nocutstoRAFMy anger is the UK spent $2 billion to be a tier one partner which is the basis on which UK’s industrial participation was set – the message from LM basically says if UK (or any other partner country) does not order the full number they originally planned then the industrial participation can be changed – lets face it no-one including the US is going to order the numbers envisaged two years ago at this point, and the programme is going be more draw out than envisaged as finances are tight.
Now if the UK orders an initial 50 odd F-35B rather than the 130+ originally planned then UK industry might still loose out if LM carries out their threat – might be overreacting but had a sh*te couple of days at work and I am not in a very chilled mood as right now I am imagining that LM is using this as a ploy to a) leverage orders and b) move more of systems production to the US – I assume that the US Government not RR owns the intellectually property rights to the lift fan so the US Government and LM could shift lift fan production state side without any come back
nocutstoRAFhttp://www.janes.com/news/defence/jdw/jdw100820_2_n.shtml
Industrial participation by international partners in the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) programme could be affected if firm commitments to buy the aircraft are delayed or amended, Tom Burbage, the general manager and executive vice president for the F-35 programme, warned on 17 August.
Burbage told Jane’s that the eight international partner nations – Australia, Canada, Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Turkey and the UK – were “still soft on production schedules”.
To date, only five aircraft of the anticipated 800-plus international sales have been contracted by partner countries – three operational test aircraft for the UK and two for the Netherlands.
Other nations are seeking changes in their delivery schedules.
“There is a sort of a gentleman’s agreement in this game that ties industrial participation to buying airplanes,” said Burbage.“Industrial participation is all going on today in advance of anyone making a formal decision to buy an airplane.”
“If, at some point in time, somebody says we are not going to buy any airplanes, that puts us in a pretty difficult situation, so there is a trust factor, sort of a partnership factor, that goes along with being part of the programme,” he said
LM has made not to a subtle threat if you are partner country and you do not buy the number of aircraft that you planned they will cut or cancel your industrial participation despite it being based on the money you invested – my spit in the eye attitude, how dare any company threaten a nation state is for the UK to bank roll a massive war chest so RR and others can sue LM if they do cut contracts – 😡 grr and I was all for the F-35B now I backing anything but!! Very peeved as you may guess! 😡
nocutstoRAFThere are also a number of customers who will not be sold the F-35 and who still want to buy American and the Silent Eagle fills that role – it’s a niche market.
nocutstoRAFInteresting – but presumably a UAV with fan in wing and jet engine in the main body like VARIOUS would be only suitable for roles that might be carried out by the F-35B and that you would need a CATOBAR set up if you want to launch UVAC designed for long-range deep strike missions carrying bombs rather than a couple of brimstone for CAS.
With regard to Osprey MASC solution would the RN not get three Merlin’s for an Osprey? – thereby demonstrating the original plan of F-35B and Merlin MASC combo as the best!
nocutstoRAFI also wish the two months would fly away as it is starting to get a bit annoying seeing the same stories re-hashed over and over – I also wish Liam Fox would call George Osbourne bluff and say if MoD has to fund Trident replacement they decide it is not value for money and drop it all together – I give it five minutes before George Osbourne is forced to back down! Still I am leaning to the idea that in return for MoD covering Trident they will get a settlement which is frozen rather than cut as long as they agree to re-vamp their procurement and go for what bits of kit the Treasury fancies rather than what the MoD thinks is best.
nocutstoRAFI can see some advantage of COD and the massive advantage of being able to deploying UVAC’s by the mid 2020’s (which will only be 10 years after QE is launched, and I reckon the RN will have a MALE or HALE for ISTAR before then) but I question the need for Hawkeye – yes it is wonderful but a Merlin with Searchwater 2000 would be more flexible, as it could operate of frigates / destroyer or even the replacement for Ocean and the RN will never be able to afford both Hawkeye’s and the Merlin’s.
Saying all that I cannot but help wonder if they palletise Searchwater could they fit it to whatever plane they choose as they COD aircraft (and could they use a carrier version of the Defender for COD)?
nocutstoRAFOut of interest, following Lewis Page’s stunning piece of journalism I have been searching, with no luck, for the practical detection range using Searchwater 2000 on a Sea King for say a low flying Mig-29K armed for anti-shipping strike with a radar cross section of around 0.75 m2 before it is loaded up with missiles – does anyone know the answer as everything I can find is rather vague (suggesting the information is not in the public domain)
nocutstoRAFIt still costs a bloody lot. Every army of Europe, and possibly of the world, has its major spending at the voice “personell”, but considering that the british armed forces are pretty low on number of soldiers, the cost for personell is surprisingly high, and weights so much that ultimately the UK has less money for kit than France does. I don’t know if the problem is the civil servants, it was a theory of mine. It is for people with the right data at hand to determine. For sure, there are massive wastes that will need to be eliminated to ensure proper armed forces survive the cuts.
Not sure how much use it is but look at this thread http://www.arrse.co.uk/current-affairs-news-analysis/138982-unprecedented-cuts-being-proposed-ministry-defence-19.html around half way down page 19 and it might give you some good sources of info.
nocutstoRAFIn the meanwhile, rumours about the CVF going Catapults (and possibly F18) never die: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/08/17/navy_catobar_pilots/
I think that the rumour has so much mileage because a) the RN want to go CATOBAR, b) the F-35B is perceived as being expensive when compared to the F/A-18 (not enough evidence to say one way or another yet) and c) a lot of people love the idea of it. Those against it are the senior staff and the MoD who can see the bigger picture.
Over on the ARRSE forum when this was discussed the journalist who wrote the article in the Sunday Times supposedly chimed in with the original text of the article before it was edited down which said that the entire Super Hornet International Road Map has been developed specifically for the UK in response in a decision earlier in the year to go with the F/A-18. Of course it was rather discredited by the fact that the UK was going to call it Silent Hornet which shows some confusion.
If UK buys the F/A-18 then it buys the F/A-18, I like to believe that if it does it will do so for good reasons, but if you are looking for evidence of the UK making this decision then there is a lot of circumstantial information out there that you can use to support that argument.
The military personnel is not overpaid. But the British MOD, because of the civil servants or whatever else, has a MASSIVE cost in terms of personnel, that reduces dramatically the money available for equipment, so that while the budget of the UK is slightly higher than that of France, France effectively spends more on equipment and kit than the UK.
As it is, the MOD budget IS inadequate, and it has been possibly for the last 20 years. Surely for the last 10.
Someone like Swerve will be able to confirm but I think that the number of MoD staff is an artefact of Front Line First which transferred lots of jobs normally carried out in other countries by uniformed personnel to the MoD and as result the UK looks top heavy in civil servants to uniformed personnel, but if you took out those jobs you would find that the MoD is surprisingly efficient compared to a lot of other countries (when you compare the ratio of civil servants to uniformed personnel).
nocutstoRAFBeen thinking about the Jane’s story I accessed via Defence Talk
The whole thing appears rather strange -if you buy totally into the article, believe even the ridiculous bits of it, then the cunning MoD plan (clearly draw up on back of fag packet over a couple of pints) suggests that once all 12 pilots are trained in 2012 the UK would be looking to operate a knackered US carrier with maybe 1/3 of the necessary crew for 4 years until QE came online with F/A-18 that it has not brought yet and unlikely to be delivered if it signed contract today until after 2015 all in the name of saving money – I wonder if the same person who came up with that plan might want to buy London Bridge I can sell it to them for a song :).
I could half believe it if the story was that the RAF had thrown their toys out the pram and were insisting that if they give up GR4 they get F-35A, and if the MoD thought that compared to when the last reviewed the situation, the chances of operating UVAC’s of a carrier in the 2020’s was much higher, then I could see the FAA being offered the chance to go CATOBAR and a small purchase of F/A-18’s as a consolation prize but even with Jane’s reputation the story just does not stack up – unless anyone can offer a better explanation or point out the flaws in my reasoning.
Still is rather sad for the RN deck crews as no CATOBAR means no lovely working holiday over in the states 🙂
nocutstoRAFI agree on the lending of carrier bit – though Jane’s is usually reliable – but the author seems clear that the pilots are getting full training rather than just a taste of large deck operations which is fairly normal occurrence. Obviously you cannot read to much into the article as it might be as JackJack says so that they can learn to handle supersonic fighters (though you think the RAF might let them have go on the Tornado 🙂 ) – and if UK was going CATOBAR you would expect that the deck crew would be off in the states as well learning how to operate in a CATOBAR environment.
nocutstoRAFFound this on the Defence Talk forum http://www.defencetalk.com/forums/air-force-aviation/rn-re-evaluating-f-35c-10562/- based on a Jane’s article which is subscriber only – hopefully the original poster has a legal right to distribute the information. I was going to cut and paste the full text but I rather not get sued by Jane’s for copyright infringement 🙂
The jist of the article for those not wanting to read it is that 12 RN pilots are undergoing full training for F/A-18 when normally only 1 -2 would undergo partial training as part of an exchange and that the F-35C or the F/A-18 are under consideration in place of the F-35B.
The article pasted on Defence Talk Forum is worth reading just for the last paragraph of the article where the US is considering lending the RN a carrier for a few years until QE is launched which just sounds made up.
nocutstoRAFIt does seem short sighted however – a lot of roles, even with the advanced sensors of the F-35 would be enhanced by a second seat – ISTAR, electronic warfare and control of UAV’s for example. I have always thought the resistance to a two seat F-35 is down to the cost of training and paying for a WSO more than anything else.
nocutstoRAFThanks Liger – seems a little short sighted to not have meteor integrated as a baseline capability given that the F-35B will be pressed into first day of war missions and will be much more likely than the Typhoon to encounter enemy aircraft being operated at peak efficiency with-in their air defence network (not sure of the proper terminology here) i.e. operating with ground radars, being coordinated on their intercept vectors by ground controllers and possibly supported by AWACS – a situation where I would have thought bringing meteor to the party would increase the survivability of the F-35B over it carrying AMRAAM
nocutstoRAFRE: JackJack – But it might help to explain why the USN is happy to operate a mix of F/A-18’s and F-35C until NGAD comes on line – they obviously wanted a twin seater version of the F-35C.
While it looks like it’s never going to happen it does strike me that there have been quite a few times on the various F-35 threads where a twin seat F-35 has seemed like a good idea based on various comments.
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