Liger30My understanding of the A model is that it will only be configured for flying boom refueling
True, it should be that way. But it may still be fixed at a relatively small cost, possibly. Either by fixing the fighters… or, possibly a lot cheaper, fixing booms at the centerline stations of the new tankers.
I suppose there is the poasibility that some squadrons C models could have carrier stuff removed
It is a worrying possibility. It depends on the effective chance of saving money out of it. My hope and belief is that actually very little (if anything at all) would be saved by having, for example, fixed non-foldable wings.
Similarly, the more important wire-hook might cost more to remove than to keep: modern fighters aren’t Spitfires with hooks and called Seafires. They are designed in a way, and have a software coded for THAT way, to ensure it works.
Just like the Typhoon-without-gun idea, failed because of the impact on the software of removing the gun and its weight and all, screwing up the Fly By Wire software regulations, removing major components might have a massive impact in cost and complexity, in particular on the Flying Software, that is coded to fly a plane with certain weights and certain parts mounted in certain places.
And then there’s logic, that in an ideal world should be enough on itself to make it evident that planes that can go both on land and on carriers are better than land-stuck ones.
But logic is in short supply lately, so the worries are unlikely to vanish anytime soon.
Liger30For now, it is the F35C that we are looking at. No doubts on this. And it will be this way at least until SDR 2015… which hopefully won’t make me shiver like this one did. It won’t be happy, of course… Last happy SDR was 1998, and even that was massively betrayed…
But hopefully it won’t be a budget cutting excercise like it was this year, either.
However, my pessimist MOD analyzer side tends to agree that a real threat to the whole future of the carrier strike concept do exists, and in particular, with the words of Richard Beedal:
The capability ‘holiday gap’ is enormous – effectively a generation of RN sailors – and will mean the relearning of carrier operations by the RN. There is also the fundamental question that as the UK can apparently live without a carrier strike capability for nine years, does it really need it at all? I suspect that this question will be very high on the agenda when the next comprehensive spending review is due in five years time, one of whose key decisions will be to decide how many UK F-35C’s to order at a potential cost of many billions of pounds. It may be all to easy by then to decide to save money by abandoning the intention to operate some of these from Prince of Wales.
Readers with very long memories may recall that when it was announced that American made Phantom fighters would be ordered for the RAF in 1965, the Defence White Paper stated that the RAF Phantom squadron’s would be ‘swing-role’, operating from both land bases and Royal Navy aircraft carriers. However the RAF intended to avoid this by requiring the manufacturer – McDonnell Douglas – to remove some essential carrier compatibility features in order to supposedly reduce maintenance costs.
Another worrying possibility – which I suggest will be increasingly mentioned in the coming years – is for the UK to buy the JSF F-35A variant. Whilst this is land based only, it still has a longer range than the F-35B and will be cheaper than both the the F-35B and even the F-35C. For the RAF, it seems likely to be a quite acceptable final position for its next generation of manned strike aircraft; whilst leaving the Royal Navy totally ‘high and dry’ as to the provision of aircraft for its new carriers .
I find it extremely hard to disagree with what he reports, admittedly, and it will be hard for the Royal Navy to sustain its point about carriers.
If the deal with the French can help in avoiding demented decisions are taken, i welcome it totally.
I don’t really trust anyone anymore when it comes to procurement for the armed forces and in particular for the navy.
Liger30No, because it allows them to deploy on the carriers, which they’ll be expected to do too.
And no because it gives a formidable and currently unrivalled range. The C variant goes farther than anything else in the fighter-domain so far. Farther than the A variant too.
Liger30It has been said that ultimately, differently from what originally envisaged, the F35C is said to promise 25% savings in running costs over the life of the plane compared to the F35B.
Dunno if it is true or not. May be a bit high, but personally, for that little that my opinion can matter, i thought from a long time already that the F35B was likely to require a lot more mainteinance and spare parts: there’s no escape from the simple but deadly fact that the F35B adds to your mainteinance list a whole lot of moving parts, from doors to swingeing thrust duct to thrust jets in the wings to the transmission of the lift fan to the lift fan itself.
Considering the toll that the lift fan and its transmission are likely to be subject to with each VTOL landing, their need for mainteinance will be pretty damn high.
The F35C might be less mainteinance-intensive despite the stress of catapult launches, that anyway with the new ElectroMagnetic cats should be massively reduced.
I also suspect that the RAF/RN might be considering all sorts of cost saving measures, including (if it’ll save a few pennies) scrapping the folding wings for fixed ones and such. They will also most likely NOT order the gun-pod, but that was going to happen with the F35B too, so that matters very little.
As to RAF buying F35A, that’s not needed and not likely. Nor something the RAF has a real interest in.
The RAF wanted the range and payload of the F35C already from a long time. There had been proposals, back in nicer years, to buy 24 or so F35C on top of the B version as a replacement for Tornado in the Deep Strike role.
It’ll be back to the times of the Phantom: RAF F35C will operate normally from land bases, but they’ll be expected to deploy on the carrier regularly and obviously in case of need.
The RN will get 12 planes for its Naval Strike Wing and operate them out of Queen Elizabeth.
Nothing strange nor special.
Liger30For the UK, the deal is going to mean that when the QE is in refit, the Naval Strike Wing (which i guess will be the 12-planes strong squadron “normally deployed on the carrier” with the SDSR words) will be able to deploy on Charles de Gaulle.
Similarly, french planes will crow the deck of QE (not a bad thing at all if you ask me!) when CdG is out.
Standing to the worlds of Luff in parliament, even with catapults, the QE class is still going to maintain roughly the very same mainteinance cycle foreseen when they were going to be STOVL configured:
12 weeks a year in mainteinance, which gives an availability for hull of 281 days a year, coherent with the combined 562 day for year figure for both hulls, with a major 36 weeks refit roughly every six years.
He also said PoW is “unlikely” to be sold, and most likely to be in extended readiness.
Which means, pretty much, that when QE is out in peacetime, planes continue to work from CdG.
In case of war/need/improved financial situation, PoW can be pulled out of reserve and work in place of her sister.
In itself, it is not bad at all an agreement.
I’m surprised by the lack of Air Tankers-sharing news in the Agreement, though. It does seem like the RAF truly asked a price too high to the frenchies to resupply them with gas… but it may well surface again later, since the french do NEED tankers, and the UK could do with getting some money for the A330 KC1 fleet.
The drone for 2015/2020 ISD is most likely Mantis, while the “post 2030” drone is almost certainly a UCAV (hopefully carrier-capable) shaped by joint development that will evolve from Taranis and Neuron.
For the rest, it appears that joint-programmes like the 40 mm CTA gun and the Sea Skua II and Storm Shadow upgrades are going to become the norm under a 10-years long agreement.
Then again, not bad a news. More chances to see Sea Skua II become a reality… and since i’m the greatest supporter of the CTA gun concept, i totally hope in more joint work equally succesful like that design.
Liger30After that, one dock is more than enough for maintaining two ships.
Indeed, the whole point of having two hulls is the need to ensure that one is always available, even when one of the carriers is in dock undergoing refit. So one dock is what’s needed, necessary and sufficient.
Liger30So far, the french are the ones who get the most advantages out of the Defence Collaboration, in the order:
-Usage of RAF tanker planes (much as they are bitching about too-high hour price and trying to obtain an even more advatageous price)
-Permission to deploy Rafales on Queen Elizabeth
-Sovereignty rights on the Mantis as it becomes a common programme
I think they are getting a true bargain out of it even without blessing their shipyards with mainteinance contracts for the CVFs. They might be able to offer better prices, but political it will be suicidal to announce to the nation “look, our 5 billions carriers will have planes tomorrow. In the meanwhile, on top of letting french use them, we are also paying french shipyards to maintain them. As a result, a few hundred redundancies in UK shipyards are likely.”
Gordon Brown or not, Rosyth or not, such an announcement would be political suicide. Just like the bid of french yards to build the CVF, it is likely, and overall desirable, that the french-proposal will die in time.
Better to make good use of the experience, dock and machinery paid and installed in Rosyth, and keep up british jobs as much as possible, apart from retaining the capability to refit the UK ships in UK shipyards.
Liger30The fact the Nimrod MRA4 can cruise at high altitude with four engines and then station, even very low on the water, with two engines only is a major plus on operations, though.
The P-8 misses that, but it is certainly not an advantage, but a weak point in a plane that still is effectively a submarine hunter first of all. Having to stay high up in altitude is going to make it quite less effective at hunting subs, and make its MAD a lot less sensible.
Liger30And it definitely was.
Liger30Stop looking at the inventory and look at the big-picture capability. The capability reflects the force doctrine. With half a dozen boats deployable at any one time the strategic aim of the fleet is not Atlantic surge/sea lane interdiction. Simply put they aren’t interested in that any more. The Atlantic is too big an ocean for a handful of boats to actually achieve anything meaningful….and a planner would figure in attrition from the starting number. Why should we spend precious resources defending something no one is planning to attack?.
That’s your vision. Last thing i say about this, is that submarines have changed, and tactics and effects too.
Moreover, merchant fleets are now far smaller than once were, and each ship is an higher loss and an higher value in money. In late 2008 the british merchant fleet numbered 646 registered vessels for a rough 13.000.000 tons (to give an idea, the U-boots in the second world war sunk 11.7 million tons, the 54% of pre-war merchant ships of the UK, while still in 1954 the Uk owned 2042 merchant ships), with 165 container ships (a modern container transport today has an average rough value as high as 50 million dollars with a payload of over 300 millions on average for travel), 134 tankers, 38 passenger ships and the rest Ro-Ro transports and other vessels.
It is quite likely that in these two years the number has grown smaller, but i don’t have more recent data at the moment.
At a neat loss of over 350 million dollars in average for each ship lost, destroy the economy of a nation now is far easier than it was in the past.
And while they have a lot less subs than in the past, there are also a lot less hunters, escorts and means to detect and track the enemies.
I remind how much the old SSK Santa Fe in the Falklands war worried the RN, and how it was chased down, and i keep thinking my way.
Have to hunt a “small” fleet of SSNs and SSGNs would be a nightmare to say the very least.
As to Russia not considering this kind of operations in its wide military planning, i don’t think so.
Differently from NATO, Russia still carries on most big exercises in a very “Cold War” style, with NATO still as the enemy (and usually does so when Poland or whoever warms too much up with the West, so to show its force at the borders in a very clear and arrogant message – Ask the Baltic Republics for info about it).
Not in a single speech, even in the best moments in the NATO-Russia relationships, the russian officers have missed underlining that, in their strategic vision, NATO is still their most likely adversary.
And the same very fact that Akulas still come shadowing the Vanguards is both a show of force and a demonstration that their plan hasn’t changed that much.
After all, no military “expert” had thought they’d be able to use 30.000 soldiers in a 3 days time, and use them to so good effect in 2008 against Georgia.
It might come the day the Navy shows that it is not at all as rusty as we like to believe. The deployment in mass to Venezuela last year was quite impressive in itself, after all.
Liger30What sort of spec would they need? I would imagine they would need to be designed to have good endurance, fly at low levels over the sea, be able to carry a decent number of sonar buoys, plus offensive ordinance, be able to operate independently until its MAD or other sensors spots something amiss and then contact it’s base controller, and should be able to link its sensors to other ASW assets and F-35C’s. Could the UK lead the way in this type of UVAC and if so how long do you think it would take to become operational?
There’s no money for such an enterprise, but in theory it is possible. A Mantis derivative could do the work decently enough, even if a greater endurance would be handy. Brimstones and Paveway IV would be replaced by Stingray torpedoes and other loads, included perhaps an anti-ship missile.
A Searchwater radar would be handy, and a MAD would help too. And of course the sonobuoys, many of them, plus signal-sonobuoys and smoke-sonobuoys for marking and signaling positions.
But it is a very wide-ranging work, and it would be a total first for a UAV… the UK could do it? For sure, had it the money and wanted to do it.
Can the MOD dream such a requirement and programme…? NO. Definitely NO, unfortunately…
Liger30Similar story here as well:
http://www.defencemanagement.com/new…y.asp?id=14597
Looks like they are weighing up the choice between EMALS and EMCAT for catapults and AAG and DAX-II for arrester gear engines.
The article also seems to suggest that BOTH carriers would be fitted with Catapults for 500 millions, which would confirm the expected price envisaged already some years ago of some 250-something millions expense for each ship.
Also, it would be a good news if both were completed with Cats.
I keep fearing that it is all too possible that only one actually gets them…
And this
In Parliament on 26 October, defence minister Peter Luff said it had not yet been decided whether one or both carriers would be converted to use catapult and arrestor equipment.
certainly makes the feeling stronger. Also, i wish they’d stop mulling the nonsensical idea of selling one…
Still no news of HMS Endurance replacement, by the way…?
I start getting the feeling that the Ice Patrol Ship promised by the SDSR is actually the un-repaired Red Plum languishing in port but not officially scrapped and thus “a part of the navy”…
Liger30Is this a joke?. Even if we ignore the fact that the Russians have no more than a handful of competent fleet subs left you must see that there is no context left for a military confrontation with Russia that would require them to disrupt the atlantic sea lanes?. Reforger was shelved a long time ago!.
No, it is not. Norther Fleet Alone:
6 Akula, 2 Sierra, 3 Oscar, 4 Victor and 6 SSK Kilo submarines in the North Fleet plus a new Yasen (Graney for NATO) Akula-successor to be commissioned in 2011 with another being built with plans for other 6.
And a new SSK type to replace KIlo in the long term, the Lada, is also being built.
Explain to Russia that they should not retain all those “Cold War relics” will you…?
Add this to the fact that the suspect of a single SSN being at sea is enough to scare most navies into not even leaving port, and good luck in assuming that merchant shipping is safe.
Even just 4 Akula and a single Oscar fully operation would be a major pain in the ass to say the bare minimum.
As to inexistance of a motivation for a conflict, well, then in peacetime we should totally dismantle the armed forces and rebuild them in time of conflict, shouldn’t we…?
It worked when it was just about men with a shield and a sword, but now it wouldn’t work too well.
Had the UK any realistic problem with Argentina that could justify them invading the Falklands…? No, but they did.
Had the UK troubles with Germany before the IIWW…? Not exactly: the UK had invested a lot of money into Germany and at the start a lot of people was actually pleased with Hitler.
Had the UK been directly attacked/provoked into the IWW…?
Had someone imagined in 2007 that in 2008 Russia would have rolled tank divisions into Georgia?
If wars were easy to foresee and we knew exactly who the enemy was and what capability it would have and what tactics it would use, we’d be unable to stage wars, because we’d be prepared and the costs would be too high to accept for any of the two sides to make the first move.
It was, ultimately, the Cold War scenario. And in fact there was no war.
I don’t believe to people’s blissful and wishful babbling. The world was safer when it all revolved around two enemies facing each other off than now that you don’t know for what, where, against who or why and how long you will be fighting an eventual conflict.
Then again, i don’t even know why i’m here explaining it to you, since you are just going to keep thinking of “rusty” russian navy and a happy world of friends with just a few evil-guys terrorists here and there no matter what i say and no matter what Russia actually does.
It is building new SSNs! Oh, it is irrilevant!
SSKs too! Yeah, but it needs replacing older subs!
It plans six aircraft carriers! Not a threat!
It is building 5 new amphibious assault ships and seeking up to 4 Mistral-class LHDs! Yeah, but they’ll never be used for real!
It is building a fifth generation stealth fighter! No way, they haven’t the money nor technology for it. (it was said for years and instead it is flying)
They say they have a fifth generation bomber too! And people says the same they said for years about the Su50. If next year the bomber comes out and does the first fly for real, “yes, it exists, but it is not a threat!”
We’ve shifted from irrealistic assessment of threats in the early 1900 with massive arms races to the total irrilevance of the weapon programmes and evolution of activities of one of the nations which still represents a likely enemy in the planning of defence needs. From one bad extreme to the other.
From rolling out tens of Dreadnoughts in an endless row to cheerfully deem as irrilevant the fact that in four years the Russia military budget is set to triple.
Bah. Keep thinking your way, but let me think mine. If people builds weapons, it is because they envisages for them both a peacetime relevance and a wartime effect.
Once again you are clearly not being serious?. You are suggesting we keep a permanent Merlin det covering Fas just for delousing?. You do know the frequency of bomber deployments you are talking about here?.
Not a permanent flight perhaps. Problem is, i’m pretty sure Merlins won’t be sent north not even periodically for protecting the SSBNs operations, so it is useless to even babble about it. Also, ultimately what would the helicopter do??? It would still be task of the SSN to force the enemy sub away, and it would just be aided in the final work, not sent on meeting a russian subs in the North Sea, well far away, where a Nimrod’s been reporting it, but dealing it just outside Faslane.
The helicopter can listen for the SSN and maybe locate it… and then??? Bombard it with active-sonar pings at the most to shout cheerfully “i got ya!”. You can’t throw a torpedo down on an Akula just because you find it lurking around during peacetime, so not very effective.
Either way, we are drifting out of topic now. I think i’ve clearly enough exposed my views as it is. Back to the latest CVF news!
Liger30It is called reasoning, around here.
But truly happy subjects are all old glories, unfortunately, nothing of the new stuff. Spitfire, Tempest, adorable Mosquito, Lancaster, hell, even the Avro Manchester would be an happier discussion!:D
Even though Tornado could do. 😉
Not my fault if the Defence Reviews of the UK by so many years are all Cut & Slash exercise with little-to-none reasoning on strategy and means to exploit the strategy chosen.
Last one clear strategic vision was 1998 SDR, but we all know how it was betrayed and ultimately all messed up…
Liger30Maybe. And maybe not.
Then again, Russia does not send its submarines all around the world like UK does because it does not need to. It has a different policy and far different global commitments and approaches to those. And also three different fleets covering the deployments and areas, too. They have grow small compared to the past, but it is still quite a lot of stuff.
It did instead secure a foothold in Georgia before the country could join NATO, indeed. And then placed S300 missiles in it and planned reinforcements for the Black Sea Navy to say “we don’t move from here, no matter what you guys say”.
Different policy they have, but complexively better results if you ask me.
Want to bet with me that Georgia now will NEVER be allowed into NATO, despite being so close and despite wanting to join…?
I’m ready to put money on it.
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