Your remedy is akin to bombing Marbella, or Swanley, or the north-eastern corner of New Jersey, because of the numbers of gangsters living there, or dealing with a fleeing pickpocket by car by machine-gunning everyone in the street. It’s a cure much worse than the disease.

But in this case very few people care about the patient.;)

If this starts to affect my quality of life, prices go up or that exotic fruit I so like is missing from the supermarket shelves, I expect my countries of origin to go Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus Africanus Numantinus on any Somali port that a pirate sails out of………….am I joking?:confused:

To be honest Scooter as bizarre as it sounds Lawrence has this right.

Praise indeed Jonesy!:rolleyes: I was not aware that we disagreed that often anyway?:confused:

I agree – it is all very well and good saying that the RN was going to be the third most capable fleet, but as OWR says, it wouldn’t last five minutes without air cover. For pure GIUK ops, then fine, you can rely on Phantoms from land bases for most of the time (though even that may not suffice if the balloon had gone up). For anything outside of GIUK, then you really need aircover, as operations in the Falklands showed – good AAW destroyers and good ASW frigates may look good on paper, but they simply didn’t cope without air support (especially AEW actually, not just fighters).

Jonesey has pointed out the fallacy of the Falklands example more than once. The issues with RN AAW capability was related to an unplanned for threat tpe and friction (in the Clausewitzian sense). Most of the technical issues would have been solved by the planned improvements that were finally culled by John Nott. And secondly the RN was never meant to go anywhere near a serious airforce anyway…..Navies are defined by the foreign policy requirements of their governments and the UK only required the RN to operate against the Soviet Union in a secondary role to the USN. Thus the Royal Navy was built to do what was required of it.

Arguably, a better bet would have been a two tier fleet, with a semi-dedicated fleet for GIUK ops (e.g. Leanders and T-22s), and an expeditionary fleet, using cheaper frigates (e.g. T-21s) and carriers. There are benefits to this approach, and it should still have been affordable.

Not arguable at all, even if UK foreign policy had required this (which it did not) the end result would have been a fleet poor at both roles. One half to small to really contribute to NATO and the other too small to provide the availability required for genuine maritime presence, not to mention that small cheap frigates are generally useless (especially in this period) at anything other than maritime policing.

As for the whole ‘withdrawal from East of Suez’, it was partly a recognition of the limits of funding (going on at the ’50s levels was unsustainable), and partly an abdication of responsibility. Even a two carrier fleet (either Eagle+Ark, or CVA-01+02) would have been enough to repeat most of the post war RN ops. For most of the genuine East of Suez ops, keeping Hermes as a CTOL carrier (probably with some cheap A-4s or similar) would have been plenty! Frankly, I don’t buy the lack of money argument – the money was there, but the willpower to use it wasn’t. The money was tight, sometimes very tight, but with proper prioritisation, the main projects could have been funded.

Prioritisation was correct, that priority was deterrence and then defence against the perceived existential threat to national survival that was the Soviet Union. That was the purpose of the Royal Navy and that was what it was built to do. In that scenario the fleet carriers were unaffordable and unnecessary.

When will people on this forum realise that Navies are not a universal concept. They are a product of the particular security, political, geographical, economic and financial requirements of their time. They do not build carriers unless they can both afford them and have a purpose for them. When Navies try to break out of that mould they usually fail in one way or another, Thailand’s carrier anybody?

They are Russian Property and they are “very” well versed with the Design. Also, while Russian may have lost some of its shipbuilding base over the last decade. I doubt you would find many who would agree that its beyound its abilities. Regardless, the reconstruction of the Carriers is hardly the equal of say designing and building the PAK-FA from scratch…………..As for underestimating the condition and other projects I would agree.

Ships are extremely complex, especially naval vessels, and I never said that it was beyond Russia’s abilities. How well versed are the Russians actually with this design, given the collapse of Russia’s shipyards post Soviet Union, the fact that they were constructed in someone elses country, and that virtually no work has been carried out on a ship of that design for nearly twenty years?

Please, this is the fourth ship of the Class and Russia has contructed two larger but very similar Carriers in the recent past. Further, while the radars and engine maybe new built. They are indeed “off the shelf” not newly designed and build units.

Again its like comparing rebuilding a old car (i.e. new engine and tires -off shelf) than designing and building a new car from scratch.

Man…………..you want to buy a bridge?

No Russia has not, these ships were all built in the Ukraine where the workers skills and tooling has now been lost. Russia is struggling with this project because they underestimated how bad the state of the ship actually was and because their own shipbuilding base (that has little experience of even working on carriers let alone undertaking major reconstructions) has also taken a beating over the last two decades.

And what I keep coming back to is that the Bankruptcy argument does not hold water for one indisputable reason…THE MONEY WAS SPENT ANYWAY! To much less useful effect. A Navy the size of the RN of the 70s is impotent without air cover. Doesn’t matter how many or how good the destroyers and frigates are, if there isn’t a carrier to provide AEW, fighter cover and long range anti ship strike then you may as well keep them in port… a bit like now in fact. Carriers are not a luxury, they are essential. That is why they should have priority. As for infrastructure, the RN was planning to continue supporting two air groups through the 70s right up until 1969 when Eagles Phantomisation was cancelled. Why else form 767 NAS as the Phantom training unit? All the required defence savings were made by closing the bases East of Suez. Maintaining mobilr rapid reaction forces (ie Carrier and Amphibious groups) was always a better way to invest resources. Ask the USN…

Except you have yet to prove that it was spent anyway and that spending it on carriers would have been wiser. Remember that we have no idea how much CVA-01 would actually have cost.

The RN in the post war era can not be compared to the USN. What the RN was planning for did not require full size fleet carriers. The US has a huge geographical advantage over the RN in that it has two oceanic sea boards providing greater flexibility before we even take the fact that the USN was looking at a fleet of 15 fleet carriers and still maintains 12. It is the numerical and geographical advantages that give the USN its fexibility. However those advantages are irrelevent as the UK government had no intention of needing that flexibility……or have we forgotten that armed forces are developed to satisfy foreign policy?

The notion that the RN needed fleet carriers is simply not borne out by reality.

Running a carrier costs far more than running a cruiser, the burn more fuel, there aircraft burn more fuel, their aircraft require moremaintenance, special weapons, special shore facilities, rolling training programs etc etc. What the RN is planning on doing in the next year is irrelevent if the government can not afford to pay for it in that year.

The fleet put forward in 1975 was the most capable and suitable the RN proposed in the post war era, the move to three light carriers and a fleet of large (large frigates that is) escorts made perfect sense. Keeping fleet carriers in stupidly low numbers to fulfill a requirement that foreign policy and doctrine did not require whilst cutting back the escort force is sheer lunacy.

http://www.rolls-royce.com/marine/products/diesel_gas_turbine/gas_turbines/mt30.jsp

Watch the naval transition video on this page.

Now the Russians seem exaggerating:

http://en.rian.ru/russia/20081117/118359856.html

I think a dozen Tu-22M3 launching Kh-15 from Belarusian airspace as a more logical neutralization move.

Nobody cares, the ABM system is not aimed at Russia.:rolleyes: