Buyer beware, and really you can’t blame the Russians if a customer fails to do a proper technical survey before buying and so end up paying a fortune for a lemon. With each passing month this is more and more obviously a dreadful mistake by India, given the revised timeline and budget a new build would have made infinitely more sense.

If Russia wants to build bombers it’s their choice. Just as if countries want to join NATO it’s their choice. And anybody who thinks North Korea is a fine example of a country that deserves praise is nuts, I bet everybody in South Korea lies awake at night regretting they’re not ruled by the North:rolleyes: Ultimately, this may well lead to a new cold war, but it strikes me as a bit mad to provoke a cold war in the west where Europe has no interest in Russia when the extractive resources that Russia is totally dependent on are in the East, near a country with a massively bigger population than Russian, a massively stronger economy, ever increasing military capabilities and better technological development now in all sectors other than weapons (and they are developing their indigenous weapons capability very fast) and who is ethnically closer to much of Eastern Russia than Moscow will ever be.

I say let them. They’re not much of a threat and Russia knows fine well their strategically vulnerable area isn’t in the West so they can have a bit of fun at our end without risking anything, they know fine well Western/Central Europe has little/no interest in Russia either way as long as we have a quiet life. And if Putin wants to repeat the mistakes of the Soviet era by pumping huge sums into weapons rather than developing his economy, social care and civic improvement then let him, it’s his country.

So where is the big announcement scrapping the RN? Another false alarm from the Telegraph?:confused: Now we’re not having an election they’ll probably calm down with these sort of stories.

There is a definite advantage to separating dry stores and fuel if you can afford it, in the late 80’s the RFA was dead set on the AOR concept and multi-purpose one stop vessels but did a big u-turn and went back to favouring tankers and replenishment vessels. The classic old argument of optimised two platform vs. multi-purpose single platform.

And who controls this wonderful super navy of the future? Do you see the French agreeing to send a task force to the Falklands (perhaps if they could get an exocet sale out of out…:diablo: )?

In fairness to France, they gave the UK strong diplomatic support and technical assistance in 1982, they were much better friends than any other country in Europe, most of which either sat on the fence or were actively against our efforts to regain the islands. And to reverse the question, would the British go to war to recover one of the French overseas dependencies? That said, it is a reason why the UK must retain national sovereignty over defence, yes we need to co-operate with both the EU and USA and remain in NATO, but as with France we do have certain defence complications requiring us to retain control of our own forces and defence policy. Also, it has to be said, the EU efforts in defence haven’t been especially impressive and even NATO hasn’t particularly impressed in Afghanistan with countries failing to honour committments or only doing so if their troops go to the quiet sectors.

First off, I’m not suggesting we reduce our navy to a coastguard or scrap the navy. If the UK wants an expeditionary navy then fine, BUT PAY FOR IT!!!! If politicians, and that means voters, ie. the British tax payers on this board amongst others, are not prepared to either pay more taxes or cut other government funding to pay for a major navy, army and air force then accept our reduced role and reconfigure the forces as a self defence force. That does not mean disarmament, it means looking at the threats to ourselves and arming appropriately. Now considering Europe is one of the most benign parts of the globe, we’re locked into two extremely robust multi-national organisations that assist that state of affairs (NATO and the EU) the actual threat to ourselves is pretty small. The fly in the ointment is the Falklands, but we long ago gave up the capability to mount another operation corporate (not least, where would the logistic chain and sealift come from? Does anybody think all those “UK” flag foreign ships would fall over themselves to be any use?) so we can best secure the Falklands with an effective garrison (which is an awful lot cheaper than maintaining a large fleet for those small dependencies). And with regards former colonies and the dominions, they’re either well able to defend themselves, have agreements with more powerful allies than the UK or don’t want our interference. The present half baked approach of politicians using our forces like their toy box to join every passing war that takes their fancy without funding the forces, and progressing huge programs like CVF with little sign of investing in adequate support assets to make them genuinely useful so we can pretend to be a world power is pathetic verging on criminal in the way it has endangered our troops. Second, let’s stop pretending Asia is why we need a huge military capability. Asia may well explode one day but it’ll be caused by inter-asian rivalry and tensions, not by outside ambitions, the arms race in Asia is being driven by various internal Asian rivalries, the ambition of some states to be super powers, the fears of others of those states achieving that aim and fears of a rogue state amongst other things, it’s got nothing to do with Europe and the only non-asian state that matters in Asia is the USA anyway. As things stand even if Europe was the target we’re more than capable of defending ourselves from any Asian air or sea threat for the foreseeable future anyway. And I don’t see Russia as much of a threat despite the recent hype on their bomber flights, if Putin wants to enjoy a bit of fun and give his country an ego boost by yanking a chain or two then let him, they know fine well the threat to Russia is not from the West and fundamentally they’re in a strategically weak position. And if Putin wants to repeat the mistake of the USSR by squandering his nations wealth on weapons at the expense of other things then let him. Thirdly, the Neville Chamberlain comparison is probably the most abused in history and displays a lack of understanding of history, how many dumb ventures have been justified by politicians using the excuse of not repeating the mistakes of Munich? Suez in ’56? Iraq today? Vietnam for America?
I have no objection to a strong RN, but if we want a strong RN do it properly and pay for it, the present ambition of having a strong navy on the cheap is madness.

I’m with the “I’ll believe it when it happens” group, however it is a fact that the UK armed forces have been steadily shrinking for decades and with no sign of that reversing any time soon, and for the party political amongst us, much as I hate the current government I don’t for one minute think it would be any better under the Tories or Lib-Dems, and when the SNP whinge about defence cuts for a Navy they want to split away from in an independent Scotland is despicable to say the least. Ultimately, the question is do we need a large navy for our defence? I don’t mean to pretend to be a world power or go off fighting foreign wars or trying to scrabble around fighting for ever declining finite resources, but for our own actual defence. To me the answer is no. Now if a reduction in forces was matched by a decision to withdraw from all these foreign wars and mind our own business I’d not be especially sad, and we’d be better off investing a few billions in alternative energy so we can just let the Middle East melt down and leave them to wipe each other out if that’s what they want, but my fear is we’ll see force cuts continue and still have **** sucking politicians anxious to join in every passing war offering good opportunities for their own agendas. As far as the Asian military build up is concerned, personally I see no issues there for Europe, the threat situation they’re preparing for is very different, there is a regional power race and ultimately Europe is not particularly high on the Asian agenda either way, it may hurt European ego but we’re just not the continent people are particularly interested in over there, and personally I’m quite happy for Europe and Asia to have their own agendas and leave eachother to it. In the future there will be more intense rivalry for oil and gas, but the answer to that is develop technologies to avoid reliance on oil and gas, as it doesn’t matter how heavily armed we are there won’t be enough natural oil and gas to go around anyway.