I have to say I was rather surprised that some 6 years after Sea Wolf 2 was cleared for use that they are still installing Block 2 Sea Wolf to Type 23’s, you would have thought that all of the ships would have been upgraded by now, especially as they plan to phase out Sea Wolf from 2016 and BAE’s through life contract only runs to 2017.

Also am I the only person who was thrown by the comment on being able to track a target 20 miles away and thinking for minute that it could not be right as Sea Wolf only has a range of around 6.5 miles, until I twigged that maximum tracking range is bound to be different to the maximum range of the missile!

While I agree that the two sites expected to be worst hit are dedicated to the Typhoon and the Hawk, in the story I read it says “The firm said in July that defence spending cuts in the UK and falling sales of land vehicles had hit profits”.

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/bae-systems-preparing-cut-3-000-uk-jobs-172403398.html

The way I see it there are four possible reasons for the emphasis on Warton and Brough –

1) Hawk and Typhoon have good visibility with the public so the newspaper’s are emphasising closures at those sites over other sites as the public will react to them.

2) As you say something has happened to cause BAE to lay off aerospace engineer’s while still building Typhoon and planning to build parts for the JSF.

3) Someone has offered massive tax breaks to BAE to shift aerospace manufacturing abroad and BAE is willing to par it’s UK presence back to a minimum.

4) BAE is planning to leave the UK defence sector if no new contracts emerge, and they will scale back Warton and Brough and close or scale back other sites unless the MoD “bails” them out with new orders (I favour option 4, and assumed that as they are suffering cut backs in orders in Land Systems that they have basically said to the MoD we will depart the UK unless you give us a big land vehicle order)

…were we to have to station a T45 365 days a year to cover Falklands oil resources, in response to an escalation of tensions perhaps, we would need to task half of that destroyer force to keep just one on station.

I think this might be a dumb question, but just in case it isn’t, would it not be cheaper to buy a small number of batteries of ASTER 30-SAMP/T than it would be to build extra T45’s, and have them available to rapidly deploy to the Falkland’s as part of the reinforcement plan?

Am I right in thinking that once the Wildcat comes into service, the AH7’s and the AH9’s will be retired? So potentially the AAC is getting 34 Wildcat’s to replace a hundred AH7/AH9’s, or will the mix be 34 Wildcat’s and 22 AH9A’s?

Thank Geoff_B,

I think we might get a better idea of the future once the equipment plan is published in September. I agree it is all still a bit confusing, as Liam Fox has said in answer to a Parliamentary Question that both would get Cat and Traps, it was later refuted (I dig out the link on Think Defence if anyone wants it).

What will be interesting to see is if they add the angled deck now to QE as presumably that would be fairly easy to do now, and extremely expensive to do after completion? Also does anyone know how advanced the build of PoW will be by the time they select the catapult and arrestor gear and do the detailed build, as I am suspecting that new detailed engineering plans will not be available until late 2013 or early 2014 (if they have do a whole new design study), and I suspect that PoW will be fairly well along in its build by then?

The facilities for reinforcing the number of fast jets at Mount Pleasant already exist, there are 16 fast jet shelters there…

I had naively imagined there might be facilities for 12 fighters, so I am rather pleased that Mount Pleasant could handle 16. I was thinking more along the lines of if we decide to permanently improve the defences of the Falkland’s could we really do so. For example if we had two flights or even a full squadron of Typhoon’s based permanently in the Falkland’s, do we have enough spare capacity in the total number of Typhoon’s available to do this? Same with future LRMPA, if we only end up with five P-8 (which I presume is the bare minimum to guarantee 1 available at all times), can we spare one permanently based in the Falkland’s?

Accept of course John Major already signed a deal in 1995 to agree to joint exploration of oil in the sea bed around the Falklands. The fact that the Kircher’s broke the deal does not alter the fact that we have already done a deal once and we will likely do some sort of deal again.

Would Russia really let us have the necessary access to the source code on the Mig-29K to allow us to successfully incorporate new engines, radar, avionics and weapons? Would we have to reveal too much information about said Western systems for it to be viable, and does the Mig-29K have enough range to fill the strike role? I think the answers would be no, no and no, and I say this having previously proposed licence building Su-33’s before for CVF (mainly influenced by how damn great looking the Flanker is 🙂 )

Would it not be better to just buy F/A-18 E/F’s or Rafale’s than purchase the Mig-29K, also given the amount of development work needed, would it not be cheaper to pay SAAB to develop the Sea Gripen?