I blame the CEO of BAE he should have never told the Defence Select Committee 😀 – he was asked to look at the options for two, one or no carriers but with something else being built – it caused all sorts of issues, especially no-one will say if PoW will go ahead or not – it allows all sort of rumours, and if you are like me you try to understand what truth if any there are in the rumours.

1, The point of cancelling the carrier is to save money. You dont save anything if you reapply the money saved on one project to a different one.

2, There is nothing else ready to build. T26 has just been awarded to BAE at development stage. MoD are paying a mere £127mn for a multiyear programme leading to build.

If you get a different part of the work programme you were going to have to fund is now covered by changing the contract then it is a saving in the long run.

FT is suggesting BAE has been asked to advise on how feasible it is to bring construction of the T26 forward and there has been lots of vague and therefore likely misconstrued hints in the rest of the press on building light frigates which I assume is based on them (the journo’s) googling recent BAE ship building contracts and looking at what they actually built and deciding that is what David Cameron actually meant.

We are not currently using a helicopter in the Medium class on operations.

….the Merlin has many advantages over smaller helicopters arbeit at a higher cost.

The current helicopter strategy is looking likely to go out the window as it was based on the Wildcat order, 22 additional Chinooks, transferring the Merlin’s to the navy to replace the Sea Kings, and when the Puma were retired in the next decade they were going to add 8 additional Chinooks and a small number of medium lift helicopters for urban operations where a Chinook or Merlin was to large (source: article in last month’s Combat Aircraft Monthly).

Now they are only buying 12 additional Chinooks and it looks likely that they will not replace the Puma’s, Merlin’s are expensive and they are cutting the budget, they will lose medium lift for either the battle field or urban operations. Who knows what they will do, but they have to do something for political reasons as the public think the only thing that the UK needs is helicopters, I suspect it will be based on whatever option they can both afford and get AugustaWestland to deliver by 2013.

Then there is the AW149, of course, which wouldn’t be bad at all even if somehow “second league” with how most of NATO (notably France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Norwey, Portugal, Greece, Australia and many others) has been adopting the NH90.

Looking at the AugustaWestland web-site which has info on both NH90 and AW149 the NH90 is larger, can carry more troops (20 fully equipped), while the AW149 is smaller, carry’s less troops (16 standard or 12 fully equipped), but has weapon pylons and can carry a wider range of weapons (including anti-tank weapons). The former is better for the SAS but the later might make a more widely useful helicopter if it could be brought in reasonable numbers and we could overcome the fact that along with the wildcat (if you the believe AugustaWestland web-site) cannot carry multiples of 8 soldiers – i.e Wildcat – 7 fully equipped and AW149 – 12 fully equipped.

http://www.agustawestland.com/content/products

But better than a kick in the teeth and obviously 10 new NH90 or Blackhawk’s would cost less than 35 old Puma’s 🙂 Only problem is both the NH90, the Blackhawk (and the EC Cougar) can be set up for special forces use, and if you had 10 new shiny helicopters then I sure they would be mainly used by the SAS – to be fair there is quite likely a need for this type of helicopter in Afghanistan right now!

A couple of things:

Firstly RE: unarmed Clyde’s and other worries – can someone explain to me if the NSC is dead set against the 2nd carrier (and it the newspapers are to be believed Liam Fox agreed to 1 carrier if he gets more frigates) and is willing pay the penalty clauses and if Carrier Alliance is willing to use the penalty fee’s to build “light frigates” (whatever actually means) to bridge the gap until 2018 and the Type 26’s start to build what the impact it realistically going to be on British shipbuilding?

Over on ARRSE there is a thread on “Why we need a navy” which as you imagine is very polarised and there is several reference by a poster called White City (I am referencing in case he reads this forum as well) to the fact that the proposed purchase of F-35B’s is so low now that once you set up a rotation of training and active duty squadrons the three squadrons of F-35B likely to be stood up will spend all their time either training to deploy from the carrier or deploying from the carrier, and that this has resulted in the RAF loosing all interesting in paying for them – is this true or just conjecture on White City’s part?

Surely RN is only going to need a few extra ships like HMS Clyde (effectively a patrol ship) and they are going to end up with needing to generate something else to keep the yards working until Type 26 starts to be build later this decade? This is why when they mentioned light frigates I thought they were referring to designs based on the Frigate 2000 design which could do the low end C2 role.

EDIT: I was also imagining that you could use a Frigate 2000 to patrol in low threat areas and fill the same role as the La Fayette does for France.