While the Indian navy is spending lots of money on new ships and aircraft, a recent government investigation found that many existing ships were in pretty bad shape because of a lack of cash for repairs and maintenance. Many ships did not have working radars. Most naval radars are imported, and spare parts are either not available, not affordable, or difficult to install. Most shocking, however, was the discovery that the Coast Guard had 38 percent of its ships, and 13 percent of its aircraft unavailable because of parts shortages or other maintenance problems.

Foreign naval officers have long noted that Indian warships had a ramshackle look. This is apparently due to a long standing policy of cutting corners on spare parts and maintenance.

Funnily enough I also find that amusing!. For altogether different reasons than Austin though. My comment would be ‘so whats so special about that?’.

The RN seldom had all the spares it would like and main radars do fail!. There were several RN escorts that ‘went south’ in 82 with in-op sonar sets for example!!!.

A 62% availability rate is not remarkably poor and, depending on the period in which that wonderfully generalised statistic was taken, could even be quite impressive!. 62% availability right off the back of a large FleetEx is quite a different matter than 62% availability after an extended Fleet maintenance stand-down!.

As the saying goes there are lies, damn lies and statistics!!!!

Good guess Ja – they’re Sea Vulcan’s. Think Phalanx but with a more, erm, organic fire control!.

Beats the life out of me why you’d want a manually trained 20mm gatling on a boat (instead of a decent 25 or 30mm single mount) but, hey, there they are and, from memory, a few of the Asian navies bought them!. Irrespective must be some kind of fun to sit in that cab and blast away at drones with one of those things!!!

The SK vessels didnt mount the Sea Vulcan, if my sources are right. They went with the Emerlec 30 up front and a 40mm aft (looking for confirmation of this btw!) with a couple of single 20’s one per beam. The vessels passed to the Phillipine Navy were meant to be fitted with a couple of Harpoons even though lord knows how they’d target them!.

Interesting little tubs definitely! Believe they’ve even seen action is SK service as well – remember reading about skirmishes with NK patrol boats that have involved Sea Dolphins!.

Remember hearing bout this a couple of weeks back and thinking how odd it would be for a navy to want heavyweight interceptors when it faces no specifically defined air threat and its surface vessels would only deploy out of Mex AF coverage in multinational group taskings.

Since then its dawned on me that this could be an absolute piece of genius on someone’s part in the Mexican staff officer system.

They have a large maritime EEZ and upwards of 9000km of coastline, they have a proliferation of targets-of-interest in their oparea (columbian white powder brigade!) and often these targets are using fairly serious machines to burn past existing patrol nets – i.e must be hard to chase down a top-drawer bizjet in a C212 patroller!.

They are developing their capability for theatre surveillance with the ex-Israeli E-2s and they need a platform with the range and performance to be able to position and intercept the high-speed contacts as they appear on the scope.

Essentially the Flankers would be utilised in some form of high-performance MarPat role. They dont need to be spending money acquiring Kh-31’s or anything like that – just lots of close in air-air gunnery and strafing practise as the cannon would be enough to coerce most unarmed druggie bizjets or motor vessels into diverting into the arms of regular fleet units.

If this is the plan its remarkable!.

Neptune,

Do I smell some bad experience with bricks there Steve?

Nail on head there shipmate. Damned vicious things bricks if theyre only wounded!.

Got to agree with you bout the Red Storm film. Would love to see if if it was done right, but, the chances of that are slim to none so……!. Remember being very disappointed when they dropped the whole A-10 strike on the Kirov group from the Red October film. Get the feeling that a Red Storm film would end up being some kind of love story bout that Metoc chappie legging around Iceland with blonde bint in tow and the rest of WWIII being a bit of background!!!.

Nic,

You didnt like Nimitz Class. Personal taste I guess. For me it was pure visualisation – it was obvious that Sandy Woodward was heavily involved in that one and a lot of it ‘felt’ right!. Can’t explain it better than that unfortunately. Rest of those books though should feel most appreciated when they hit the local landfill with the rest of the gash!

Bloody well shouldn’t be ‘military flavoured thrillers’. As he states in every bloody book Robinson is best mates with Sandy Woodward and draws on the good Admiral as his technical resource. Sandy Woodward was known as being a ‘teacher’ on the RN Submarine Command Course (the near-infamous ‘Perisher’), before he took on command of the South Atlantic Task Force in 82. He was regarded, in the submarine community, as one of the best.

Robinsons books, with that weight of knowledge and experience behind them, should be veritable tours de force in the genre. Oddly enough I thought his first book – Nimitz Class – was just that. Clever, insightful, atmospheric and involving. Shame that the rest dropped in quality and credibility the same way a brick does before it lands on your foot!

The Arliegh Burke Flight I’s do have the Harpoon canisters. The Flight I and Flight II vessels could operate in conjunction, much like the Sovremenny and Udaloy class destroyers in the Russian Navy, one with ASW capability and the other with ASuW capability.

Even more than that though USN F-18’s can carry all manner of ASuW ordnance up to and including Harpoon, US SSN’s carry sub-harpoon and Mk48 eels, every vessel of destroyer size or better carries the very useful 5″ Mk45 mount and all their escorts (bar the first flight Burkes) can embark the SH-60B which sports Penguin or Hellfire missiles.

There is therefore a comprehensive ASuW capability within the USN fleet capable of engaging the whole swath of surface targets from capital ships (SSN’s and aircraft) to FAC’s and speedboats (Seahawk/Hellfire and good old 5″ HE). Dropping the Harpoons from the IIA Burkes alters that equation not a bit!.

No your quite right. Mostly they were rebuilt, IIRC, as block III TLAM’s to quickly restore stocks after the heavy TLAM expenditure in Desert Storm.

A few TASM’s may have been held in storage somewhere just in case but its doubtful. All TASM was, from memory, was a Harpoon seeker head mated to a converted Bullpup warhead on a TLAM missile body with a datalink grafted on for MCG. Theoretically TACTOM can do the ship attack attack mission more successfully than TASM anyway so, your friend may be right, they may have an antiship capable Tomahawk on the new Burkes – its just not TASM.

Then again he may just be assuming that because they pulled the Harpoons that there ‘must’ be an antiship missile aboard those vessels which is not the case necessarily.

Neptune,

Narrow beam, you can broaden it above the waterlevel. US carriers have only a beam of 40m on waterline.

Of course youre right, but, then you can start getting some nasty roll behaviour in heavy seas. the French tried the fine hull lines and large overhang with CdeG, because of the relatively feeble reactors, and had to put in a quite complex active stabilisation system to make it all work. now I’ve not seen any pictures of the entire ships company over the lee rail but…! 🙂

For a vessel the size of these Spanish designs it looks, to me that the Hornet was the whole core of the intended airgroup. Makes sense – light jeep carrier + light jeep plane!. Don’t think this would have suited the IN requirement as the designs stood, but, expand the larger design up to 40k full load, 4 COGAG LM2500’s with an aux steam plant and a truly sustainable 27 fastjet airwing plus pinger squadron and AEW detachment and they would have been on the mark for the requirement.

Shame the money wasn’t there for them to do it – they would have taught a few nations about how to run efficient carrier operations!.