JonesyYeah well, a nice cabin doesnt quite mitigate the effect of being far away from the family & kith & kin does it Jonesy? You pay a lot for the fittings in human cost, when you are in service. I think the public tend to forget this point.
Depends on how old you are I guess. Now, as a mid 30’s father of two and soon to be three, the nice cabins would not be enough to entice me back in to uniform.
If I were a young lad though looking at the RN as a possible source of an adventure and a good deal of decent training for my future, yes, I think it would be a factor. I remember the reasons I joined and, to be honest, getting away from a largely unpleasant kith and kin environment was well up there in the decision making process. The concept of ‘running away to sea’ may be hackneyed and corny. but, it worked for me at the time!.
Retention is meant to be being addressed through TOPMAST reducing the deployment burdens on individuals. Recruitment has been the recent problem and ‘gucci’ new ships like the Carriers, Darings and the new SSN’s with better facilities then even the vessels of a decade back is going to be helpful.
JonesyUSS and Nick,
Sorry for the delay in replying to this. Lots of chaff in the way from our new friend with the recurring cat theme in his persona.
Yeah but the crew complement for both the IAC and the Gorky are almost the same (1200-1500). Even the current Viraat employs a similar figure. Thats one of the advantages of having loads of relatively cheap and qualified labor, which india does.
Where are you getting the crew figures from?. The crew of a Cavour is less than 500 personel – why does IAC require more than double or even triple that…even if you figure in flight deck personnel you are only adding a couple of hundred extra hands at most. I cannot conceive of a need for 1200 crew on IAC unless something is seriously amiss with the spec of the ship. Likewise the maximum of 1600 generally quoted for the Gorshkov is for the Russian STOVL design – not the STOBAR version. Some crew savings will be made in the weapons/warfare branch but these will be more than compensated for with flightdeck crew. There is no way that Gorshkov will operate on the same crew that IAC will have….unless the IAC crew is padded out to ridiculous proportion!.
Building an IAC sized ship in Europe is no joke –
1) What would be the cost of building the ship?
2) What would be the cost of equipping it?
3) What about the cost of its air wing (probly rafales)
4) What about crew training costs?
The original price solely for the refit of the Adm Gorshkov was released as US$700mn. That price alone has now raised by, if reports are correct, an additional US$1.2bn. So we have $2bn near as damnit for the free carrier to reach Indian service entry. That is before we look at whole-life expenditure which is the real factor of note as it will, rapidly, outstrip the initial build cost of the vessel itself. Lets say, for the sake of argument, that Gorshkov averages out at $300mn per annum in ops costs – considering an RN CVS tips in at about half that figure I’d say its good enough for ballpark. Its going to cost triple its acquisition price again by the end of a 20yr service life. Whole life, including the new sticker price, you are looking at $8bn to keep what will be a modest number of unproven Russian fighters at sea. Without the costs of the fighters themselves.
So what you are looking for is a better solution than Gorshkov with a whole-life budget of US$8bn. If you can acquire a modern and efficient hull you shave $100mn off that operations cost a year. Remember CVF – 2 hulls aimed at ops costs of £200mn (US$400mn) or one hull, roughly, $200mn USD per annum. 20 years at $200mn -> $4bn in ops budget. So for the same whole life cost, with an economical hull, India could’ve spent $4bn upfront on a carrier – present $4bn to Izar, DCN or Fincantieri in 2005 and they would have come up with a very nice vessel for you.
This isnt the end of it either…with a modern design in Gorshkov’s place there is a ready made template for IAC, so, India licenses the original design and carries it through for three or four hulls indigenising along the way. So your IAC spend is suddenly shrunk to the license fee and you have full commonality throughout your carrier fleet!. They can still opt for MiG-29K and STOBAR as easily as the existing IAC has with Italian input so the ‘expensive fighter’ argument need not be relevent either. Unless the Russians would’ve pulled out of the MiG sale without the Gorshkov strings….who knows?!.
Bottom line this is all fairly basic defence procurement procedure. No-one, not even the inept clowns in UK MoD, stop reading at the upfront costs because, as was alleged, you cant get away from whole-life costs – no matter how many attempts are made to ‘fudge’ them. You pay for the maintenance or sooner or later the ship is tied alongside mission ineffective. Even the USN are in the process of relearning this lesson.
Make no mistake India, and its govt officials, knew that Gorshkov was a gamble every bit as much as the Indian Navy did. They couldnt have NOT known what the year-on-year expenses were likely to be….what they were banking on was that the inital $700mn price wouldnt move which, given the level of refit even as it stood in 2005, was extremely unlikely to be the case. Everyone knew that it wasnt enough money and the provided service entry schedule was a work of fiction. Still – thats why they call it gambling right?!.
JonesyPlanesman
Many Brits would baulk at the idea, but seriously what articulate arguments can be made against having full-strength regiments, squadrons and ships?
We already have foreign nationals serving aboard RN ships in the form of the Chinese laundrymen and bloody critical to the ships company they are too!.
Having a solely foreign-crewed vessel needs little conscious effort to form an articulate argument against. Security. Performing the kinds of background checks necessary to allow someone access to, and knowlege of, state-of-the-art weapons systems crucial to national defence is not an infallible process within the UK. Take that to sunny Lithuania and try and establish what potential security risk an applicant is likely to be.
Anyway, I cant see us having an issue crewing the new vessels – T45 in particular. Have you seen the accomodation they get on the Darings?. IIRC even the senior rates are in a 2 berth cabin that looked a lot plusher than any shore establishment I was based at!. Far cry from the gulches of old!.
JonesyFunny, that smaller array I posted was certainly talking about targeting systems either actively or passively. But you say it cannot be done, so…
I said classification cant be done….because it cant. Detection has been done for decades and has been evaded for decades under operational conditions too.
The article you posted are very interesting but, again, nothing new. I am a member of the IEEE. The scatter modelling and templated propagation processing techniques are all very interesting but they are largely concerned with increasing detection potential of a maritime target in heavy seas than anything useful in targetting. Even the MIT article really does more to detail the problems involved with getting a meaningful RCS profile than any solution….and does nothing to address the problem of target aspect.
Range and resolving power can be increased by using a more powerful array.
Range yes – Resolution no. This is OTH tropobounce radar we are talking about here.
They start popping off missiles and see what they hit. Maybe they don’t hit the CVN right off, so what? They’re still hitting important components of the CVBG.
Or they are expending a finite supply of costly missiles hitting the FFG-7’s decoying for the real CVBG whilst the carrier group, using E-2/UAV sensor coverage, steams merrily on. Remember these things will have precious little cross range ability. An FFG skipper at flank with a good helmsman, and a good stock of RF expends, might fancy his chances at dodging one of these RV’s.
If the CVBG is going to not be emitting, then it has been mission-killed already.
Offboard and passive sensors. E-2 can be operating 200 miles away from the carrier and still provide coverage. A wiley CAG would site another E-2 a hundred miles farther out, and back up course track, than that to try and draw opfor ELINT teams into boxing the ‘carrier’ the wrong side of the ‘real’ E-2. Lots of deceptive tricks can be played if the enemy is foolish enough to rely on ELINT.
By nature we have to care about nearly the entire ocean. China only needs to worry about a swath near and around Formosa. Far cheaper to monitor a piece than to monitor the whole pie.
How far out can the USN start with the saturation TLAM strikes?. The Chinese need to add a couple of hundred kms to that range figure and thats the depth they need to cover to deny the USN theatre-entry. Thats a LOT more than you are insinuating here Sean!.
JonesyOh, that’s just an example of an OTH system that can pick out targets well beyond 300 km, that’s all. That thing is pretty small anyway, a lot of China’s OTH systems are enourmous systems coming close to the USSR’s Duga BMEW systems in size.
Sean it is nothing new or revolutionary to detect a target at sea using a tropbounce. People have been developing systems to exploit various aspects of anomalous atmospheric propagation of radar signals as long as the concepts have been known. The simple fact is that, at the frequencies employed, you CANNOT get sufficient resolution off an OTH radar to target from. Please understand this – it goes for the big fixed arrays just as much as the smaller more mobile ones and it goes for western OTH radar as much as Chinese or Russian. Your guys use OTH radar….ask them.
Never heard of OTH-T, I take it.
Yes its not a new term either. In the Royal Navy Merlin HM1 is considered an OTH-T asset because it can target over-the-horizon from its parent vessel. OTH-T is the descriptor for the generic practice of Over The Horizon-Targetting. Its a concept – not a system.
Again, the assumption that it has to be an MPA providing target identification. Whatever helps you sleep at night, I guess.
I used MPA just as its the most commonly employed platform. Now it could be a HALE UAV, a radar sat, SURTASS essentially a platform that has the systems and surviveability to derive a target ID from the OTH cue-in. I sleep just fine thanks….as I would expect to aboard any CV/CVN at theatre-entry range off the Chinese coast AShBM’s or not!.
Yes of course, because something didn’t work at one point means it will never work at all. How silly of me, I should be smited for not believing in the infallibility of Western naval power.
Getting a bit hysterical Sean?. You dont have to believe in ‘the infallibility of western naval power’. All thats required is believing in the difficulty of targetting naval vessels at very long ranges. Look at the amount your nation is spending on its BAMS programme and its space-based surveillance capability. Ask yourself, honestly, if anyone else is spending that much?.
ELINT systems are far more advanced now than they were in the Cold War, for starters. At the outbreak of hostilities is is not likely that your average CVN will be travelling about with every electronic emitter turned off; that obliterates any hope of having a worthwhile amount of SA when hostilities kick off.
Offboard and passive surveillance Sean. Basic information warfare – collection of data on your opposition whilst restricting that which he can collect on you. Navies have been practising it for a very long time. Let me put this in terms you might understand – you get excited about the Russian SA-10 systems yes – what value does that system have if it needed the target to emit on a recognisable military radar set or be behaving in the fashion of a hostile before it could be employed?.
SA-10 can engage a stealth aircraft if the plane is close enough to the SA-10 guidance radar to get enough of a skin-paint to allow the missile to guide yes?. If that range is inside of the release range of the stealth aircrafts standoff ordnance how likely is the battery to survive?. OTH radar and its analogies not only have to be able to detect and cue a descriminator-asset in to get the targetting solution for the AShBM but they have to do it before the carrier and its supporting arms can destroy those targetting assets.
When the AShBM is bussing out intelligent autonomous, high endurance, hunting antiship missiles then its a threat. Until then its a US fantasy to try and secure funding for CG(X) that Chinese internet warriors have cottoned on to!.
Jonesy“up to 450 km” your site says Sean…and it doesnt say its discriminating anything at that range. It doesnt say that because it isnt. This is simply because the frequencies used, in the operating technique employed, do not provide sufficient resolution. No OTH set does at anything above about 300km.
What OTH does is cue in the other assets you listed…MPA and the such like. Then again they only cue in based on course and signal so any vessel, providing a sufficient return signal, on a suspect course track would have to be tasked out to the MPA’s. Going to need lots and lots of MPA’s….or lots and lots of AShBM’s and a very cavalier attitude to sinking cruise liners and VLCC’s!. Have a look at a supertanker with its nice long, wide flat maindeck and then look at the nice wide flat maindeck of an aircraft carrier. Without a seriously high radar resolution – i.e SAR at about 20m res those two are VERY easy to confuse on the scope. As the RAF Nimrod force proved!
The ELINT thing is a joke and you surely know it. If you must rely on the target being complicit in its own destruction then you have a pretty useless weapons system. There is also nothing new in the passive/active seeker system you are theorizing for your fantasy-AshBM…it was the system employed by TASM with some downright hilarious results at times when long-range shots were attempted.
JonesyOnly in a world where OTH radar systems do not exist…
…or a world where OTH radar has enough resolution to pick out a ship beyond about 300km. Certainly not this one!.
JonesySo lets connect the dots here….
1)Zumwalt DDG programme just reported to be down to units-ordered only.
2)Tico CG’s approaching end-of-life and no Clancy-esque multi-regiment, blue-water, air threat likely anywhere for the next couple of decades.
3)CG(X) project definition phase in prolonged state of flip-flopping as DDG-1000 stole much of the CG(X) thunder.
So the CG(X), to be relevent, needs to do something more than the DDG’s to justify its funding especially now DDG-1000 has, apparently, gone the same way as LCS.
Suddenly there is a Washingon Times article about ‘possible’ Chinese anti-carrier ballistic missiles. Missiles that everyone knew about, and many have debunked as impractical without a shudder-inducing amount spent on radarsats, a few years back.
Hmmm. I think I know how the PLAN can defeat the USN now. All they have to do is come out with the real story behind these ‘AShBM’s’, make it perfectly clear that they dont really have them and couldnt employ them without a huge and expensive ramp up of their ocean reconaissance assets anyway, then sit back and watch while the US Govt backs off CG(X) as well as DDG-1000!.
JonesyDoes the Tornado have a Anti-Shipping role in any Air Force anymore????
Simple answer to that one is not a standoff-missile antishipping role in the sense that aircraft/missile combinations like JH-7/C80x have. There was a seperate variant of Tonka GR1 – the GR1B – that was the Sea Eagle shooter replacing the Buccs in RAF service. That missile integration wasn’t continued through with the GR4 upgrades.
Its conceivable that the RAF’s AGM-65G2’s could be adapted for GR4 and that missile could do significant damage to a combattant, up to destroyer size, with short-ranged point defenses only. Obviously the usual range of free-fall dumb and guided ordnance and CRV7 rockets could also be utilised for pressing anti-shipping attacks on lesser-defended targets also.
JonesyThat’s what Russia will do. Hairy new cold war.
…and it will establish a precedent for many others to follow. I’d not think the Cold War would be the accurate model for this one…more like a return to the days of Govt sponsored ‘privateers’ going for natural resources wherever the most tenuous of claims exists reinforcing the claim with firepower.
JonesyThats a long way off. Even then, the IN may still use the Gorshkov intensively, since rotating the 3 carriers- 2 operational at any given time, one berthed, was what they’d always planned. Simply stated, there is not a single ship the IN has purchased, which they havent done their best to keep running and in regular use, despite associated costs. Plus the Indian economic growth means that maint budgets have been seeing a regular rise so the Navy is ok with it.
Yeah Nick but Indian economic growth is not isolated from the rest of the global economy. Werent there reports a week or so back about Indian truck drivers on strike over high fuel prices?. Costs of fuel and rising costs of manpower, plus the single-user nature of much of the equipment in the Gorshkov is going to add up to a vessel that will be disproportionately expensive to operate alongside the IAC.
Naturally, when there is no alternative, the carrier will deploy and the IN is obviously capable of keeping elderly ships at sea. All that is being said here though is, when the IAC happens and 2 hulls get in the water, the difference between a modern, efficient, hull and Gorshkov is going to be very stark. My personal expectation is that with escalating costs the IN will be faced with a pragmatic choice and that Gorshkov may be an excellent candidate for ‘extended-readiness’ status!.
JonesyYou mean Star that the Russians will willingly SELL weapons and transfer technology to the nations in the region.
As we’ve seen already with Venezuela the Russian weapons, in the quantities that are affordable to those nations, do not do a lot to change the strategic balance. A couple of squadrons of Flankers, two or three Kilo’s or a couple of S-300 batteries are not going to change the equation to any sugnificant extent.
Now, if the Argentines were suddenly able to occupy the islands, take MPA intact, base a couple of squadrons each of fully-trained-up Bears, Flankers and MiG-29alphabetti-spaghetti’s supported by at least 5 A-50’s and a detachment of Il-78’s and an interlocking comprehensive IADS driving a multizonal doube-digit SAM environment. Then we are talking about a force mix that would give us significant pause for thought.
Seeings as there is no South American country that possess such a force mix for its own national defence I think the chances of us finding something that consitutes a materialisation of Stars “Russia will gladly help with weopons and technology the entire region” unlikely in the extreme!
JonesyThe Aeronavale provided a measure of assistance to the RN exercising our EW crews with Super Etendard/Agave. We knew all about Agave by the end of the serial and had the codename ‘HANDBRAKE’ assigned to its signature.
We didnt need any help with Exocet seeings as we had it in the fleet with the MM38/GWS50 system. Thats not to say they didnt provide any Exocet assistance after hostilities started…its been alleged that the Argentine AM39’s weren’t integrated to the specific SuE airframes delivered at the start of the conflict. Aerospatiale assistance, officially denied, nevertheless happened. Hard for us to call foul really seeings the assistance we got with fitting Shrike to the Vulcan force from a mysterious team of ‘South Africans’ at Ascension.
JonesyPaveways were used in the Falklands on several occasions – all designated by a GBD. At least two missed drops were caused by unfamiliarity with the designators by the ground forces. Essentially in both missed drops a loft profile was attempted to get maximum standoff for the GR3 – both designator crews turned their laser on too early and pulled the bomb off the arc too early for it to make the required range.
As with all things experience caught up with the ground designators and several successful drops were made.
As has been stated the GR9’s are currently using Sniper pods in Afghanistan.
JonesyProve it! lets see you throw some fact based figures on how much the gorky is going to cost over its lifetime and how much one of your hypothetical new a/c carrier costs. Bottomline is, you simply can’t – no such hypothetical carrier exists and the Vikad has not even been inducted yet. At best you can speculate.
No need for figures USS. The Goshkov, even with its new boilers, is a VERY manpower intensive vessel – an 8 boiler steam plant is going to occupy the attentions of a great many stokers. Simply put a modern, gas turbine prime-mover, electric propulsion system is more efficient and easier to maintain by several orders of magnitude.
You dont need to be an engineer officer to see the difference between a propulsion system that requires 8 boilers and many hundreds of miles of high-pressure steam piping (whose thousands of joints and valves require careful routine maintenance) and a propulsion system that doesnt even need conventional gearboxes and inline shafts to transfer motive force to the screws.
IF you need some figures to latch on to the RN originally specified the annual operating costs of the two CVF’s to be no more than the costs of the 3 CVS’s. In monetary terms approx £200mn per year. As I understand it that target hasnt been achieved, but, its not far off. To operate a 65k ton carrier on an annual budget that is 5 or 6 times that of a Type23 frigate is quite an achievement. To further indicate the difference between modern propulsion and legacy the Type45, with its IEP, is described as offering a fuel burn 55% of that for a COGAG Type42, for equivalent distance, with a hull thats twice the displacement.
Lifecycle costs for the Gorshkov WILL push its price higher and higher for the IN especially when fuel, spares and wage costs really start to ramp up. Problem for the IN is that the IAC looks like it should be everything the Gorshkov isnt and the comparison is going to be very easy for the accountants to make in cost-per-deployment terms. In those terms, if nothing else, I wouldnt expect Gorshkov to have the service life in the IN that some here expect.
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