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.
