The Royal Navy has had some of their new Type 45 destroyers in service for a while, but they’ve only just gotten around to arming them?
The Royal Navy’s new £1bn+ Type 45 destroyers, which have been in service for several years (the first is already on her second captain), have finally achieved a successful firing of their primary armament.
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) announced yesterday that HMS Dauntless, second of the class, has made the first firing from a Type 45 of the French-made Aster missiles with which the ships are armed. All previous trial shoots were carried out using a test barge at French facilities in the Mediterranean.
Well, at least they’re getting closer to being armed and equipped as they were originally supposed to be:
Each of the six Type 45s will now cost the taxpayer £1.1bn and counting. At the moment the only weapons they can use operationally are their basic 4.5-inch “Kryten” gun turrets and light 30mm autocannon, principally useful for bombarding undefended foreshore targets or shooting up pirate dhows and the like. This is armament barely above the gunboat level.
The big attraction to the (very expensive) PAAMS/Sea Viper missile system is its claimed ability to shoot down the latest generation of Russian supersonic anti-ship missiles . . . oh, and that it wasn’t the cheaper (and proven) American AEGIS system.
As it is, we will pay at least double and get none of these things. Our Type 45s will have no serious ability to strike targets ashore, and we will continue to have no capabilities against ballistic missiles. Most glaringly of all, the Type 45 will have no weapon other than its guns with which to fight enemy ships — Sea Viper has no surface-to-surface mode.
You might feel that preservation of British high-tech jobs in some way justifies such horrific overspending for such lamentable amounts of capability, but in fact the relatively few Brit workers concerned have now mostly been fired anyway.
We can’t poke too much fun at the Royal Navy over the jobs issue: most major purchases for the Canadian Forces are driven more by “spin-offs” and regional employment concerns than either cost or military efficacy.
I did like The Register‘s cheeky graphic:
