Some odd views here, from some, on what CAS entails in a modern air defence environment. Lessons learned over Serbia, Georgia and the unfortunate incident with the Turkish RF-4 seem to have gone astray a little?.

SHORADS/MRAD have now made the traditional Harrier, Jaguar, A-10 concept of close air support obsolete. Stooging around in the trash-fire envelope is now an extraordinarily good way to get shot down…A-10 was developed to defeat Shilka and Romb with a combination of manoeuvre, toughness and, where required, stand-off weaponry (AGM-65). Anyone care to give odds for it against current gen systems?.

CAS now, not even necessarily against a peer-state, means flying above the trash-fire and knocking back tracking and engagement ranges against Med Range air defence systems while ‘using sensor superiority to identify and engage targets with precision’. For that you need a good sensor suite and LO capability….which are expensive things. Detection may happen from PCLS/passive radar or the longer wavelength search sets, but, detection doesn’t necessarily mean tracking or weapon-laying within the necessary window to prevent attrition of those surveillance systems.

Regardless of the greater or lesser merits of LO technology the simple fact that a survivable CAS platform now has to have more about it than a titanium ‘bathtub’ to sit the pilot in and a honking great tank-shredding gun or to be a small and quick target. Simply put CAS isnt cheap now…unless you have an agreeably stone-age opponent. F-35B means that you are not limited to engaging dusty compound dwellers going forwards. The ‘cheaper’ solutions for next gen Harriers etc as suggested do.

Switching to the ‘STOVL ruined the F-35’ topic am I correct in stating that JAST was the product of a merger between the USN AF-X and USAF MFR programmes?. The design for JAST appears to have been driven by single-engine, internal weapons bays and high internal fuel carry. These characteristics creating stubby, portly, designs from every manufacturer who put forward an entry. Where does the conviction come from that, without STOVL, F-35 would have looked all that much different?.

The USMC needs a plane noone else wants in ordered to be allowed to order it independantly.

No-one else apart from:
UK
Italy
Spain

….and potentially also:
Japan
South Korea
Australia

….and I’d be willing to bet £10 that if it was offered to Taiwan they’d snap your hand off at the elbow signing up for it. Though, of course, you’d be a bit surprised to see it offered anytime soon.

Hardly fits the description of an aircraft ‘no-one else wants’ does it?.

if you don’t disperse yourself developing, buying and operating a STOVL fighter, you can use part of that money to increase your fleet of conventional fighters to take care of this mission, easing management of lifespans & logistics.

Fair point would you buy STOVL without it ticking another box like dispersal or naval deployment?. No you wouldnt…unless you are pretty visionary and have a good LO MALE UAV in the inventory to team it up with.

I take your point about the airfield, but I’ll counter that if the UK didn’t have some STOVL it could base there in the first place, the work to have a useable airfield would have been done long before.

It was the US that was the motive force in regenerating Kandahar to the best of my knowledge. The RAF CO who took the first Harrier Det went on record to say that without Harrier (ergo STOVL) Kandahar Airport would have been shut down as an operating location.

And if the fuel isn’t in country you have to bring it there, then transport it to the FOB, and set up the whole logistics chain to bring supplies there. Besides, unless in situations like in Afghanistan, your put the whole logistics chain at great risk.

Indeed that was quite my point. You stated that the lower fuel requirements of forward-based STOVL dets were offset by the resources required to get that fuel into the FOB. I made the point that the distant, in-country, long strip also had to get its fuel somewhere so that logistics penalty was inescapable either way.

As per wiki, one A400M takes off in 980m and lands in 700m. Still as per wiki, a Dassault Rafale takes off in 400m and lands in 450m. If you can land in A400Ms, there is no point operating a Harrier or a F35B, period.

What loadout is Rafale taking off with at 400m?. If that Wiki is accurate Rafale has 30% better short-field performance than Gripen!. Quite a feat as the comparable (higher powered?)Typhoon needs 900m+.

You’d be better off bringing some good artillery, which will react MUCH faster than even your F35B, and a couple choppers, and have armed UAV’s to retain aerial persistence, and use jet fighters on a need to basis.

Artillery is largely fixed location, fixed trajectory and fixed reach. If your trajectory is masked on your arc to target artillery is useless until it can relocate. Weapon effect is also far less for artillery or choppers than tacair…there is no comparison in effect between a 155 shell or 120mm mortar bomb and a 250lb SDB.

Armed UAV’s I agree with….but if you have them up why do you need conventional fastjets flying circles 300 miles from base burning hours of fuel on the off-chance that a target might present itself that the UAV isnt equipped to deal with?. Isnt it smarter to have the backup manned air on the ground close by ready to be bombed up to meet the identified threat?.

The crux of your paragraph is “and/or want to operate non catobar carriers”. If you are limiting yourself then sure, you’re going to end up with limited capabilities. But is it really the point?

Limited as opposed to theoretical best…maybe not that limited against defined goals. For us CVF STOVL meets our, limited, requirement and does so without dragging us down a very costly path towards cat and trap. Look at the damage CdeG has done to your navy and to what benefit?. You have the justification that it was designed in the Cold War for Cold War missions, but, you have never once, to the best of my knowledge, needed your E-2C’s in a true combat support role. Your Rafales have done sterling work, but, have they done much that a 450nm F-35B couldnt have done from the same deck?. For that your navy has been soldiering on with frigates designed 40 years ago, virtually first gen SSNs and your AAW destroyer programme was cut off at two hulls. Your CATOBAR capability came with a very steep price. No criticism there, sincerely, just an obervation that limiting yourself in one area can sometimes be a rational and sound decision.

I think it would have been wiser to not design an aircraft carrier for a concept where no plane actually exist yet, and be stuck with whatever the F35B turned out to become. Or with nothing had the US DOD canned it. Besides going for F35B leaves you NO option but to accept whatever the US will charge you for your F35s, especially once you’ve sold all your Harriers to them.

That would mean having to spend the money to effectively duplicate the Aeronavale here. The Fleet Air Arm has faded to a point where that would cost a lot and it would be done with direct opposition from the RAF, rightly or wrongly, so the principle source of ready to go pilots would be cut off and training liklely awkward. So, on top of the carriers expense, we’d need to stand up at least three purely naval fastjet squadrons plus build up one of the air stations to handle 60 or 70 fastjets. When STOVL requires none of this and the only real handicap is the loss of 150nm on the range….for our circumstances….its a no-brainer.

Would have been wiser to install cat & arresting wires, and at least have the choice to order the SH or Rafale, if only to get a better deal on the F35C.

Why?. We were never interested in Rafale or Super Hornet and, if F-35B folds, we can go STOBAR with Sea Gripen to put a capability on the decks cheaper than either and no worse a solution.

You can have helicopters for very urgent needs, and planes parked elsewhere for general needs. No need to spend billions to develop a plane just for this. Besides I doubt lengthening an airfiled takes all that long.

The helicopters point has been more than adequately dealt with by Lightning. Planes parked elsewhere are fine and the conventional solution but you have to be aware that flying several hundred miles, loitering for a couple of hours, then flying x hundred miles back home sometimes to no purpose is hardly efficient. Airframes are limited in number these days and have finite flying hour lifespans. Smart weapons have airframe carry lives. Burning through them needlessly seems something that was easier afforded when strikefighter fleets were bigger and weapons stockpiles somewhat deeper than they are today.

As for lengthening runways they were still building aprons to accomodate Tornado at Kandahar in 2009!. The Harrier moved in 5 years earlier!. It was 2006 before the first conventional fighters operated out of that field. At RAF Stanley the Phandet had to have arresting gear installed and a separate Harrier Det as backup and that was the case up til 1985 when MPA opened.

An real carrier would have allowed F4 ops in the first place. A carrier or two would allow to protect the islands long enough for the few days it would take to lengthen the airfield.

The carrier would have been on station for several months at the time. As it was we had two in theatre and the land basing was still the requirement owin to the impact of prolonged ops in those conditions. As stated the runway lengthening wouldnt (didnt in fact!) take ‘days’.

Your calculations about fuel is wrong as you must factor in the fuel needed to transport the fuel for the STOVL aircrafts and their weapons & equipement.

Not necessarily. Thats only the case where support is from an established base in a nearby friendly country. If the choice is, like the UK deployment of Tornado GR4 in Libya, a long strip airbase in a distant friendly state you have the costs associated with AAR and in the Afghanistan case there is a cost to get fuel to the long strip airbase in country already. If the fuel is in country anyway the only extra cost is shuttling it 300 miles to the forward basing.

F-35B has max internal fuel of 13000lbs which should be good for a few 50 mile hops?. Call the det 8 cabs with a target of 4 sorties per day per airframe your looking at what, about, 80 tons of fuel per day to support that?. A400M with cargo bay tanks is carrying 58 tons of fuel. So, less the fuel for the lifters 600 mile round trips, 80 tons is maybe 3 trips a day for a single A400M?. Doesn’t seem an absurdly onerous burden really. 1 single 30ton A400M load could bring in 240 SDB’s, crating densities allowing, which would be more than a days worth given 30 sorties with 6 SDB’s loadout per sortie and total weapons expenditure. Logistics for fuel and ordnance then is two airlifters making 2 trips.

Then go the way of the Gripen. You don’t need to dig a clear area in the woods to disperse your fighter fleet. You just have to base them around some pre-planned installations next to some adequate motorways.

Gripen is the only other way to do the job and that may have limitations in the naval environment. Simply you have two choices if you want to undertake expeditionary operations and/or want to operate non-CATOBAR carriers. If you dont want Gripen you have to buy into STOVL. No-one is talking about forest clearings by the way. The idea is short field hard strips, like Stanley Airport, that cant take conventional strikers but can take STOL lifters and STOL/STOVL fastjets.

Looks a lot like a Russian FAB-100

http://www.mig-21.de/bilder/fab-100.jpg

So its an SSK, thats 7000tons, but it wont go aground like the 7000 ton SSN’s do because its an SSK…that right Chaffers?.

You have to develop a conventional power plant capable of providing propulsion and all of the, considerable, hotel loads that a boat that size requires….spread those costs over just 4 hulls and you think you are getting a cheap boat?.

Then you have an SSK that, on-station, has to be indiscreet because of the need to keep a comms mast up to receive the calls for fire that are the whole reason for it being there in the first place. This immediately wipes out the ships usefulness for any tasking other than periscope recon…how does it stalk an opposing sub or surface vessel if it has to be ready to respond to a fire request at any time?!.

Your problem is that all you want is a stealthy, unreachable, 6″ howitzer battery that can be omnipresent and rain down shells from seemingly nowhere at seconds from the call. The rest of it you’re trying to fudge in is just half-arsed justification. As I said from the outset the concept is flawed by the fact that its target set doesn’t warrant the costs of developing the platform. There are far better ways to do the job than lobbing guided 155 shells in with 50m CEP’s and no need for a 7000ton SSK to dismantle insurgent Toyota’s, donkeys and unhardened compounds a few miles behind the beachhead.

We do need a platform to operate in the littoral and provide coverage for deployed forces. It was identified as the C2 Stabilisation Escort in the S2C2 study before we seemed to slip back to the old FSC concept for T26. C2 needed to perform a lot more roles than could be undertaken by a 7000ton SSK with or without guns though.

As I read some of the press releases, the costs for the STOVL build is the cost payable to the ACA etc for the delivery of the ships whilst the new cost for Cats and Traps is, or may be, the whole life programme costs of the cats and traps conversion on top of the cost of the purchase of the ships.

Which (the latter observation) is as it should be. The direct comparison is the cost to deploy the capability not some simplistic ‘Top Trumps’ like aircraft to aircraft match-up.

With STOVL there are no special shipboard costs demanded by that operating technique. With CATOBAR there are. You cant deploy a CATOBAR capability without catapults, arresting engines, recovery tanking, airframe deck cycle life, specialised flight training etc figuring in. Its not possible to take the unit cost of a STOVL jet and directly compare it to the CATOBAR one in the way some appear to be attempting. Just because the CATOBAR jet leaves much of the expensive recovery and takeoff kit on the ship doesn’t mean it doesn’t have to be paid for!.

Someone wanted to know why the costs had jumped from £800mn to £1.8bn…simple…£800mn was never the total cost to deliver CATOBAR capability.

If someone wants to make the argument that ‘the carrier was meant to be adaptable’ I’d say look at what the MMI’s options are for adapting Cavour to CATOBAR if F-35B folds. CVF has the size and weight margins to be adapted into a successful CATOBAR hull. It was never the case that switching between the two was going to be just a matter of screwing in EMALS the operational shift has to happen too!.

Likewise now with STOVL….the option is retained in future to shift to CATOBAR should the operational requirement arise….that wont be any cheaper but, the assumption is, if a greater threat emerges that demands us to have CATOBAR then the defence budget will reflect the new reality and money will be made available so that we can make the changes necessary to field the things we dont need right now.