Stryker73‘Armed Forces Minister reassures over Carrier order’
Speaking on the BBC’s Good Morning Scotland programme, the Liberal Democrat minister Nick Harvey said: “Well the first carrier of course is pretty much 25% built now.
“I cannot imagine any circumstances in which we wouldn’t finish the build.
“As for the second carrier, I would simply point the Scottish political community to the fact that there is an existing contract between the Ministry of Defence and the shipyards that guarantees them a certain level of work so whether that will be on the second carrier or anything else, the work is guaranteed for several years to come.”
He added: “If I were in their shoes, it’s exactly what I would be doing as well but I don’t think they need to be in panic mode because there are legally valid agreements there.”
Mr Harvey also said he thinks the decision on renewing Trident will be made after the next General Election in 2015.
It was initially scheduled to take place in 2014.
So it seems the first CVF is certain (who for, less so) but sounds like the 2nd might be a smaller ship/brought forward T26 order?
Stryker73More Drama!
Britain is doomed, we will sink etc, etc. I want CVF to happen but if on October 22nd its announced that CVF is cancelled don’t worry Liger – Britain will still be here and no-one will be awaiting the hordes coming to invade us.
‘the uk will effectively end being an independent nation’
Oh please…….. :rolleyes:
Liberals getting applause at their own conference for saying Trident should be scrapped! Whatever next.
Stryker73Any credence to this story?
http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/ajai-shukla-making-warships-happen/408614/
Seems like the decision on the SDR on Friday has been postponed
http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/68995,news-comment,news-politics,strategic-defence-review-looking-like-a-train-crash-army-navy#ixzz10Alnnf00
Britain’s Strategic Defence and Security Review, due to reach final draft this week, is beginning to look like a Whitehall train crash rather than a piece of visionary strategy.
The main outline of the review, including the major cuts in defence ordered by the new government, was due to be approved at a meeting this Friday of the National Security Council chaired by David Cameron and Nick Clegg.
But The First Post has learnt that this has been put off because there is still no agreement on the major cuts proposed – nor on the subsequent defence strategy.
The meeting has been postponed until next week, and then it will be brief – because the PM’s diary is too crowded for him to be able to give more than an hour or two to the difficulties of defence.
Firefights are breaking out across Whitehall between the three services and the MoD, the Cabinet Office and the NSC (national Security Council). Some of the details leaked to the Sunday Times about Army numbers, and to the Financial Times about the row over aircraft carriers and Trident’s replacement, are clearly accurate. But things seem to be getting worse.
One of the plans, supported by most senior civil servants, was to slash service numbers – by up to 40,000 by one account – in order to preserve some of the big-ticket industrial programmes, principally the aircraft carriers and the order for four new Trident submarines to be placed in 2014.
Civil servants have argued that personnel are expensive – making up about 30 per cent of the £37 billion annual budget – and are relatively easy to fire compared with breaking major equipment contracts, which incurs huge penalty payments.
But Cameron has now been persuaded by the head of the Army, Gen Sir David Richards, to spare 20,000 of those troops. As a result, the RAF and the Navy can expect deeper cuts.
The Navy’s dilemma is particularly acute, and proposed solutions have reached a sublime absurdity that Lewis Carroll might envy.
In order to keep the aircraft carrier and Trident submarine programmes going, if only in part, the admirals were prepared to bin a large chunk of their present surface fleet. One proposal was to sell off six new amphibious assault ships.
This would mean the UK would have very little amphibious capability – something we have had to draw on repeatedly in the past 30 years, including the Falklands, Sierra Leone, numerous humanitarian missions, and, twice, in wars against Iraq.
Without this capability, the Royal Marines would have little raison d’etre (despite the important role they now play in Afghanistan and in supplying top recruits to the Special Forces).
The problem with the aircraft carriers, to which the Navy seems addicted, is that their true cost has not been aired in public. The two carrier hulls will cost around £6 billion to complete, but then comes the real cost of fitting them out and equipping them with Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Lightning II aircraft.
With the price of those planes included, it is now likely to cost £50 billion to run the carriers in the first ten years of their commission – two and a half times the projected bill for Trident’s replacement at £20 billion.
The original order of 150 F-35s is to be cut in half to 70 or 75. But even so, on current projections, only 10 of the jets will be fully capable of operation at one time.
Defence Secretary Liam Fox is keen on the Navy and wants both the carriers and Trident. It was his proposal that the Army should be cut substantially. But Gen Richards appears to have persuaded Cameron that you cannot cut the Army while it is still at war in Afghanistan.
With his obsession with tackling Iran, defending the High Arctic and grand maritime strategy, Dr Fox seems permanently out of step with his military, his party and increasingly his bosses across the road in Downing Street. That is a political nettle David Cameron will have to grasp – if not soon, then no later than the end of the year.
Looks like Richards is determined to kill CVF off. Best to understand this article was written by Robert Fox, arch CVF-hater and none too fond of Dr Fox himself!
Stryker73And let’s be clear, although this maybe a little more factual than other SDR reports since details will actually have been drawn up by now instead of being ‘presumed’ it’s still only a report and nothing set in stone.
The NSC will still have to sign off as to the direction of the cuts.
Stryker73Well this is my worst case scenario – 40 F-35B’s that is enough for what? 1 front line squadron, one OCU and attrition/maintenance spares? I can guess where they will not be spending most of there time, and it’s not on the carriers.
Though, the JSF production line could still be open for another 25 years,nothing stopping follow on orders in fiscally better times.
If this is true, (and how often has pre-SDR reporting been accurate!?) then it at least leaves the RN recoverable and gets the 2 carriers into service.
Since the article suggests that the RAF may get to keep some of its Tornadoes rather than losing the lot i’m wondering if those 40 will be FAA?
Stryker73Story in the Times – some pain (Destroyers/Frigates) but it could’ve been worse if they’ve got their facts right for once!
Cuts on the MoD to be limited to 10%, it does look a little like salami slicing.
From the Sunday Times:
“The incoming head of the armed forces, General Sir David Richards, has persuaded David Cameron to spare 20,000 soldiers from the Treasury axe after convincing him they are vital for the Afghan war.
He told the prime minister that the army needs to maintain its strength of about 100,000 troops for it to support nearly 10,000 soldiers in Afghanistan for the next five years.
The Royal Navy and the RAF will bear the brunt of the cuts imposed under the Strategic Defence Review.
It is a victory for Richards, who has outmanoeuvred Ministry of Defence officials. Cameron has accepted that it would be politically damaging to slash the army at a time when it is fighting alongside America and other Nato allies and when casualties are at their highest level since the start of the war in 2001.
The forthcoming cuts will be the deepest for nearly 20 years, when the armed forces were slashed by a third.
Other service chiefs are furious. Nearly half of Britain’s fighter jets and more than a third of the navy’s frigates and destroyers will go. Plans for two new aircraft carriers will still go ahead at a cost of £5 billion. But there will be a sharp reduction in the number of jets operating from them.
Richards has spent the summer making the case for protecting the army from cuts, insisting that it needs to retain its seven combat brigades to provide enough units for six-month tours of duty. In an unusual move, Richards was appointed directly by the prime minister after he interviewed candidates.
A senior army officer said: “This deal is a realisation that we can only succeed in Afghanistan if we back the army to the hilt and concentrate resources where they are needed.”
Senior government sources say the first key decision on the future of Britain’s armed forces was made early last week, and that cuts to Britain’s £38 billion military budget will now be limited to just over 10%.
Despite Richards’s success in protecting troop numbers, he has had to agree to “brutal” cuts of £5 billion a year to the parts of the military not directly involved in Afghanistan.
Defence sources say the RAF and the Royal Navy will each have to save £1.5 billion a year, and to cut 10,000 jobs. There will be further savings of £2 billion a year from cancelling procurement projects, closing military bases and making 10,000 civil servants redundant.
General Sir Richard Dannatt, the former head of the army, told The Sunday Times that the proposed deal would allow Britain’s armed forces “to maintain their national stance” and he described it as “not a complete show-stopper”.
However, the deal could still be blown apart depending on the outcome of heated arguments about the replacement for Trident.
Dannatt described the Trident issue as a “political game changer” and said it would not be manageable for the MoD to have to find the money for Trident from within its budget. “If you delay Trident and look at alternatives it would be adequate,” he said.
Sources say Richards would accept a trade-off whereby conventional forces are spared deeper cuts if there is a delay until after 2015 in ramping up spending on Trident. Under existing plans it would cost £5 billion to fund the first phase of the replacement for Trident over the next five years. Pleas by Liam Fox, the defence secretary, for the Treasury to pay for the new nuclear deterrent separately from the MoD budget are likely to fall on deaf ears.
Fierce arguments are expected within the national security council over where the axe will fall in the RAF and Royal Navy.
However, The Sunday Times has established that plans to buy 22 new Chinook heavy-lift helicopters — pledged by Gordon Brown to help troops avoid Taliban roadside bombs — are to be scaled back to only 12. Most of them would not have been ready for six years, after Cameron’s deadline for withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Upgrades to keep 35 Puma helicopters in service for another decade are to be scrapped and their base at RAF Benson closed.
The RAF is expected to confirm that it will retire at least half of its 160 old Tornado and Harrier fighter jets early, leaving the future of RAF Marham, Wittering and Lossiemouth in doubt.
The Royal Navy will go ahead with plans to close its Devonport dockyard and nine older frigates and destroyers are to be retired.
Although the navy’s two new aircraft carriers now seem safe, the air group to operate on them will be significantly reduced to fewer than 40 aircraft. A £700m replacement for the amphibious carrier HMS Ocean will now not be built and one of the new carriers will have to act as a floating base for the Royal Marines.
A £300m upgrade of the Royal Navy’s 35 Sea King amphibious assault helicopters is to be scrapped, and they will all be retired within five years.
Richards, formerly head of the army, left behind detailed plans for efficiency savings across the army when he handed over to his successor, General Sir Peter Wall last week.
Army savings will be measured in “low hundreds” of millions and much of this will be ploughed back into the Afghan war chest.
The vast majority of the 20,000 British troops currently based in Germany will be found new homes in redundant RAF bases in Britain by the middle of the decade.”
Stryker73I cannot get into the FT article nor will it let me register to read it for free. Can someone summarise what the article said and how it was linked to the Army?
You can read FT articles by going through google news. Search for ‘Rifts open up on defence’
The main gist of the article… interestingly they don’t say ‘may’ or ‘might’ but seem pretty definite about the decision
Liam Fox, defence secretary, has drawn up a comprehensive blueprint to meet the Treasury’s minimum demand for a 10 per cent cut in his department’s budget over the next four years.
Mr Fox is proposing that Britain sticks with its plan to build two new aircraft carriers at a cost of more than £5bn, while buying just 70 Joint Strike Fighters, half the number originally planned. His proposal rules out an extended delay in the replacement of the four submarines that can launch Britain’s Trident nuclear deterrent.
Then follows lots of Army whinging
One senior Army figure said: “We’re within two weeks of a decision and we don’t have any vision of how our armed forces should be configured in 2025 unless you think we’re only going to be fighting World War Three. We are in a right ******’s muddle.”
The Army says Britain should build only one aircraft carrier, using it mainly for training and keeping it on “extended readiness”. In addition, Army chiefs argue the MoD should abandon plans to buy the F-35 jet for the carrier, restricting itself to purchasing the land version after 2020 while investing in unmanned combat air vehicles.
Obviously the Army are taking it upon themselves to be the Guardian of the UK Armed Forces :rolleyes:
the Navy and RAF will fiercely resist any change to Mr Fox’s plan, which was finalised at a meeting of the defence board at the MoD last Tuesday. It will be presented to the prime minister’s National Security Council in 10 days’ time. Senior defence officials fear fierce inter-service rivalry is standing in the way of a sound strategic outcome. “The Army is putting forward a vision that is uncompromisingly army-centric,” said one. “What is the point of going through a joint process if they break ranks to propose something unbalanced and incoherent?”
This is the best bit of the whole article!
“The idea that we should purchase two carriers is strategically illiterate,” said one planner. “Fox has based his strategy on giving Britain lots of big guns without knowing what to do with them.”
Asked whether Mr Cameron would defy Mr Fox and opt for just one carrier, this figure said: “I believe the prime minister may well do that. It makes military sense, it makes economic sense, it fits with current thinking on the nature of warfare and it fits with what the US military would want.”
At the same time as the UK armed forces are fighting a war in Afghanistan they’re fighting a civil war between themselves.
Stryker73Seems like the Army are getting twitchy?
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/045dc02a-c29c-11df-956e-00144feab49a.html
Mr Fox is proposing that Britain sticks with its plan to build two new aircraft carriers at a cost of more than £5bn, while buying just 70 Joint Strike Fighters, half the number originally planned. His proposal rules out an extended delay in the replacement of the four submarines that can launch Britain’s Trident nuclear deterrent.
Fox’s plan, which was finalised at a meeting of the defence board at the MoD last Tuesday. It will be presented to the prime minister’s National Security Council in 10 days’ time.
Lots of army blubbing from the usual un-named sources, If the facts in the FT are correct then we can expect an all out PR assault in the next 10 days.
Since when did the Army think it runs the British Armed Forces?
Stryker73For me the bottom line is does the UK have enough funds to stand up the FAA under RN control – or pilots?
The RN/FAA needs the RAF online for CVF to function properly.
Stryker73When did JCA go from an £11bn programme for 130 odd aircraft to a £10bn one for 80?.
In COIN-lalaland?
Stryker73To quote your own post, the bolding is my emphasis
I am not English teacher but that suggests that the options are two carriers, one carrier or no carriers but the BAE and it sub-contractors getting a programme of work equivalent to the carriers. IMO this is likely to be either a design based on the BPE/Canberra’s or frigates.
To me it reads dangerously like the third option is actually as many cheap as chips frigates as we can afford and getting out of the carrier game completely instead.
Equivalent workshare doesn’t automatically mean similar type of ship. Did anyone see the rumours of a replacement for HMS Endurance? Where is that funding coming from in these cash strapped times?
Stryker73Although interestingly the WSJ says Ian King said BAE has been asked to look at a number of different options, in the last week
Stryker73BAE asked to look at options for carrier cuts
http://www.portsmouth.co.uk/newshome/BAE-asked-to-look-at.6520953.jp
Nothing new here is there? Seems obviously that the company should be asked to draw up plans for all scenarios.
Stryker73Liam Fox looking incredulous when responding about the carrier share idea
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfUY0ivxcEs
So looks like strategic and tactical lift are on the agenda, how would pooling A400’s work then?
Stryker73Loathe to post this here incase Ligers temper gets even worse but here goes –
‘Plan to share aircraft carriers with France’
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/plan-to-share-aircraft-carriers-with-france-2066267.html
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