Eurofighter reductions strike

Britain to reduce Eurofighter purchase?
Date : 10th July 2002 Source : Daily Telegraph Author : PSO

An article in the Daily Telegraph is casting doubt on Britain’s purchase of Eurofighter. According to this report the British Chancellor of the Exchequer (Finance Minister) Gordon Brown and the Prime Minister Tony Blair are putting pressure on the Ministry of Defence to significantly reduce it’s $18B purchase of Typhoon. This would see a reduction in the second tranche order size and complete abandonment of the third tranche. This would probably result in just over half the currently planned 232 Typhoon’s being delivered to RAF service.

The article suggests this turn around in policy would guarantee funding of the two new ‘mini-super-carriers’ being proposed for the Royal Navy. These carriers, now expected to be upto 50,000 tonnes displacement (~1/2 the size of the massive U.S. Nimitz class super-carriers) are being estimated to cost £1B each.

In addition the Chancellor and PM have cited the ‘new terrorist’ threat and increase in conflicts involving specialised, mobile units as resulting in a reduced need for a state of the art fighter.

The MoD are denying the reports and insist that they plan no change to the order. However, the comprehensive spending review is due to be announced early next week. This will determine how much money the MoD (and other departments) have to play with over the next three years.

In practice it is unclear how the Government view the future of the RAF. On the one hand there seemed to be recognition of a need for increased ground attack units (demonstrated by Europe’s very poor showing in recent campaigns which have required U.S. aircraft be deployed in large numbers). However on the other hand they have reduced spending on the replacement project for the Tornado IDS, FOAS. In addition the RAF’s Harrier’s has been merged into a joint force with the Navy (with deployment of it and JSF likely to be solely destined for the future aircraft carriers) and now they appear to want to remove entirely the Eurofighter tranche intended to replace the Jaguar.

This compares with the Royal Navy which is seeing almost it’s entire fleet replaced over the next 15 years with new air defence destroyers, carriers, survey vessels, submarines, amphibious landing ships, surface combatants, etc.