nocutstoRAFCan I have a link to the review please!
nocutstoRAFYour proposals risk costing more than replacing Trident in current form, or risk being totally impossible to pursue.
To point out some of the flaws:
2) Supersonic cruise missile: first you’d have to develop one, and be aware that politically you cannot have the same missile armed with nukes and conventional warhead. It would be a nuke alone, that you’d have to design, produce, acquire and maintain. The risk is the cost of the program spiraling out of control, and it would not be a surprise. Besides, it would have not just to be very fast and possibly stealth, but it should have RANGE. More than the range of the Tomahawk. And in the western world such a missile does not exist and there never was an attempt to buy such a piece of engineering tech. I can see lots of things going bad during development and the program being scrapped well before producing a missile that would be horribly expensive anyway.
3) Scalp, Storm Shadow, Tomahawk or even BramHos based nuclear missiles are not going to be feasible, because the US, France, Russia and India would never allow the UK to have a nuke mounted on missiles they use for all sorts of conventional tasks, with the risks connected to it.
When I asked about supersonic cruise missiles I already pointed out the cost (i.e. have to develop new technology) but since the US, France, Russia and India all have supersonic or hypersonic cruise missile technology or programmes and the techniques for making a supersonic cruise missile (such as ram jets) are a know factor I do not think it would be impossible. I would have thought that buying an off-shelf system only to modify it for use by UK for nuclear warheads would not cause US or France any problems as the UK would be using the system in a single use capacity even if the US or France used it for other roles.
Of course the different scenario’s (ballistic versus cruise, number and types of submarines) need to be worked out and costed – something they should have done as part of the SDSR rather than rule out different options for the nuclear deterrent, if only to conclusively prove that the current option represented the best value for money.
nocutstoRAFWhat about using nuclear cruise missiles based on a supersonic cruise missile (rather than the sub-sonic performance of Storm Shadow and Tomahawk) – I presume that higher the speed harder it is for air defence systems to intercept the missile so you would have a better chance of pentrating the air defences?
Also presumably you could use a nuclear cruise missile or even a conventional one targeted at where you think the long range air defences are located to neutralise them and then create a channel for your nuclear missile.
My only objections to nuclear cruise missiles is the cost of developing the new system combined with the fact that we would have to make it clear which of our subs are carry nuclear cruise missiles so that no-one thought a cruise missile launch was a nuclear one and the UK had gone back on their policy of only using nukes in retaliation for a nuclear attack.
On a separate note is it possible to fit a air-fuel “bomb” warhead on a ballistic or large cruise missile to use them for tactical purposes -i.e. flatten an entire training camp in one go.
nocutstoRAFThe Prime Minister’s power is pretty much fluid and depends on how popular he is both in general and within his party and there is a lot of backroom politics involved, and certainly we saw in the last Government what can happen: Gordon Brown in the same role as George Osborne undermined Tony Blair both as a consequence of his iron grip on budgets that saw Iraq and Afghanistan under-funded and as a consequence of his in-fighting with Tony Blair to get Tony out so he could become PM. Then once he was PM and things turned bad he was undermined left, right and centre by his own party and the Cabinet seemed to be able to do and say what the like without him slapping them down.
Saying all that David Cameron should have enough clout to slap down either George Osbourne or Liam Fox however the issue might be that his Liberal Democrat partners would be happy with the Trident replacement being scaled back and David Cameron’s big weakness right now is keeping the coalition going so he will look to do a deal in the backroom that solves the matter (so I can either see that the Trident replacement budget as well as its cost will be moved to the MoD or it will be agreed that funding the Trident replacement is already a saving and they exempt the MoD from any further cuts).
nocutstoRAFIn fact at this point Fox should make it clear that it is not viable to fund Trident from the core budget and scrap plans for Trident replacement at all.
If the government truly is committed to maintaining a deterrent, it must pay for it, as from plan and from logic. It has no sense to have a nuclear deterrent if you have to destroy the conventional fighting force for it. At that point, of the two, it is Trident which has to go.Accepting all the consequences in loss of political power, prestige and security.
Because at peak annual espenditure, it would mean that the MOD would spend 1.5 billion of its budget on Trident alone. How the hell can it survive such a thing when it is so tremendously overstretched already…???
Anyway, Fox says a thing, Osborne another. Since they are both ministers of the current government, i’m guessing that the government itself must take a position sooner rather than later, right…?
Who has the ultimate word, the Prime minister?
I don’t think the Treasury has the power to ultimately decide on its own who has to pay, isn’t so?
I agree that Liam Fox should at the very least draw up two plans one where he cuts 10% or 20% but drops Trident replacement and the other where he funds Trident replacement by cutting the Army and pulling them out of Afghanistan now and force the Prime Minster (PM) and the Cabinet to decide which of the options is more palatable.
The problem is that the PM has a lot less power than many other forms of government, as the Cabinet is almost like a body of equals and the only way the PM can overule an individual without risk is if he has strong backing from his party, however he should certainly step in as the public spat between two senior Conservatives is unseemly and unnecessary and causing certain people (myself included) certain amount of paranoia about the future of the armed forces.
nocutstoRAFStill if George Osbourne gets his way and the MoD first cuts their budget by 20% then has to take a further £20 billion out of their budget to pay for the replacement for Trident then you can expect ship, planes and boots on ground to be cut drastically as the combination of the two (20% reduction and Trident from MoD budget not central budget) would be equal to cuts in the region ~26% assuming re-capitalisation for the Trident replacement are spread over 10 years.
nocutstoRAFJust to show that we are not the only ones picking on Converteams announcement on EMCAT and debating the F-35B and if there is going to be a plan B alternative – I found this over on Think Defence:
http://www.thinkdefence.co.uk/2010/07/f35b-hedging-ones-bets/
nocutstoRAF“or that EMCAT works and they will switch to catapult based fighter, in either scenario the high cost of keeping the Harrier’s running is just not worth the extra cost.”
Can we put this one to bed now?. The ONLY criteria that will see a CATOBAR conversion for CVF-01 as completed is a total cancellation of F-35B. Returning to catapult operation throws away the whole operational concept of UK Carrier Strike as currently defined.
We will not put ourselves back in the situation of tying ourselves down to the need to maintain deck qualified pools of pilots, with reduced sortie rates, reduced airframe lives and higher shipboard operational costs just on a whim to say a few million quid per airframe.
I think you are right, that the F-35B is the way MoD is going and is part of a coherent plan and the MoD will only abandon the plan if the F-35B is cancelled. Saying that it is obvious that the heads of the armed forces are currently brainstorming all sorts of weird and wonderful ideas to cut costs and you cannot be sure exactly what will happen when people are forced to think outside the box.
With regard to the savings been only a few million nothing that LM has said has convinced me that when the UK decides to buy F-35B it will only be a few million pounds per plane more expensive than the alternatives, I expect it to still be 10 – 20 million pounds a plane more expensive than the cheapest alternative. Plus EMCAT is projected to reduce wear and tear on carrier airplanes so that their airframes last longer than if they are operate with a traditional catapult, so all the cost calculations for the different options might be out of date. By the way I am no fanboy of the SH or Rafale-M or any of the other alternatives all I want is that there be two carriers with enough aircraft available that when the UK needs to send one into harms way for strike mission it can do so.
nocutstoRAFIn an attempt to be positive – the early retirement of the Harriers might just mean they will join the USM in buying F-35B’s to use in 2012 as the USM seem confident that the F-35B will be in service by then, or that EMCAT works and they will switch to catapult based fighter, in either scenario the high cost of keeping the Harrier’s running is just not worth the extra cost.
I view the whole Trident story as a cunning ruse – I think the Treasury is going to give Liam Fox the money for Trident less a 10 or 20% saving as part of the reduced MoD budget and all of the sudden over the long term the MoD’s budget goes up (i.e from 2015ish – 2025ish the budget will be between £1.6 – £1.8 billion higher than normal to pay for the replacement for Trident).
Interestingly Prof Malcolm Chalmers an economist at RUSI has suggested ways that the costs of Trident replacement could be reduced and the one I liked best was to stretch the Astute add a very small number of launch tubes for nuclear ballistic missiles and then build around 6 of the new class and deploy nukes on them when and as needed else use them alongside Astute, making it hard to be sure if and where the UK has it’s deterrent at sea.
nocutstoRAFUnfortunately Sir Richard Dannatt has voiced that in his opinion that FRES was delayed due to money for them being used for the carriers and a lot of people are going to believe him over whatever the MoD might say on the matter.
nocutstoRAFFrom what I’ve read of his public statements, Dannatt has never learned not to assume that the next war will be the same as the current one. If he was a general in 1940, he’d be preparing for a few years in the trenches. 🙁
I think all the top brass suffer from that particular problem the only difference for the RN is that how they want to fight the last war is relevant for the most part to today, particularly given how far they have been cut back.
nocutstoRAFJust to mention Sir Richard Dannatt has left the Army, he is likely to become a Peer and there was originally plans to make him a defence minister once he was raised to the House of Lords, but I did read a story (in the Guardian I think) which said that Liam Fox was opposed to any such move.
nocutstoRAFJust seen this story based on comments made by Sir Richard Dannatt to the Iraq enquiry:
http://www.defencemanagement.com/news_story.asp?id=13629
To quote the key part:
Dannatt was also critical of the “internal machinations” which resulted in the Future Rapid Effects System (FRES) in-service date being pushed back from 2007 to 2015.
“It has now moved so far to the right that it is effectively a dead programme,” he said. “The money that might have gone into the FRES programme substantially went into the carrier programme.”
I am glad Liam Fox blocked has so far blocked him from getting a role in the Government as was the original plan, if Dannatt was in charge he would be cancelling the carriers to buy a new scout mainly because the British Army has some sort of “scout” envy that Scimitar does not match up to US armoured reconnaissance vehicles (yes I know the Scimitar are reaching the end of their service life but you cannot let a small fact that like that ruin the point I wanted to make).
nocutstoRAFJust a quick reply:
RE: development cost of the F-35B, I understood from the comments of the head of the RAF that we had paid all the development costs we agreed to and we were taking part in the evaluation programme but that was where our commitments end, if the F-35B in the evaluation programme did not perform as expected we had no commitment to buy any F-35’s.
RE: My SH comments – Boeing pays US taxes and employs US employee’s and this means that certain members of congress and senate are going to go to bat for the UK if we buy SH international (or whatever unique UK version that if it happened the RAF would go for), especially if it leads to sales to non-European countries buying solely on the basis that Boeing’s marketing people can point to a large Western military power deciding to operate them. Yes Eurofighter consortium and the countries funding the plane might be miffed but lets face it the Typhoon and SH are different planes with different roles and costs and if evaluation includes tech transfer then the SH is going to lose.
nocutstoRAFI thought we had already invested our money in the F-35 Programme, is that not the case?
As for the impact on RR we are talking about 135 less sales on more than a decade than currently planned, it is negligible and depending upon the replacement option selected we could deal with the impact.
I am sure the press would make more out of us spending money on fast jets than on buying a different fast jet to the one originally planned, as far as most of the press are concerned, fast jets are a waste of money as we have plenty of them as is.
Politically speaking, if we went for Super Hornet international, then we are still putting the money into a US companies pocket. Plus we would be logical to use a US company for the support of the planes and pay to train with the USN, I suspect that over the long term we would give even more money to the US than with the F-35. It would also be a major coup for the US if the UK was the launch customer for Boeing’s proposed International version of the SH, as it looks like increasingly the non-European customers are being priced out of the market and considering extending the life of their legacy aircraft by upgrading them or replacing them with the latest versions of F-15’s, F/A-18 E/F, Rafales, or the latest flavours Russian fighters and occasionally they buy Typhoon’s, if we went Super Hornet I think a fair number of other countries would as well.
Hell, if we where considering only political options I would be telling David Cameron to tell the Indian Government the UK will buy 70 LCA (N) Mk II with a EJ200 engine if they buy Typhoon for the MMRCA, as this along with the Hawk contract would be good politics and good for UK business.
With regard to the choice of what to fly of the carriers and I hope in the end that the major factor is not price nor are we swayed into a course for political expediency but instead post-SDSR we have a clear strategy and stick with it and spend the money to get the right plane in the correct numbers, which still looks like the F-35B, but I would not be surprised if the F-35B is a casualty of the deficit reduction plans – 😮 apologies to anyone tired of me raising the same point again that there will be either be no F-35B purchase or not enough purchased to be useable 😮
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