Quotulatiousness

October 23, 2009

Corruption quadruples the price of military transport aircraft

Filed under: Africa, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:33

South Africa has a serious corruption problem with their yet-to-be delivered A400M military transport planes:

Yet another corruption case in South Africa. This time, members of parliament are asking why the military is suddenly paying $809 million each for eight A400M four engine transports. The price other nations are paying for the aircraft are under $200 million each. The price South Africa agreed to pay, in 2005, was about $279 million, and included training, maintenance support and some spare parts. It is believed that the price went up so that government officials could siphon off large bribes. Meanwhile, the A400M aircraft is four years behind schedule, and has not flown yet. It was originally to start deliveries to European customers this year. South Africa is supposed to begin getting its A400Ms in seven years. South Africa has already paid $400 million for its A400Ms, and more progress payments will soon be due.

Such blatant corruption is not new in South Africa, but lately the crooks have been winning. Last year, the South African parliament passed a law disbanding an elite government investigation unit nicknamed the “Scorpions.” Investigations by this unit had led to dozens of corruption prosecutions of government officials. That’s why the unit is being dismantled. Corruption is a major problem throughout Africa, and many nations are now setting up units like the Scorpions, after having realized that corruption was the major cause of the poverty and civil wars that afflict most Africans.

October 9, 2009

Army beats Navy and Airforce

Filed under: Britain, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:11

Following up on yesterday’s post about the British Ministry of Defence directive to find savings to support the ongoing (primarily army) efforts in Afghanistan, Strategy Page calls the winner:

British Army Sinks The Navy And Grounds The Air Force

After several months of debate, the British Royal Navy and Royal Air Force have been ordered to cut back on spending, so that money and resources may be used to support army operations in Afghanistan. Among other things, the army has been pointing out that only ten percent of spending on new equipment goes to the army (based on actual and planned spending between 2003-18). This, despite the fact that it’s the army that is doing most of the fighting during this period. Although the army recently pulled out of Iraq (where it had been since 2003), it is still in Afghanistan, and more troops are headed there. The Royal Navy and Royal Air Force have not been fully involved in a major operation since the Falklands in 1982, although they have been involved in several more limited efforts. The point is that they face nothing like what the army is dealing with in Afghanistan.

The British armed forces have 191,000 troops on active service. Of those, 38,000 are in the Royal Navy, 109,000 in the Army, 41,000 in the Royal Air Force, and the rest in joint staffs and operations. The annual defense budget is about $58 billion.

Those aircraft carriers are looking less and less likely to be ever in service . . .

October 8, 2009

British military establishment facing cuts under next government?

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:36

It would be too glib of me to suggest that the Ministry’s preferred way to respond to the Conservative opposition’s call “to cut MoD costs by 25%” would be to abandon the Royal Navy (or ground the Royal Air Force), but it’s hard to imagine them voluntarily cutting their own numbers:

Shadow defence secretary Liam Fox is expected to tell the party’s conference: “Some things will have to change and believe me, they will.”

The BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg said Mr Fox had asked for savings in bureaucracy – the MoD has 85,000 civil servants.

The Tories have pledged to cut overall Whitehall budgets by a third.

In his speech to party members in Manchester, Dr Fox will accuse Labour of having creating “a black hole” in defence budgets, which are affecting the war in Afghanistan and threatening to create an “on-going defence crisis for years to come”.

Of course, there’s nothing new about the administrative “tail” of the armed forces growing . . . C. Northcote Parkinson documented the phenomenon (PDF) back in 1955:

The accompanying table is derived from Admiralty statistics for 1914 and 1928. The criticism voiced at the time centered on the comparison between the sharp fall in numbers of those available for fighting and the sharp rise in those available only for administration, the creation, it was said, of “a magnificent Navy on land.” But that
comparison is not to the present purpose. What we have to note is that the 2,000 Admiralty officials of 1914 had become the 3,569 of 1928; and that this growth was unrelated to any possible increase in their work. The Navy during that period had diminished, in point of fact, by a third in men and two-thirds in ships. Nor, from 1922 onwards, was its strength even expected to increase, for its total of ships (unlike its total of officials) was limited by the Washington Naval Agreement of that year. Yet in these circumstances we had a 78.45 percent increase in Admiralty officials over a period of fourteen years; an average increase of 5.6 percent a year on the earlier total. In fact, as we shall see, the rate of increase was not as regular as that. All we have to consider, at this stage, is the percentage rise over a given period.

Parkinson_Admiralty_Statistics

September 14, 2009

The RAF sets a record, but not a good one

Filed under: Britain, Military — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:54

The RAF‘s most expensive aircraft had just made its first flight:

The Nimrod MRA4 programme was initiated back in 1996 by TV presenter, one-time director of BAE Systems and former New Statesman theatre critic Michael Portillo, who was defence minister at the time. Under the original deal, BAE Systems would be paid a “fixed price” of £2.2bn to rebuild, rearm and upgrade the RAF’s fleet of 21 Nimrod MR2s, the last De Havilland Comet airframes left flying in the world, to the point where they would effectively be new aircraft. This would have meant a cost of just over £100m per plane. The project was then known as “Nimrod 2000”, rather optimistically as it turned out.

As time went by it became clear that the price was not fixed, and that “2000” wasn’t a good name for the project at all: it was re-dubbed Nimrod MRA4. BAE Systems has just announced that the first flight of a production-standard MRA4 took place last week, though the aircraft is not yet ready for handing over to the RAF — that will probably take place next year. Then there will be more delay before the type can be declared operationally capable.

Meanwhile the MoD now estimates the programme’s overall price tag as £3.6bn, an increase of more than two-thirds. In fact the situation is much worse than this, as the number of planes has had to be slashed to prevent even worse cost overruns. The RAF will now receive just 9 aircraft rather than 21.

As a result the cost per plane has actually quadrupled: each MRA4 will now have cost the taxpayers a cool £400m, better than $660m at current rates.

On a pure economic level, this is quite a price increase, but it’s typical of military equipment contracts: the very small number of items means that there are no economies of scale to be reaped, and all the design, test, and administration costs must be recouped over a much shorter production run. It still looks very bad . . . unless you happen to be in opposition right now, in which case it’s a great campaign talking point.

September 9, 2009

A plethora of Billy Bishop airports

Filed under: Cancon, History, WW1 — Tags: — Nicholas @ 12:53

Publius reports on an attempt by Toronto to steal away the name of Owen Sound’s most famous warrior:

The small regional airport was originally named after George VI. Publius’ humble suggestion would be to change it back to its original name. Modern Canadians can’t tell the difference between George VI and George III, so that’s probably a no go. The choice of Billy Bishop, one of the leading Allied fighter pilots of World War One, as a namesake is an inspired one.

So inspired I was shocked by it. Billy Bishop is very Old Canada, pre-1960s. Bishop didn’t engage in peacekeeping and we’re fairly certain he was a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. He was never discriminated against, except when British officers made fun of him for being Canadian. The British used to do that a lot back then. We just returned the favour by making fun of them. Perhaps Bishop could have filed a human rights complaint, had such things existed back then.

Billy Bishop was something modern Canada has half forgotten. An ordinary man with extraordinary skill and courage from small town Canada. He was one of the very best in the world at doing a very dangerous, very new and very important job. Here was a Canadian who was, in the current phrasing, completely world class.

August 27, 2009

The only Canadian conspiracy theory

Filed under: Cancon, Military, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:29

American conspiracy enthusiasts have plenty to choose from, but their Canadian confreres don’t have much . . . but they do have the Avro Arrow controversy:

InnovationCanada.ca spoke with Campagna 50 years after the only examples of Canada’s premier jet fighter were cut into pieces.

InnovationCanada.ca (IC): What would most Canadians be shocked to find out about the Arrow, 50 years after its demise?

Palmiro Campagna (PC): Most people don’t know that the order to destroy the Arrow did not come from Prime Minister John Diefenbaker. One theory was that Diefenbaker decided to cancel as this was a Liberal project and he had problems with A.V. Roe president Crawford Gordon. But the reports I had declassified showed that was clearly not the case.

The decision to cut the Arrows into scrap was blamed on Diefenbaker as an act of vengeance, but it was actually an act of national security. The Arrow was an advanced piece of military technology, and the Canadian government didn’t want the test planes to go to a Crown disposal group that would be allowed to auction them off to anyone in the world.

I’ve written a little bit about the Arrow controversy back in 2004:

I hate to sound like a killjoy, but everything I’ve read about the AVRO Arrow says that, while Dief was widely viewed as an idiot for destroying the . . . finished planes, it would never have been a viable military export for Canada. The plane was great, there seems to be no question about that, but it was too expensive for the RCAF to be the only purchaser, and neither the United States nor the United Kingdom was willing (at that time) to buy from “foreign” suppliers. With no market for the jet, regardless of its superior flying and combat qualities, there was little point in embarking on full production.

Also, given the degree of penetration by Soviet spies, the Canadian government took the easiest option in destroying the prototypes. That doesn’t make it any less tragic if you’re a fan, but it does put it into some kind of perspective, I hope.

August 19, 2009

24th Air Force now activated

Filed under: Military, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:39

The US Air Force has officially activated the 24th Air Force, consisting of the 688th Information Operations Wing and the 67th Network Warfare Wing:

According to Air Force Space Command, under which the new cyber force comes, the 688th will be “exploring, developing, applying and transitioning counter information technology, strategy, tactics and data to control the information battle space”. The unit was formerly known as the Air Force Information Operations Center, and will continue to function as an “information operations centre of excellence”.

The 67th, by contrast, seems to be a more offensive unit. It will “execute computer network exploitation and attack” as required, and when not doing that will conduct “electronic systems security assessments” for US military units and facilities.

August 6, 2009

More threats to Royal Navy’s carrier plans

Filed under: Britain, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:03

An interesting report in The Register discussing the possibility of abandoning the planned STOVL variant of the F-35 and switching to the more traditional catapult-launch and tailhook-landing variant being developed for the US Navy:

The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) is set to make a major change to the design of the new aircraft carriers for the Royal Navy, according to a newspaper report. It’s suggested that the ships will now be equipped with catapults and arrester wires, allowing them to operate normal carrier aircraft rather than the complex, expensive jump-jets which had been planned.

According to the Daily Telegraph today “the MoD has indicated that it will drop the jump-jet… The Daily Telegraph has learnt from senior defence officials that an announcement is due this autumn.”

There would definitely be advantages to going with a more traditional aircraft: less mechanical complexity, greater weapons-carrying capability, and (probably most important in the MoD) lower per-aircraft costs. It’s not a slam-dunk decision, however:

Catapults and arrester gear aren’t a significant expense in themselves, but current catapults are powered by steam from the ship’s engines. The planned new Royal Navy ships will be propelled by gas turbines, however, and so have no steam (US and French carriers use nuclear propulsion, which can easily furnish steam from their associated turbines).

Adding powerful auxiliary steam boilers for catapults or upgrading the ships to nuclear propulsion would significantly increase their cost. There is an alternative option, the use of electrically-powered catapults, but these don’t yet exist. They are being developed in the States for the next US carrier, but as a new technology there is naturally some risk that they won’t pan out, or may be subject to delays and cost increases.

Of course, there’s always the risk that the MoD, under pressure from the government of the day would cancel the ships altogether, as a cost-saving measure (see this post from last year for further grim speculation on that topic).

China soon to be capable of settling the “Taiwan question”?

Filed under: China, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:37

According to a recent report from RAND Corporation, unlike the last time they ran the simulation (in 2000), their current projections have the Chinese able to win an air battle over Taiwan:

In 2000, the influential think thank RAND Corporation crunched some numbers regarding a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan, and concluded that “any near-term Chinese attempt to invade Taiwan would likely be a very bloody affair with a significant probability of failure” — especially if the U.S. raced to the island nation’s defense. But nine years later, a new, much-updated edition of the RAND study found that China’s improved air and missile forces “represent clear and impending dangers to the defense of Taiwan,” whether or not the U.S. is involved.

“A credible case can be made that the air war for Taiwan could essentially be over before much of the Blue [American and allied] air force has even fired a shot,” the monograph notes.

I’m not sure if this comment was intended to forestall the cancellation of the last part of the F-22 order, or if it’s a marker for a future “We told you so” debate:

It’s a potentially controversial assertion — and one that might have fueled the (now-resolved) debate over whether the U.S. Air Force should buy more F-22s. RAND found that F-22s flying from the relative safety of Guam could be surprisingly effective in blunting a Chinese air assault.

Remember that the air battle would only be part of the military equation . . . fighters and bombers still can’t overcome ground forces by themselves. A seaborne invasion would still be necessary, and the PLAN does not (yet) have sufficient lift tonnage to ensure a chance of success. Amphibious attacks are the hardest to accomplish (despite the Allied string of successes from 1942 to 1951), and always depend on both command of the air and command of the sea. China could, according to RAND’s latest study, win the air battle but still does not have the necessary preponderance of force to win control of the sea.

But the century is yet young . . .

H/T to Jon for the link.

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