The problem the MOD needs to solve is that the best solution is not wanted by the user of the aircraft and will be strongly resisted.

CATOBAR makes perfect sense for providing an airwing for CVF. You get the choice of 3 different aircraft, Rafale, F18 and F35 C, with variable cost and capability options. You get operational convergence with the principle allies, US and French navies. The additional infrastructure cost for the ships could easily be made up from the lower cost of the F18 option if cost was to be the principle driver. It opens the door to Hawkeye at some future date to replace the ASAC 7 and any future Euro UCAV will likely have a CATOBAR version as the French will insist.

The problem is that the RAF own all fast jets and will be the buyer of all F35. The RAF want F35 B because they will provide the vast majority of the aircrew for the new aircraft and they want it based on land like their other assets, with occasional familiarisation visits to a carrier. This fits the expeditionary air group idea with CVF as ‘just another airbase’. This rules out the use of CATOBAR as this would require dedicated naval air wings that train with and deploy on the carriers pretty much all the timein order to maintain their deck currency. The down side is that it means continuing with a lash-up AEW and makes the prospect of a naval capable UCAV pretty much impossible, as no one is building a VSTOL one. This mans that any UCAV operation in the 2020s will be land base dependent with all the restrictions that that includes.

Forget naval Typhoon, its a red herring, as it involves immediate substantial upfront development costs and a substantial technical risk. Neither would be acceptable in the current climate.

Do you think that when the new Government hints at greater defence collaboration with the French they are giving out a coded message that we will be buying Rafale and switching the QE to CATOBAR?

Or is just a sign that we are going to buy Minstral to replace Ocean and buy La Fayette frigates to fill the C2 role?

Your reasoning seems logical but my main point was that national defence itself is outdated. The escalating costs of defence equipment and the much stronger international community and public opinion make it more and more difficult to launch lone ranger actions.

the way forward is a closer alliance, probably in Nato context, if not in EU context.

Even the US are asking themselves these questions now wondering if they really need 11? aircraft carriers, and a very large marine force, and a huge army and… or if they could live with a smaller national force for their own defence counting on international cooperation to give rogue states a run for their money

I would concur that we need to reconfigure Nato at the very least, however the UK is stuffed all the time that the Nato treaty does not prevent the UK from being forced to go it alone in the South Atlantic as it does currently, where most of our overseas dependencies. I see no chance of us getting any allies (apart from maybe Brazil) in the region to provide mutual defence.

Another issue is that in order to get defence procurement costs down we need to agree common equipment and Nato will not agree it unless we come up with a system where the US companies do not push monopolise everything – if only to make sure that in 50 years should USA stop being our ally the rest of Nato has the capacity to build their own weapon systems.

My problem with this is modifying a commerical machine will simply only be a commerical machine, and while that may be handy for current operations, the worry is what happens when you have high intensity operations against a neer peer competitor later? Your modified Gulfstream becomes so much falling shrapnel about five minutes into hostilities.

In the B1-B, the US has an aircraft developed to handle a far more demanding set of circumstances than it has so far had to contend with. Thus it is able to ‘lower’ itself to these high persistance missions in Afghanistan, whereas in the opposite case the Gulfstream would not be able to reach up to do the B1’s other jobs.

In that case then, it seems to me to be a lot of money for a very limited one trick pony.

Not going to say I would not prefer a purpose built bomber, and even a modified commercial one is unlikely.

However if you believe the old Labour Government and all the lovely ex-army guys who pop up as talking heads we will never fight a near peer rival it will all be asymmetric combat in Southern Hemisphere countries against irregular forces or light infantry who lack air cover or decent air defences, any heavy armour or artillery

Therefore according to the Army we do not need MBTs, artillery, fast jets (unless they are for CAS – and platform of choice for the Army is the Harrier), aircraft carriers, destroyers, frigates – all we need are more boots on the ground, lots and lots of helicopters, air transportable vehicles able to survive IED’s, some ground strike aircraft, lots of big transport aircraft, lots of UAV’s and I imagine they would grudgingly allow sea transport and some corvettes as escorts and patrol.

Of course the Army can only focus on Afghanistan now, and they are forgetting the UK’s trigger points for conflict – resources (such as oil), the political need to feel like the UK is still important, and the displacement of populations near the EC border which risk a refuge crisis in the EU.

If you look at those trigger points then you can see there is a risk of war with either Argentina or Venezuela (the latter more likely) over the Falkland Island, a low level conflict with Russia or any all out conflict with Russian proxies in the Black Sea area, a real chance of being dragged into a conflict with Iran (I think Iran has a secret pact with North Korea, and they are going to trigger a simultaneous conflict with USA while the USA is tied up in surge operations in Afghanistan, but that’s my own personal paranoid conspiracy theory) and that does not discount the fact that China’s increasing military capacity is upsetting the status quo in the Pacific.

well (thinking it through very thoroughly :)) .

The UK is planning to do A2G with UCAV and F35 so a new aircraft for A2A is required not quite yet….

I want a new system to be developed but value for money dictates that its a bit early for that isn’t it?

Well IMHO it all depends on the PAK-FA, will it be a game changer, if it has superior A2A performance to the F-35 and the Typhoon and Russia sells a thousand fighters to countries that do not exactly like Britain or Nato, then we along with the rest of Nato (bar USA with F-22) are going to have to rush out our own Fifth Generation Air Superiority fighter or USA will have to restart the F-22 production line and sell export versions.

I read the self same article and aside from the hourly flying costs thought much the same as you. I have a vague recollection of a US document looking at how to plug the capability gap with fifth gens and making the point that B1bs have dropped a large proprtion of ordnance used in all recent US campaigns and thus having more bombers might be cheaper than more fighters.

I also thought that Japan should look to a B1b as its new F4 replacement in the anti-maritime role. Endurance, payload and range seem perfect. I suspect that politics and fear might put the kybosh on that though….. 🙂

Al

For those not lucky enough to read the article it stated that in Afghanistan the B-1Bs have flown 6,900 missions and logged 70,000 combat hours. The B-1B has employed nearly 40 % of the all munitions while flying only 5 % of all sorties.

While they do have high hourly flying costs (and a lot of upgrading to do the job) they seem to finally found a post cold war purpose.

I simply thought that RAF could do with something similar to save running up of those airframe hours on our remaining GR4’s which are meant to last us to 2025 (http://www.defencemanagement.com/news_story.asp?id=10505)

As an aside from the discussion on carrier aircraft – I read an excellent article in Combat Aircraft Monthly about the B-1B lancer and it made it clear how useful the bomber is for close support, when it can loiter over the battle space (is that the new trendy word for battle field?) for 10 -15 hours and carry 24 JDAM and drop them with pin point accurary using a SNIPER pop. It seems to me that a good use of resouces would be to push for RAF to get bombers again for CAS (rather than as suggested by recent blogs lobbying the US and RAF to get turboprop COIN aircraft).

What does everyone else think?

I don’t think the CdG can carry that many Rafales.

I understood that the CdG can carry up to 40 aircraft, I extrapolated a little to 36 Rafales, I guess some are going to be helos and Hawkeye, but they do seem comparable to the QE as she is meant to be carrying as standard 36 fighters and 4 early warning helos/aircraft