Quotulatiousness

December 15, 2009

RAF and Royal Navy facing further cuts

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:40

With the costs of maintaining British troops in Afghanistan still rising, the government is expected to announce further cuts to the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy today:

Some RAF bases face closure to pay for extra equipment for British forces in Afghanistan, a defence minister indicated this morning.

Quentin Davies said that it would be a “very good thing” to get by with fewer RAF bases if that was possible and that the Ministry of Defence wanted to spend its money with “maximum effect”.

[. . .]

Some Tornado and Harrier aircraft and small navy surface vessels are likely to face cuts. A number of RAF bases will be closed — including reportedly RAF Kinloss in Moray — and part of the sovereign base areas in Cyprus will be sold.

The two large aircraft carriers are expected to survive this particular cut, although it wouldn’t be surprising to see further delay introduced into their construction . . . even though stretching out delivery dates is an expensive way to increase short-term savings:

The announcement follows the publication of a report from the National Audit Office saying the gap between the cost of planned weapons projects and what the MoD can actually afford could be as much as £36bn.

The gap would have been larger had the ministry not delayed a number of projects, such as the construction of two large aircraft carriers, the Queen Elizabeth and the Prince of Wales, the NAO reports.

However, the decision to delay the carrier project to save £450m over the next four years will increase costs by £1.12bn over later years — a net increase of £674m, the NAO says.

The MoD has also decided to reduce an order of Lynx Wildcats from 80 to 62 helicopters, saving £194m but reducing planned flying hours by a third. The report says that last year the price for the 15 biggest military schemes rose by £1.2bn, £733m of which was the result of delays designed to save money in the short term.

Update: Believe it or not, there’s actually some sense to the government’s announced changes:

The headlining move comes with the announcement, widely anticipated, that the British fleet of US-made Chinook heavy-lift helicopters is to increase from 48 to 70 aircraft, with initial deliveries of ten new choppers arriving by 2013. The Chinook is the only helicopter in widespread Western service with enough spare lift to operate with any freedom in Afghanistan’s heat and high altitudes, and the new copters will be extremely welcome among British forces there.

It is also expected that another Boeing C-17 heavy transport plane will be ordered to join the existing UK fleet of 5, which are regarded as crucial to sustaining the “air bridge” logistic link between Blighty and its troops in Afghanistan.

These short-term improvements will be paid for not by any budget increase, but by reducing the active forces of Tornado bombers and Harrier close-support jets, and early retirement for much of the existing fleet of antique Nimrod MR2 maritime patrol aircraft. These moves will allow closure or mothballing of some of the RAF’s 45+ UK stations, with associated further job losses and savings.

They’ve also announced the retirement of the Sea King helicopter from active service, with the existing inventory of Merlin HC3 moving from the RAF to RN service (including whatever refitting will be necessary to “maricise” them for full-time service with the fleet).

Overall, the changes make a good deal of sense . . . what a surprise.

November 17, 2009

India to purchase “spare” British carrier?

Filed under: Britain, India, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 18:23

Ah, it must be a nightmare to be in the Royal Navy’s forward planning department these days. First, they gave up half the fleet now in exchange for guarantees that they’d get two new aircraft carriers in the near future. Then it became known that the government was considering equipping only one of the new ships as an aircraft carrier and converting the second to a helicopter carrier. Now, India’s growing navy appears to have a strong interest in taking one of those under-construction vessels off the Royal Navy’s hands. You can almost hear the gleeful cackling from the Brown government’s financial whizzes:

Yet another scheme by the MoD for cutting costs on the Royal Navy’s new aircraft carriers has surfaced in the media, with claims now being aired that one of the two ships might be sold to India.

The Guardian reports that India “has recently lodged a firm expression of interest to buy one of the two state-of-the-art 65,000 tonne carriers” and that an unnamed “defence source” has told the paper’s Tim Webb that “selling a carrier is one very serious option”.

As Webb is the Graun’s industrial editor, and glovepuppeting of biz correspondents by big companies is the most common way for such stories to appear, we can probably take it that the tale emanates from someone in the industrial consortium building the ships, led by BAE Systems. This is the more so as the article repeatedly states that contract penalties would make it impossibly expensive for the government to cancel one or both of the ships, which is probably the main message that Webb’s industry informant was trying to push.

F-35B to be too hot to handle?

Filed under: Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 16:59

Well, handling isn’t really the issue . . . it’s landing where there’s some strong concern for US Navy carrier captains:

It’s now official. The new generation of high-tech hovering aircraft — namely the famous V-22 “Osprey” tiltrotor and the upcoming F-35B supersonic stealth jump-jet — have an unforeseen flaw. Their exhaust downwash is so hot as to melt the flight decks of US warships, leading Pentagon boffins to look into refrigerated landing pads.

[. . .]

The jarheads* will want to operate their new machines from their existing helicopter-carrier amphibious assault vessels, which can’t practically be torn apart and refitted with massively reinforced upper decks as this would be likely to make them capsize. Similarly it would be extremely difficult to refrigerate the whole deck from beneath.

Hence the Marines would like someone to invent “a system that can be installed on top of the existing decks”, capable of resisting the hot breath of the F-35B and less than one inch thick. It should also, of course, be tough enough not to suffer any damage from the aircraft landing on it. This miracle fridge-sheet assembly should be covered with “thermally stable non-skid” finish — this latter perhaps incorporating “amorphous metal coatings”.

October 26, 2009

An alternative spending plan for Britain’s MoD

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:16

Lewis Page looks at the Ministry of Defence and comes up with innovative ways to both save money and increase military capabilities:

Under the plan as laid out in the Times, the Ministry of Defence would still buy the two planned new carriers, to be dubbed HMS Queen Elizabeth and Prince of Wales. However the Prince of Wales would not be operated as a strike carrier with a force of jets; instead she would be a “commando carrier”, a floating forward-mounting airbase full of marines, helicopters and drones. This would mean no need to replace HMS Ocean, the navy’s current helicopters’n’marines ship — which would, according to the Thunderer, cost £600m in the 20-teens. (That seems pretty steep as Ocean herself only cost £150m in the mid ’90s).

This is the same story I linked to yesterday, although I said I suspected that the MoD had probably decided that their best plan was to scrap the carriers altogether. Part of the problem is that the Royal Navy can’t depend on the Royal Air Force to join with them in the larger purchase of aircraft:

It has long been known that the RAF doesn’t want to replace its own Harrier force — it would rather spend that money upgrading as many of its Eurofighter Typhoons as it can. The horrifyingly expensive Typhoon was designed as a pure air-to-air fighter, and at the moment it mostly still is — though a few RAF ones have been given an “austere” bombing capability.

The RAF would like to rebuild and re-equip as many of its largely irrelevant Typhoons as possible, giving them such things as trendy electronically-scanned radars and air-launched cruise missiles of various sorts. This would, perhaps, enable the Typhoon force to tackle tough enemy air-defence networks of the sort possessed by nations such as Iran and Russia.

There’s another over-priced item on the MoD budget that could be cut without seriously impacting military capabilities:

But there are many better ways to cut money from the MoD than crippling our new carrier force. To give just one example, our new fleet of refurbished De Havilland Comet subhunters (sorry, “Nimrod MRA4s”) will cost at least £700m a year to operate. If we put the whole Nimrod force on the scrapheap for which they are so long overdue right now, by the year 2019 we will have saved the £7bn needed to buy the missing eighty-odd JSFs for our second carrier — and the Prince of Wales isn’t actually going to be afloat much before then, so that’s not a problem.

[. . .]

There are many, many other such stories. We could buy cheap Sky Warrior auto-drones off the shelf rather than expensive Watchkeepers. We could equip the carriers properly and so buy cheaper F-35 C tailhook planes rather than pricey B-model jumpjets — this would save money straight off, and save a fortune on the vital carrier radar planes. Indeed, we could buy much cheaper Super Hornets to begin with, if we wanted to save a lot of cash. We could bin the expensive, feeble A400M transport and buy nice cheap C-17s instead. Rather than upgrading squadrons of Eurofighters into superbombers at a cost of billions we could buy a force of vastly more cost-effective turboprop strike planes to back our troops in Afghanistan. The list goes on.

I rather agree about the A400M . . . although Britain isn’t paying as much as South Africa for their planes.

Related: Strategy Page looks at the costs involved in refitting current USN aircraft carriers, and in designing and building the next generation of CVNs.

October 25, 2009

Royal Navy carrier plans: going, going . . .

Filed under: Britain, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 20:34

A report in The Guardian walks a bit further down the road to the increasingly likely end of aircraft carrier operations in the Royal Navy:

Defence chiefs are considering scrapping plans to have two large aircraft carriers equipped with fast jets, a move that could save billions of pounds, Whitehall officials said today.

The idea would be to have just one carrier holding US-made joint strike fighters, with the second, more basic, ship, being used only as a platform for helicopters and possibly unmanned drones equipped with missiles and cameras.

The two proposed carriers, the Queen Elizabeth, due to go into service in 2016, and the Prince of Wales, to follow in 2018, are already running £1bn over budget. The original estimated cost was £3.9bn.

Consideration is being given to cutting the number of joint strike fighters to be flown from the carriers, from 138 to about 50, saving more than £7bn.

The head of the Royal Navy last month conceded that the decision to build two large aircraft carriers could be overturned. Admiral Sir Mark Stanhope said that though contracts had been signed to build the carriers, next year’s defence review could cause those plans to change.

Personally, I suspect that the final decision to cancel the carriers has already been taken, the government is just waiting for an opportune moment to make the announcement. Given that the rest of the fleet has been shrinking for years, eliminating the two carriers would allow the government to “save” an even-more-reduced Royal Navy from further cuts . . . until next budget period.

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).

July 29, 2009

Another lost WW2 combat aircraft discovered

Filed under: History, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 20:28

This time it’s a US Navy carrier plane:

On May 28, 1945, the SB2C-4 Helldiver was on a practice bombing run from a nearby aircraft carrier. The crew members survived the emergency landing.

At the time, the Navy opted not to recover the plane.

Yesterday, Raia said she couldn’t comment on how long it will take Navy officials to decide whether to salvage the plane. Typically, the Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, Fla., plays a major role in the evaluation process.

One of the pilots is believed to be 90 years old and living in Michigan, but the Navy hasn’t provided his name.

“Wouldn’t that be something to fly him out here and have him standing on the shoreline when they lift the plane out?” Manville said.

That’d be cool . . . as long as they don’t make him pay for the recovery of the plane.

July 24, 2009

Photo tour of the USS Hornet

Filed under: History, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:06

I’ve been onboard several retired battleships, but so far I’ve not managed to get onto an aircraft carrier. This will have to do for the time being:

The USS Hornet was on hand 40 years ago to pick up the Apollo 11 astronauts after their Columbia Command Module splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on July 24, 1969.

Today, the aircraft carrier is preserved as a museum in Alameda, California. Its main deck is littered with historic warplanes and space artifacts including an Apollo command module and Mobile Quarantine Facility from subsequent missions, pictured below. The first footsteps the Apollo 11 crew took on Earth after walking on the moon are traced on the deck.

USS Hornet CIC

USS Hornet CIC

Above: The USS Hornet’s Crisis Information Center is pictured. While engaged in active warfare, crewmembers would stand behind transparent, hanging boards and write information backwards to keep from getting in the way of the officers who needed to read it.

I think it was actually the “Combat” Information Center, but I could be mistaken. Lots of cool images, but I’d like to see more . . .

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