And a price tag rivaling the one of the Raptor…

Absolutely…but if you want to do the job you buy the tools. The brief did say ‘aircraft’ as well!.

Seahawk got it, PGM´s launched from the ground.

I dont see how the HiMARS launcher develops its own ISTAR like the aircraft can or how it selects appropriate warhead effect on target like an aircraft, with a mixed loadout, can?. So, to replicate the aircraft capability with ground systems means both tube and rocket artillery plus a supporting tactical UAV detachment!. Simple alternate…wouldnt have said so!.

But if you go from 18 frigates to 6 destroyers, then you can’t even participate in a meaningful way in these kinds of operations anyway due to lack of hull numbers.

You aren’t going to get 18 frigates in place of 6 destroyers though. A comprehensively armed FFG is now 60-65% the cost of a full-up DDG….is your participation dramatically more meaningful if you deploy 2 frigates instead of 1 DD?. The DD, it must be remembered, will always bring more to the party that is ‘meaningful’….i.e the USN seeming quite happy to have a Daring deploy with their carriers in the ME. So say the tradeoff is one Daring or two Formidable class frigates…which deployment is more ‘meaningful’?.

You become a token capability.

Maybe so but a useful token nevertheless.

RN is struggling to meet commitments with smaller fleet.

The answer to that is to enlarge the fleet…not reduce its capability to undertake its mission capability set.

Would it have been better to have acquired only 2-4 Darings and then maintain a larger frigate force.

Nope. You just spread the sunk costs for the hull, machinery and radar/missile system over fewer units making them respectively more expensive. 4 Darings wouldnt be enough to guarantee one with a CVF and one with an amphib group at all times….even 6 is a bit of a gamble. The frigates wouldnt have offered the DD’s capability so you’d end up spending more and getting less, role specific, combat power afloat.

What use is a large ship if fleet is so small, you ‘re struggling to meet peace time commitments and have no capacity for surge operatons?

The use is in maintaining the core capability set. That must always be preserved even if its at the expense of some of the elective ‘Operations Other Than War’. It hasnt been a principle task of the Royal Navy to chase pirates for about 3 centuries…its good to do it if we can as its good training and positive on service morale to clobber some genuine baddies every now and then….same with the anti-drug/anti-smuggling MSO taskings we do around and about. We’re never going to design the surface fleet with the peacetime mission as primary driver though.

Then look at NATO requirements for coalition warfare – NGFS, MCM, sanction enforcement. None of this sounds like AWD territory.

You dont think that ships tasked to NGS or MCM need an anti-air screen?. Supporting those missions in a hostile littoral is exactly an AWD’s mission as is the lesson that came out of the Falklands and the Gulf.

Why is there so many?. I dont think there are especially – we have 6, but, we have HVU’s to screen. France and Italy the wildly excessive 2 apiece, Germany 3, Holland 4 and Spain 5. Of the last two states the Dutch have sacrificed one capability to keep the more industry valuable 7Provs going and the Spanish were early at the party with their boats and, today, they are really more GP hulls with a modest area missile fit than contemporary AAW hulls.

HMS Mermaid was a Yarrow design that was originally built for Ghana. After a period of service in the Royal Navy she was sold to the Royal Malaysian Navy. Still in service as a training ship – she deployed on anti-piracy duties to the Gulf of Aden in 2009 – she underwent a refit in 1997 and had Wartsila diesels fitted. She has a CODAD arrrangement but does anyone know what diesels [Olympus maybe?] she was originally fitted with when she was commissioned into the RN? Thank you.

From memory they should have been Admiralty Standard diesels. The Leopard/Salisbury propulsion fit incorporated eight units of the ASR1 type and Mermaid was very closely related. Have to dig through a couple of books just to confirm though…if someone else doesnt come through first.

Perhaps the Western navies, should get together to have a fast , expensive, long range AShM …

Mach 4-5 Top speed, 250nm+ Range…

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While the expense may not be justified for one navy, getting together and having a robust acquisition program can really bring costs down. The LRASM_B may well be considered by the USN in the future, but the cost associated with developing and procuring of really FAST Ramjet/Scramjet weapons is whats going to be holding everybody back. However if you could have missiles like the LRASM–A , and Scalp as your BULK weapon, and acquire the fast missiles in lesser amounts, you may build up a better overall anti ship capability.

Aren’t we in danger of putting the cart before the horse to a very large extent here?!. Just as the old opposition found with their big very long range antiship missiles the issue is in getting verified targets for them in the first place. What limited them will be every bit as limiting for ‘us’. I’m not seeing any recent, significant, evolutions in US/NATO deployed naval ISTAR sufficient to enable organic VLR antiship shots…unless I’ve missed something significant?. I appreciate the intelligence is being built into new generation weapons to avoid non-combatant strikes etc, but, are we going to have RoE’s that allow shots on non-POSID targets and, even if we were, would we gamble on wasting missiles in that fashion?.

Hang on, is there a budget? Or is this just a thread of people making sh!t up?

MHPC has been acknowledged as being in Assessment phase at, roughly, this time of year in 2011 and work on UW comms and offboard systems directly under the MHP aegis has been underway since at least that time. This confirms that there IS budget and it is being spent. The total budget is the question…originally commentary was that a figure of about 1.6bn was earmarked and that, according to 2010SDSR, MHPC was to start systems deployment around 2018. Verifiable details of both total budget and service entry have become scarce recently. It is an active program though.

The concept of looking at off-the-shelf offboard systems and using the MHPC budget for multirole platforms is simply making sh!t up.

Best you could hope for would be something like a stretched river class like Clyde but with a work deck and perhaps a 57mm if you were really pushing things.

I’m wondering whether we could do just a bit better than that to be honest. As stated my preference would be a 65-70m SWATH – something like a stretched version of the German Customs Borkum/Helgoland 50m hull, but, revolutionary thoughts like that dont seem the Admiralties forte. Sticking to more ‘conventional’ options its still an interesting exercise. If we eliminate the mini-frigates and £100mn-a-pop ‘conventional’ BAM-style OCPV’s as too expensive what does that leave us with?.

The requirements would be distinct:

90m length (for a monohull)
diesels
circa 4000nm range @ 15knts
lloyds naval build (or equivalent)
mission deck/garage
Small boat/Interceptor/UUV launch/recovery system.
Aviation support (embark Wildcat/support Merlin)
Military spec comms/netcentricity
Combat Management System
Air/Surface surveillance system
RF/EO or EO FCS
ESM fit
Offboard Decoy fit
Light/Medium calibre gun mount

If MHPC is in fact ring fenced at 1.6bn (a big IF in fairness!) and you set the budget at £1.1bn for 20 hulls, leaving £500mn for embarked/offboard mission systems development and procurement, you wind up with a unit price cap of about £55mn.

The ‘stretched-Clyde’ so often suggested for this is obviously one option, but, its going to end up a significant stretch. Essentially it may be more prudent, rather than stretching Clyde, to try and adapt the BAE 90m OPV (itself a stretched-River class!) to add helicopter capability. Problem there though is that the 90m OPV’s BAE built, as became the Brazilian Amazonas, were costed at about GBP£50mn a go…notably without the costs of modification and the extra displacement, and subsequent performance impact, of a helideck/hangar!.

So what else is there that might fit the criteria for the price?. STX’s PV85 design cost the New Zealand Navy, apparently, about £40mn per hull and ticks a lot of boxes above in capability terms. The issues theyve seen with weight/growth margins and performance are significant though. For MHPC, to put the margins back, we’d probably need an additional 20ft in the length and maybe 4 or so more in the beam to maintain/improve seakeeping. That means a significant improvement needed in the engine room…which will come at a price. Still, a PV85-derived hull shorn of its ice-strengthening, up-engined and fitted with a standard 997 set plus a BAE Mk4 forward could conceivably do the job for the money.

Another interesting option, at the other end of the spectrum from the PV85, might be the Norwegian Svalbard design. Again modification would be required and, again, its pulling out displacement on ice-strengthening. The Svalbard is a big old girl, for a patrol ship, and would need to do a bit better with 10MW of electric motors and more than 12MW of installed power than the 17-18knts managed by the in-service hull…cutting out the unnecessary displacement will help there markedly. Likely the Svalbard hull would come in at the very top of the price bracket as well…perhaps over it a touch…(similar to the BAE 90m OPVH concept) BUT off-the-peg it has all the design elements desirable for MHPC plus, crucially, room for systems growth.

Thoughts?.

. But the one thing I don�t think we can get away from is the navy needs Hulls in the water. When we look at what we will have if its not cut even more its not a enough….And we will pay for them by not giving the government its 11% pay rise that should cover the cost

3 distinct truths emerge from the points you’ve made. 1) We’re short on hull numbers. 2) Frigates cost a bit to deploy and 3) theres no more money in the budget for corvettes!.

There IS, supposedly, budget penciled for MHPC to the tune of £1.6bn though. At present, last I heard at any rate, the story goes that much of this is intended to look at transformational systems…AUV/UUV’s for MCMW and droggy work, UAV’s for patrol, chopper borne MCMW sensors etc. These systems being platform agnostic so deployable to an RFA, frigate, Amphib etc to put the capability right where the fleet is. My view is that much of what we need to role optimise a ‘second-rate’ hull is already available off-the-shelf and that a hull, with the right characteristics to fill MHPC for modest unit cost, is quite deliverable and can leverage the Patrol and/or ‘droggy mission tasking to be in the right place at the right time for the Fleet MCMW job or any one of a number of contingency ops.