JonesyWell, what does Turkey really need……………or should I say want?
LOL Those being as you, by all appearances accurately, note two seperate things!. Orko suggests that what the Turks are looking for is some form of power projection capability.
They have an amphibious brigade comprising 3 Marine battalions and an armoured battalion (TO&E’s of these units would be appreciated!) plus attachments. So the overall likely amphibious requirement would be for the ability to put ashore a brigade strength landing force comprising, say, 2 battalions of infantry with, perhaps, 2 companys of armour plus support elements. A fairly comprehensive force by any measure. Orko says that they want to address this with a large LPD and a pair of LSTs.
We’ve already covered the drawbacks of beaching ops with LSTs and, if you look at the map of the Aegean below (the most likely oparea for Turkish amphibious operations!) you’ll perhaps understand my point about the undesireability of 15-18k ton LPD’s in those waters – especially when you look at the scale!. The phrase about all the eggs in the one basket coming to mind!. Not to mention the routine issue of availability with a single hull.
As stated above I think they need to look at their programs again. I think the Italian San Giorgio is perfect for the Turkish requirement for the LPD and LST replacement, accepting that the LST requirement is in need of some modification, and going with one design for both is just good sense. To my mind 3 San Giorgios is by far the better option than a Dokdo and a pair of LSTs.
Jonesy10 nm??? THats supposed to save a LPD? From what? Even a small C-701 will be a threat at that range. No Navy would likely try to land a armor force without capturing a beach head. The only way to ensure that LPD/LST are truly safe is to have some air component to neutralize these threats.
Directed fire Broncho old boy!. Putting the amphib on the beach and stationary opens it up to a whole raft of threat weapons that a ship standing 10nm offshore isnt exposed to.
Put it this way – you’ve had your air component sweep across and hit all sorts of fixed targets to prepare the landing beach. You call in your amphibs to put MBT’s onshore. While this is happening the two spec ops lads in a covert OP monitoring your landing beach get on the radio and 20kms inland 3 Smerch launch vehicles roll out of their covered positions and fire 36 rockets in salvo. With the LPD you’ve probably lost the armour and maybe, if unlucky, the LCU’s. With the LST odds on you lose the ship, its crew and everything therein.
10nm offshore doesnt sound much and certainly is no defence against advanced AShM shore batteries and radar-directed long-range coastal artillery. It does however offer much, much better protection against less-advanced threat systems that the beached LST most definitely IS vulnerable to.
Jonesy16 Baraks?. Realistically Broncho you can treble that number and a Dokdo will still be thankful its operating under TuAF coverage. When will people realise that if the defensive armament on a HVU is ever actually employed then there has been a massive screw up in the attack planning!.
The difference between the LPD deploying armour by LCU/LCAC from 10nm offshore and the LST beached and disgorging tanks over the bows is very obvious. Its very difficult to direct fire on to a ship thats over the horizon. Beached the LST is a stationary target for artillery, tanks, even ATGMs in an opposed landing. Christ help the LST crew if there’s a concealed hostile OP/FAC with a radio controlling a couple of LGB-toting tactical strikers. Standing offshore sending in LCU’s means that the threat to the LHD is considerably reduced against the kind of basic shore defences that would murder the LST.
JonesyA 20k tonne LPD is a sitting duck as turkish navy can’t really deploy it safely anywhere away from its shores. So whats the point?
That being quite the point I was making earlier in concert with Swerve!. The San Giorgio’s at least have a dockside loading ramp and could be valuable as military sealift – similar to the way the Italians use them.
JonesyDont know whether you could use the IN acquisition of the type as indicative of the continued viability of beaching LST’s to deploy armour!.
An LST may be useable to the IN, in peacetime, for putting heavy equipment ashore in locations where there is little conventional port infrastructure. That value is minimal to those nations who tend to operate in more developed areas. As stated the military concept of risking a 5k ton amphib to deliver, in the IN vessels case, 11 main battle tanks is so ludicrous as to be not worth considering. As the Sir Galahad fiasco proved in 1982 amphibs are very, very vulnerable close inshore in the face of even a modest threat level.
JonesyOrko,
The link to the Fincanteiri offering seems to be broken?. I’ve tried hitting the URL behind it and that appears non-functional also. If as seems likely from the title is a 15k ton LPD the decision is a fairly strange one given the existence of the mature, evolved, San Giorgio design.
Swerve,
Good point on the LST. With the spread of pgm’s now the concept of beaching a valuable amphib to let it offload heavy armour is one that most believe has had its day. Even our LCU Mk10’s dont actually beach to let off a Chally – they just get it close enough to shore that it can ford the rest of the way!.
One big LHD and a couple of LST’s does seem a very odd approach for the Turkish Navy to stipulate?. I’ve a feeling that the Singaporean LHD’s might be a bit too light in the aviation dept for a service looking at 18k ton LHD’s, but, a class of three San Giorgio’s, perhaps with a small buy of LCU10’s, to cover both LST and LPD requirements would seem sensible and practical?.
JonesyWhy the BPE Scott?. The Turkish armed forces have no great expeditionary warfare capability to deploy with a BPE and, in reality, little need to develop it.
They operate in the Eastern Med, a confined body of water thats ringed on all sides by nations with developed military capability against any of which a sqdn of STOVL fighters is going to have marginal impact. Furthermore, arguably, all their regional conflict flashpoints are within reach of conventional land-based air.
In such confined waters, in the face of a considerable air and sub-surface threat that the Turkish Navy isnt really very well equipped to face, dumping in a great big HVU like a BPE would be unwise. Doing it for little in the way of useable capability in return is just plain nuts!.
IMO the Dokdo is bigger than is ideal for those waters and the Turkish requirement would appear, at cursory glance, to need nothing more than could be provided by a San Giorgio Mod. The Italians know the Med – if they use smaller, but still capable, vessels there is a reason for it!.
JonesyYou’ll want to alert Raytheon, the USN, and the rest of the participating NATO navies as they clearly don’t know what they’re talking about. :rolleyes:
What he’s saying is that, for the kind of SHORADS anti-air suite LCS would require in its intended operational environment, anything less than an active seeker is a poor solution. He’s right too!.
If your opponent looses off the combined firepower of a 3 TEL Kh-35 shore battery sat parked 15km inland you will value the VL MICA capability to handle saturation fire much more than ESSM’s ability to pot targets 50km off!.
I’m sure the usual SPY-1/SM-2 and ESSM exponents will now come on and wax lyrical about how many missiles can be kept up in the air and that the fire-channel limitation is overstated, but, the fact remains that reliance on shipboard fire-channels puts a restriction on your target engagement capability. If one of your SAMs misses an inbound, for example, the fire channel can not be released and the engagement cycle can not jump to the next target. Active missiles do not suffer this limitation and, therefore, have to be the optimal choice for a littoral combat ship.
As to the question of equipping the LCS adequately for its mission I dont see the need for the OTO gun. You’ll not be much more successful with NGFS from a 3″ mount anymore than you will with the 57mm and the Bofors 3P ammunition offers a useful airburst option against soft targets ashore and against small craft.
Likewise if you have a Bofors 57 for’d and a battery of 6 4-shot Sylver A35 modules behind it for VL MICA then I dont see much more anti-air firepower as a necessity!. The Millenium guns are good all rounders but would seem to be a bit of a luxury item seeings – if you are facing a significant enough hostile air/missile threat that the Bofors and SAMs are insufficient – there is absolutely no way that a lone LCS should be in that situation anyway!. The Millenium guns are going to be more useful, by several multiples, than the Typhoon/DS30 type mounts so if the pockets go deep enough and you can spot a few directors they make sense.
Apart from that the only issue would be for some manual last ditch guns – the vulnerability of manned mounts to ‘AK47 fire’ is a little overstated in many quarters. I’d encourage anyone living in a country with suitable firearms laws to try and fire small arms accurately from a moving speedboat/go-fast vessel. A couple of GD’s Naval Mount GAU-19’s would add significantly to the distractions of the AK-47 shooter too!.
My choice of weaponry would therefore be:
1 Mk110/Bofors forward
Sylver A35 VLS – 24 VL MICA
2 Contraves Millenium – aft quarters
2 GD Naval GAU-19/A
…and that is probably way over the top!.
JonesyThe system would need to be tested .
If the UK wants only 25% capabilty of the USN BAMS and that which would not benefit from the future USN upgrades and block versions then by all accounts they can choose the reaper . I dont know if the AESA radar is going to be able to be mounted on the Reaper withouth a re-design and restructure but if UK is willing to pay for everything that is their choice , i bet that the US authorities wont really have any problem .
It would be interesting to see why the US didnt choose the reaper , from my sources i am getting rumours that the GH block 20 was found to be more survivable , more upgradable and faster with higher Loiter time .
The system would not need testing to the tune of $1.5bn though!. You talk as if Mariner hadnt actually seen service before and wasnt developed from a well-proven air vehicle!.
25% of the USN BAMS system capability may actually exceed UK requirements!. If all we intend to do is put in a high-endurance chokepoint patrol on the Gibraltar Straits and the GUIK/North Sea approaches plus limited Atlantic patrolling and forward deployments, i.e Falklands as and when necessary, is there any abiding need for Global Hawk/USN BAMS?. I’d say no.
Likewise on Distillers point about platform growth – we’re not, ever, going to be in the business of surveilling the whole western side of the north atlantic so the UK maritime recce tasking isnt going to evolve in any dramatic fashion. We need a system that can economically cover the atlantic entry chokeponts and, probably, the western med. Likewise we could find use for the system patrolling the north and western approaches to the Falklands. Little else springs to mind that we would need to use such a system for.
Mariner is, by all accounts, sufficient to that task and it will be cheaper, in whole-life terms, than Global Hawk when you consider joint support benefits sharing with the RAF Reaper force.
JonesyThe Mariner would need 1.5 billion in duplicate development and integration , testing approval etc etc.
Why would it need this testing?. The flight control system is essentially that of Reaper. The airframe is fully tested – there may be small changes swapping SeaVue for Searchwater 2000MR perhaps but little of major significance to an airframe capable of carrying impressive external loads already. The C3 backend would have to be developed of course but our needs are far, far simpler than the US BAMS setup and thats if we went far beyond a simple sensor relay back to, presumably, Waddington and Northwood. Hard to see where $1.5bn in development would come from when thats 75%, IIRC, of the far more intricate US BAMS job.
Against that GH is a system that is a larger, more complex, and is one we will have to start from scratch with the infrstructure to support and deploy. For 15 airframes who’s primary advantage is a capability jump we have little realistic need of.
JonesyI suspect you may be right to some extent, but, Global Hawk would still bring ‘start-up’ expenses that Mariner wouldnt. For Mariner the RAF will be able to joint-base, probably, and use the same techs with the same pool of spares, same pilots etc, etc to support both. That is going to make it attractive in a way that Global Hawk cant compete with – however much Global Hawk’s capabilities exceed Mariners.
The questions will be asked if Mariner can do the same job within reasonable parameters as Global Hawk and when that answer comes back positive the cheaper, whole-life, solution is going to win!.
JonesyThey need intelligence on the strip(s) these aircraft use to operate from and a special forces team or an infantry company with a few 81mm mortar tubes!. That, along with some light AAA mounts discretely dotted about on top of government buildings, should decrease the threat quite handily.
If there is a need to track the light aircraft through technical means (i.e not relying on people looking up with mobile phones which might be the most simple and effectice technique!) then they need to get the Indians to bolt one of their israeli aerostat radars onto an old frieghter and park it 20 miles off the Sri Lankan coast. A couple of months ‘testing’ to see if the ‘aerostats work in a marine context’ should be sufficient!.
JonesyThe U.K., Canada, Singapore and Japan are already considered potential buyers for the Navy version of the aircraft, said sea service officials.
Dont see the UK as having great potential as a buyer for GlobalHawk – especially not a $55mn a throw without support and infrastructure costs.
The RAF already operate Reaper so a Mariner version with UK mission equipment would seem much more likely in order to maximise operational efficiencies were a ‘UK BAMS’ requirement to be drawn up. I think Nimrod MRA4 would have to completely fold before such a requirement was even considered to be honest though!
Edit: Its just dawned on me that there is one country conspiciously NOT on that list of potentially interested customers – especially considering the nascent P-8 deal in the offing. India may already operate Israeli Heron’s, but, this maritime Global Hawk would seem to offer a whole new level of strategic surveillance capability – especially as adjuncts to the P-8’s?. Its one system I’m suprised India aren’t keener in pursuing given their current, reasonably advanced, level of UAV marpat focus?.
JonesyWell they did license the airframe.
They had a license to build up to 200 kits. They did not, from any information I have been able to find, have a license to build 95 kits and then gain full rights to the Sukhoi airframe design. The Russian reaction would seem to corroborate that the license has been exceeded somewhat here.
Change BMW to Lincoln and you got a story that actually happened. The engine is still Ford’s of course.
Not the same situation as both were entities of the same parent organisation. The BMW analogy is accurate because it would involve one company ripping off anothers design illegaly.
Russian government attempt to get royalties from all the AK-47s made around the world is a landmark case of precedence for this type of cases.
Which is of course an abiding truth. There is very little doubt that China’s aviation industry will walk away from this one as winners in every respect. As initially noted though its just very amusing seeing the attempts at justication for their behaviour that some people cook up!
JonesyI love the concept that changing the engines, avionics and paint scheme means that its not a Sukhoi designed airframe anymore.
I think Jaguar should catch on to this immediately – they take the body design and chassis of a BMW then install their own engine and dashboard and then slap a Jaguar badge on the front!. Hey presto its a Jaguar!.
The Russian article below is even funnier – they know the Chinese have shafted them so they say the plane is gash anyway!. To think some people pay to see comedy like this!.:D
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