has offered us an utterly pathetic capability to deliver three or four dodgy missiles into Libya and a minimalist air support capability thereafter.

Even by the time of the Review, when the Harrier fleet was down to an almost unviable 44 jets, it would have made more sense to keep them, scrap the Tornado and buy or lease some nice cheap F-18s from America to bulk up our strike forces somewhat. The RAF should be ashamed of itself for manipulating the Prime Minister into keeping Tornado; heads should roll.

Is it too late to save the Ark Royal and Invincible? Yes:

To make the situation even more pathetic:

Once, this would have been a sight to strike fear into the hearts of any enemy fleet, a vivid portrait of the naval clout of this island nation.

But, today, these are two ghost ships. This depressing photograph taken yesterday is merely a reminder of the current state of the Royal Navy. Until recently, Britain had three aircraft carriers. The latest round of defence cuts means we have just one carrier — HMS Illustrious — and no planes on board. It only does choppers these days.

Invincible is bound for the Middle East. But Colonel Gaddafi need have no fears about this gallant old warhorse. In a few days’ time she will be off the coast of Libya but she won’t be stopping. She’ll be pressing straight on for Turkey where she is due to be cut up — or ‘recycled’ as an MoD spokesman insisted yesterday.

Back to Mr. Page’s conclusions (not that there should be any surprises based on the examples I’ve included):

Summing up, the lesson of Libya is that the recent Defence Review was, indeed, a dismal failure. RAF empire-preservation saddled us with the useless Tornado at the cost of our carrier capability. The army insisted on preserving pointless tanks and big guns and as a result we are not pulling our weight in Helmand — a war we more or less unilaterally started in 2005 — and we have no option to intervene on the ground in Libya seriously.

The navy made no real effort to help matters. It might have managed to preserve a carrier capability by making concessions on its pointless frigate flotilla, but this it refused to do.

[. . .]

But the chance to change things is not gone yet. So badly fudged were the Strategic Defence and Security Review’s figures that more reorganisation remains on the cards; in effect, a review of the Review is now very likely. The chance is still there to scrap the cripplingly expensive Tornado and Eurofighter altogether and replace them with cheap, excellent F-18s — so getting our carrier capability back in just a few years, as well. When the F-35C actually becomes affordable at last around 2025 we can buy some — by that point its Stealth and other new technologies might actually be becoming relevant for wars that might really happen, along the lines of Libya.

Polling numbers

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:54

The poll numbers will change over the course of the election as muck is raked, accusations are hurled, and reputations are assailed (assuming that the Conservative government is defeated in Parliament later today). The last poll was conducted by IPSOS for Global News:

I’ll try to update this chart as the polls are published. I doubt that the 19% lead the Tories had yesterday will hold up for the first few days of the election campaign, but anything is possible.

Update: As expected, the government has fallen, so the election is on. Tasha Kheiriddin congratulates the media on their success:

And they’re off. In newsrooms across the country, journalists are tossing their Team 2012 shirts on the trash heap, while the Team 2011 folks are collecting their $5 bets. Sure, they could have cashed in on Tuesday, but it’s always prudent to wait for the chickens to actually hatch. Or, in this case, come home to roost. After stoking election fever for months, the media now get to feast on the fruits of their labors: bad plane food, no sleep, and crazy deadlines.

CNN: US government finance requires both spending cuts and tax increases

Filed under: Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:26

Jeanne Sahadi at CNN Money insists that the government can’t control the ballooning debt situation by spending cuts alone:

If lawmakers wanted to permanently freeze the debt held by the public at the today’s level — 62% of GDP — they would need to immediately cut spending by 35% or about $1.2 trillion, according to the Government Accountability Office. And those cuts would need to be permanent from hereon out.

How hard would that be?

Consider that in 2010, all of discretionary spending — including defense — totaled $1.35 trillion. In other words, to do deficit reduction all on the spending side means “you have to cut into the real meat,” said Roberton Williams, senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center.

Consider, too, how much fun lawmakers are having right now trying to negotiate spending cuts for this year alone. Their working range: Between $10 billion and $61 billion.

And here’s the kicker: Even permanently cutting $1.2 trillion today wouldn’t be the end of the story. Deficit hawks note that public debt at 60% is still well above the country’s historical average — which is below 40%. So more cutting would need to occur in subsequent decades.

The joker in the pack is that interest rates at the moment are incredibly low by historical standards. This is an aberration, not the “new normal”, and won’t last. If the government fails to take serious steps to reduce the debt now, it’s vanishingly unlikely that they’ll be able to avoid a default. It’s like running up a huge debt on a credit card with a low introductory interest rate: once the low interest period is over, the debt becomes payable at the higher interest rate. Pretending that tomorrow will never come is never a good planning strategy.

French stereotypes

Filed under: Europe, France, Health, History, Humour, WW2 — Nicholas @ 09:09

Even if we have to stop calling them “Cheese-eating surrender monkeys”1, we still have all the other stereotypes to fall back on:

The myth of the great Gallic unwashed seems to have travelled back to the US after the second world war with GIs shocked to discover that a still largely rural population with scant access to hot and cold running water should, after four years of German occupation, not always consider irreproachable personal hygiene an overriding priority.

It is, unfortunately, sustained by the odd wayward statistic. According to one 1998 survey only 47% of French people take a daily bath or shower, against 80% of Dutch and Danes. Worse, France’s own health education council calculated that if those 47% were being honest, the country’s annual soap consumption should be 2.2lb a head, whereas it happened to be 1.3lb.

Another 1998 report found that only 60% of French men and 75% of French women pulled on clean underwear every morning.

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