Why do you think we went to the trouble and cost of recovering the Argentine Chinook to the UK (and then of storing it for 27 years) if not as a potential source of spares and parts?

If the engineering and cost cases for using parts from the captured Chinook are water-tight – as they are in this case, how can it possibly be a scandal?

What would have been a scandal would have been if we had thrown away a useful asset (the Argentine Chinook) as a target, for scrap, or to moulder away outside the AAC Museum, or had we failed to use an asset we had in order to repair our own damaged Chinook.

This is a non-story – except as an illustration of the MoD doing exactly the right thing to make the best possible use of taxpayers money and its own resources to maximise the delivery of capability to the frontline.

I did say “I am not against doing it” BUT this is symtamatic of the governments reliance on “bodging” to keep our armed forces going – thats the real story.

No it was very smart to store it, but I am sure they never foresore 27 years before use. By the way there are a couple of Pucaras hanging around if we fancy getting them going….:p

I’m not saying it should not be done at all, i’m all for value for money, BUT this should not be used as an excuse to short change the military, which it is.

The Army kept the Clansman radio system going by constantly scavening and rebuilding, this allowed HMG to prevaricate on its replacement for years, we rely on the great British “Make do and mend” attitude far too much. In Kosovo we resorted to using mobile phones.

Look at FRES. Part of the reason it can be delayed is that the REME are so good at keeping 40 year old CVRTs on the road and constantly rebuild the 50 year old FV430 that the governement can avoid putting its hands in its pockets.

SLR went on until they were smooth bore because our armourers could keep them going.

The RN has put up with the oldest active SSNs in the world because our engineers are really good at their jobs.

Surely if we value our servicemen and women the airframe we are talking about should be relgated to training duties (so still very useful) and a nice new shiny chinook should be purchased.

This is why the Yanks see us as poor hick relations, scraping around for favours and parts. Why should we be proud of essentially being beggars?

i wonder why that is. for sheer range and speed, i’d say the HARM being a bigger missile should top ALARM. It shouldnt be a matter of one missile being much smarter than the other, not in this day and age of small cheap reprogrammable electronics. So that leaves the one difference, the parachute in ALARMs tail. This allows it to linger until the radar starts emitting again. Should that make such a big difference? i’d say luck had something to do with that too.

Alarm is a bit smarter as it is self contained, it was designed to be used by non specialist SEAD types, such as Tornado GR1/4 and so has to do a lot of the thinking for itself, where as HARM needs more outside input. The Parachute makes an enormous difference, as soon as HARMs get fired radars shut down then HARM has to make a best guess. ALarm has the same function but the ability to loiter and fool the enemy into turning back on is Alarms biggest advantage. It means it can clear corridors through a SAM belt by loitering and then still kill the radars after the raid is over.

As for needing 18 helicopters to get 6 cabs into theatre – utter nonsence. The supply of Bell spares is readily proven and the wouldn’t be a need to have large numbers of aircraft canabilized to keep others in the air.

All military operations should be based on a minimum of a “rule of three”. Be it an aircraft, a ship, even an individual soldier, you need “three” to sustain a long term deployment. The (over)simple explanation is that you have-

One preparing and standing up
One on the operation
One standing down

So for every infantry Battalion you send you actually are comitting three- one in the line, one recovering and one preparing to replace. For ships you generally have one on op, one in transit and one in refit. For aircraft this still stands, as an airframe reaches its total hours for a major service it must be returned to the UK, so another has to go out in its place and another then needs to be getting ready to replace that airframe- perhaps at short notice if there is an accident/ shot down.

Three is the minimum, four is better as you reach the more sustainable cycle of-

One preparing and standing up
One on operation
One standing down
One in long term training

If you only buy say 12 Bell 412s and send them all to afghan, they will all eventually need a major service and then need to be sent back to the UK. Then you are back to square one. By having a small fleet you also knacker your kit more quickly by more frequent use.

This is what the media miss all the time in this debate. The question of those extra 2,000 troops is more complex, you are actually comitting 6,000 more on a deployment that at present is really numbering 27,000 + (9,000 x3), that would mean 1/3 of the Army is comitted to Afghan in some way.

The point misses you totally. This was a non-story and the BBC chose to publish it, the angle of the story is that the MOD and RAF are letting our troops be killed which is false and a lie.
The story served one purpose and one purpose only; not to impartially inform the reader about helicopter shortages or percieved shortages but to attack our services and claim they are negligent.
This comes from the supposed ‘news’ organisation that willingly helped organise anti war rallies which themselves are far outside of its duties and a clear sign of the left leaning policies toward war so it is of no suprise to myself.
I guess people will claim the BBC are perfect and fair ,but you might be suprised to find they are nothing of the sort
http://www.ejpress.org/article/7205
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1554833/BBC-report-finds-bias-within-corporation.html

I would never claim the BBC is perfect, but as a news organisation its one of the best and most reliable. Every news agency has an angle or “bias”, all reporters have baggage and opinions. Would the “European Jewish Press” you quoted have reported a pro-jewish/ anti-palestine bias in the same way? Of course not, this story and its angle is an interest story for them. The “Cut and Shunt” story was reported because-

a) The Helicopter debate is one of the top stories of the week.
b) The quoted man has a direct interest and a relevant angle on the story in a week when we have had the heighest weekly death toll.
c) as I outlined above, this story is a real issue, why should the government rely on our techies to rebuild a wreck when they should be just buying a replacement chinook.
d) The story does not in any way have the BBC directly attacking the RAF, the quoted man does. The MOD is culpable as they direct policy and made the excutive decision that money should be spent supplying our troops with a rebuild rather than a new helicopter.

Well I won’t harp on about this subject after this post but you BBC lovers need to read the article again and notice
Sentances such as

“If you gave them flip flops and catapults they’d still go out there and do the job for us, but we don’t support our men.”

But Mr Sadler said it was a “real scandal” and showed a lack of support for the troops fighting in Afghanistan.

“Mr Sadler’s son, a trooper in the Honourable Artillery Company, was killed when his non-armoured Land Rover hit a mine.”

“An admission that a “cut and shut” helicopter was used in Afghanistan has angered the father of a dead soldier.”

All of these sentances were left in the article for a reason and if you cannot figure that out I feel bad for you.

But the BBC did not write those lines??? They are quotes. Would you rather they applied censorship and did not report what was being said?

“The BBC heard today from a greiving nutter who has no idea what he is talking about and as it possibly makes the government look bad in a current debate we are not going to report it…now here are some stirring images of Royal Marines storming a house, remember the war is all going well and all our brave boys will win through in this right and just cause, or earn their place in “wooton Bassett”.

The problem is that all the discussion does detract from the fact that this is an issue. “Cut and shunt” should be of concern. Yes its an ancient practice… but it goes to the heart of undefunding in the UK military and that is the real story.

I have no doubt that chinook rebuild was utterly professional and “a proper job”. But why should the RAF and the military overall have to restort to such measures? I would not get on an airliner if I knew it was built from two other 30 year old airframes, one of which had crashed. I wouldn’t put my daughter in a car I knew to be made of two 30 year old chassis’….so why do we expect “our boys” to do the same with their kit?

If our military was funded correctly we would have bought a replacement Chinook and not expected one to be rebuilt from war booty and a wreck.

Thats the real story.