Liger30I have just been watching channel 4 news where an expert came on and said that the tornado is more versatile than the harrier as it has a gun and that can be used to fire at 2-4 bad guys… it will cause less colatorral damage etc..
I know guns cause colatorral damage but i find it hard to believe that the tornado can fly slow enough and at angles such as to be able to strafe small numbers of taliban in afghanistan.
What a load of bull. Even Apache has sorta troubles “sniping” people with the 30 mm gun, figures if Tornado can!
Almost like using an A10 Avenger’s gun against a solitary guy with a RPG in the middle of the street.
You’d devastate half of the lenght of the street.
Harriers anyway could be fitted with guns as well. Maybe the “expert” missed it. Basically the point is:
There’s a friendly base available.
Then Tornado is fair game, but Harrier can do the job as well.
There’s no friendly base available.
Harrier can use Illustrious’s deck. Tornado is out of the mission.
Ultimately, it comes down to that.
Liger30Not been vital???
It depends on what the “defence of the UK” should look like.
If for you UK is just London, or Dover being very generous, you are totally right the carriers are not needed.
But since the UK defence is also:
Protection of interests abroad (Iraq)
NATO contribution (Afghanistan, Kosovo, Lebanon on a smaller scale)
Protection of OVERSEA territories part of the UK (Falklands)
Protection of sea lanes (Gulf standing commitment, Somalia counter-piracy missions etc)
Counterterrorism
Protection of UK citizens abroad (Lebanon, Sierra Leone)
the carriers ARE vital. Otherwise, most operations abroad couldn’t be carried out. Simple like that.
In the 1982, the Falklands war wouldn’t have even started if Hermes and Invincible had been already handed to the buyers.
Remember all the ships and men lost in the war? 255 men and some 6 warships. WITH air cover.
Think of what it would have been WITHOUT air cover.
Couple that with another fact: HMS Hermes carried out most of the heavy job. HMS Invincible was too small to really allow strike ops with high number of sorties (as it had been designed as an ASW helicopter carrier capable to carry a bunch of VTOL fighters for self defence) and you have the latest, biggest demonstration of the need for carriers, and the root of the CVF requirement for TRUE, LARGE carriers.
It is really simple like that.
Navy wants to continue justifying its existence. It’s as petty (and sad) as that.
You must totally be kidding me. If the navy wasn’t out protecting the trade on the sea for the UK and something bad was to happen, you’d, in the order:
1) Have the lights going off for lack of fuel, liquid gas, and everything else, which ALL comes by sea, either by the relatively close North Sea or from abroad.
2) Have Harrods EMPTY, along with all the rest of the activities that wouldn’t anymore received that 98% of goods that the UK moves in and out over the sea.
3) Starve to death like the UK was so close doing in 1942 when the Battle of the Atlantic had spurred Churchill into writing that the U-Boots were the only thing that really worried him, far more than the Blitz on London.
You remember for how long the UK was going on with rationization of food WELL AFTER the end of the war…? It wasn’t a case, you know.
we couldn’t afford carriers in the 1960s. We certainly can’t now, and they don’t make the UK in any way safer than we would be without them.
This is total bull, and i don’t even feel the need to reply to such misinformation.
They’ve [carriers] never been vital since WWII.
For the UK, they were totally vital in Korea and in the Falklands, and very relevant in nearly all other conflicts, if not paramount to victory.
I think it is more than enough.
all that of that kind of suggests to me that we could get away with just carrying on using and updating our smaller carriers?
Falklands II would doubtless be settled by politicians or diplomacy this time around, and we could rely on other forces for the larger carriers and airgroups.
On diplomacy setting the Falklands crisis, we are all seeing how well it is working, with Argentina calling the britons “pirates” and the british government incapable to make its point about UN SELF-DETERMINATION OF PEOPLE, which, simple like that, ends the islands issue by stating they are firmly and definitely british so long as the islanders want to be britons, to say the least.
Diplomacy is nice and shiny, but when it fails it is a disaster. (1914, 1938, 1939, 1981, 1991, and so many other times)
As to ALWAYS operating in cooperation with allies, the answer is “maybe, but most likely NO”. Sierra Leone, Falklands, were exquisitely british operations, to make two recent examples.
The word “always” rarely proves true, just like the “never” along time proves false pretty often.
Hence, the genuine and very real need for CVF to enforce policy in time of peace, to support diplomacy with the adequate show of muscle, and to ultimately sort things out when the need arises.
Liger30By the way, since it truly seems like the F35 will be 70 in the very best case and probably less, i think it’ll spell the time for the UK pilots to complete their F35 training in the US.
In particular if a switch to F35C is the final choice, economically it makes the most sense to send the pilots in the USA for the final part of their training, so that there’s no need to modify a base for the Carrier-Catapults operations training and such.
Training the pilots in the US will be certainly cheaper. And what matters the most, it will eliminate the need for a OCU squadron, so that the greatest possible number of the few airplanes available can be used for active duty.
The UK pilots can do their first part of training in the UK, all the way up to flights in the Hawk trainers… most likely a Simulator for the F35 will also be bought and installed in the base chosen for the fleet (will it still be Lossiemouth or will it change…?) and used…
But for the effective final training on the F35, pilots will move to the US and train there.
The US already plan to have a F35 training school open to the international users anyway, and the UK has all the interest in joining at this point. Otherwise the active fleet of planes will seriously be ridiculously small and undersized.
Arguably, the very lowest “credibility target” for the UK’s F35 fleet is an ACTIVE force of 3 Squadrons of 12 planes each. Just enough to fill a carrier up for operations.
Anything less than that would be laughable to say the very least. Whatever decision needs to be taken to ensure that at least 3 Squadrons are formed, must be taken.
Even more so because, apart from being the carrier strike element, the F35 (B or C) will be THE strike element of the UK air force (FAA + RAF) and, apart from the “Cold War” babbling that i find is nonsense anyway, i can’t really see a strike force even smaller than a paltry 3-Sqn force.
Liger30I wouldn’t be surprised if the entire fleet is withdrawn next year. The only realistic hope of saving them is probably if the Navy succeeds in pushing the notion that they should be retained until they get their new toys.
I start to fear this as well myself.
But how idiotic that will be! Once more playing the “East of Suez” and 1981 mistake. Both times, there was to run for lives and get back some kind of capability to deploy aircrafts at sea, ultimately with the Invincible class and the Harriers.
If you go and look to the score of air-to-air kills from the end of the second world war onwards, you’ll notice that most of them, if not all, have been made by FAA airplanes, flying from carriers from the war of Korea to Falklands and Kosovo.
Similarly, excluding the support of Tornado to the Iraq wars, possible just because there was the lucky chance to get friendly bases on land, most of the air to ground work has been carried out by carrier-borne aircrafts in every major conflict the UK has been involved.
Since we are lucky and there’s not been a major war in decades, the last time the carriers proved totally invaluable was in the Falklands. No way to get down there and recover the islands without air cover. NO WAY. Without carriers, it would have been a war lost before even starting.
I think this speaks very loud in itself.
Either way, the carriers are being used by all major global players: even now, in Afghanistan the major share of the air support still comes from the US and French carriers at sea for lack of adequate bases on land for all the air traffic needed.
(there’s not much in terms of airfields in Afghanistan)
The Charles de Gaulle left port earlier this week to go down there and use its Rafales in support of Afghanistan’s operations.
And came back in port after one mere day for yet another fault in her unfortunate life. Which once more proves HOW MUCH two suitable hulls are needed to ensure you have the ship you need when you need it.
Iraq 2003 the RAF were nearlly scuppered from taking part as NATO allies refused over flight permissions as did Saudi.
Again it doesn’t seem appropriate. I don’t recall FAA Sea Harriers contributing anything to either Iraq war.
Sea Harriers were not needed because of many factors: mainly the availability of massive air support from US carriers, but the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal was in first line all the same, deploying Marines and their helicopters alongside HMS Ocean for the vital assault on Al Fawn peninsula that secured most of the oil rigs before they could be blown up like in 1991.
HMS Invincible used Sea Harriers to police Kosovo’s sky, and later on RAF Harriers carried out most of the attack operations on Serbia, even if they came from Italian airbases made available by the Italian Air force, as the Sea Harriers of the Navy continued to fly CAPs in their protection.
Tornado was late on the scene, with some finally coming into action from their bases in Germany.
Apart from the point that Afghanistan is not a “war” as such and simply a foreign policy operation of choice, there’s no way that British carriers could be regarded as essential or even appropriate for that theatre.
Essential maybe not because there are french and US ones covering that need.
They wouldn’t be appropriate for the theatre because the Invincibles are too small, carry too few aircrafts and with a limited sortie-generation rate, which is exactly why the Navy’s is building the CVF, which won’t have anymore so much to envy to the US carriers and which will have truly nothing to envy of the CdG.
Here http://www.warshipsifr.com/tenyears.html you’ll find some more news about what the Invincible carriers and the Sea Harriers did from 1998 to Sierra Leone in 2000, where HMS Illustrious was the leading ship of the task group.
Illustrious that, again, was in exercise outside Oman at the moment of the World Trade Center attacks, which changed her state to “wartime”, taking onboard Marines for possible intervention in Afghanistan, which came, however, in 2002, when Ocean took over and Lusty finally marched back home at the end of her deployment.
No, really. To undervalue the flexibility and relevance of the flat-tops and of the capability that they offer to deploy aircrafts at sea is not wise at all. They do are essential for a global policy that go past the 2 hundred miles from your own coasts.
The presence of a carrier strike group is a political message so powerful and evident that it works as a better deterrence than Trident, very often.
Liger30What’s worse is that I’m pretty sure there aren’t 3 squadrons of Harrier anymore either. The Naval Wing provides just crews.
The 4th Squadron became Reserve and took on the role of Harrier OCU this year after disbanding in march, so there’s possibly only the 1th RAF Squadron left with all the remaining Harriers GR9, plus the Naval Strike Wing providing crews.
So, yeah. Tornado going, even in a five years time, is a big loss. Unfortunately, any other cut would have been even worse.
We’ll see how bad the whole picture is on tuesday.
Liger30Well, you know… I follow british military (and thus procurement) by years with the deepest possible passion.
It is not like i was given many reasons to be optimist, you’ll have to agree.
I was happy like a child on Christmas when the CVF contracts were signed… but little did i know back then that even with the ship being build i would have had to tremble at continuous cancellation proposals.
Type 45, FRES, Nimrod (another programme we still don’t know if it safe or not…) now even the amphibs…
Hard to be optimist.
Liger30I also wish people would stop telling me that Taranis is just a demonstrator that can’t drop bombs…. Of course it is, but it exists for a reason and that is not to demonstrate that the UK/BAE can waste loads of money on a remote control toy.
Please, don’t get me wrong. I’m a great supporter of Taranis and of Mantis and Zephyr too, and i think i made it evident more than once. I hope immensely to see Taranis eventually bringing to a full-size, production-ready UCAV acquired for the RAF and carrier capable as well.
A british counterpart to the US X47B. It can be done, and it should be done.
However, for now, i must point out the limits of the programme. Not Mantis nor Taranis are safe and ensured for the future.
Which, in the Mantis case, is particularly bad because a more aggressive timeline could have ensured that the drone was already approaching maturity, and it would be selling.
I also blame it some on BAe, let me be very clear on this. They dare little with designing new creatures unless the MOD finances them and ensures a buy. At times, like with the Taranis, time is everything. Investing the company’s own money to turn out a complete and world-beating machine often pays.
France would be happier buying/partecipating in Mantis than baying Reapers.
BUT, Reaper is available NOW. Mantis has an uncertain future.
If things continue this way, France will buy Reapers. It is the obvious outcome.
Same is with the 155 mm TMF Naval Gun. Instead of waiting for the MOD’s 10 millions for moving to production, BAe should dare, complete it and show it at the first expo to get export orders.
I mean, Oto Melara rolled out the Draco 8×8 with 76 mm Naval-derivative gun as C-RAM system and it immediately got a buyer in the united arab emirates, come on! The 155 mm naval gun could have realistically already obtained export orders from Germany, US and who knows how many other countries if it was available.
Same is the Type 26 in Brazil. Too hazy a project to be easily sold, when Italy and France can offer solid and world-beating FREMMs.
Paper tigers don’t sell well.
If the paper-tiger is also always affected by uncertain expectations of survival, it is even worse.
My fear is a fear about money, you know. I have no doubts the Taranis could turn out awesomely.
But if the industry gets snubbed, then perhaps the best the RAF can hope for is buying 10 Reapers and make the “off-the-shelf” fans happy.
Hopefully, i’m just pessimist. But at the moment, it is hard to tell. The climate isn’t a happy one.
Liger30Sorry to pick you up on another constitutional point 🙂 Fox is not an advisor, he is a Minister (which comes from the old french for “servant” btw) whose official title is Secretary of State for Defence. His role is to run the Ministry on behalf of the Queen with authority deffered through the Prime Minister (which is itself technically an unofficial title – the title on the door says First Lord of the Treasury). They both have advisors who are experts as neither is generally an expert in what ever field it is they are examining. Fox would only make recomendations to the PM based on advice he has received and in itself it is not advice.
Thank you for pointing out the obvious.
With “advisor”, i meant that the PM should be listening to Fox since he’s the minister, not stealing him his own advisor and allowing the press to reports things such as:
The Prime Minister will instead present the Strategic Defence Review to MPs on Tuesday – a move which senior Tory sources said has left his long-term rival livid.
It is widely seen as revenge for the leaking of a letter from Dr Fox to Mr Cameron warning of major consequences if the military was forced to accept draconian cuts.
In a second slapdown for the Defence Secretary, the PM yesterday announced he was making Colonel Jim Morris – who used to work with Dr Fox at the MoD – his personal military adviser.
No10 said the Afghanistan veteran’s job was to provide advice to the “centre of government”.
But the unprecedented appointment leaves relations with the MoD at an all-time low – with Dr Fox and Chief of Defence Staff Sir Jock Stirrup no longer the PM’s chief advisers. Dr Fox did little to hide his disappointment.
He said: “The Ministry of Defence’s loss is the Prime Minister’s gain.”
It simply is not right. That’s the point of it.
with regard to FOAS, its far from a dream.
If one thinks of it as a fleet of super 2 man 1990s uber stealth fighter bombers, then perhaps it was fanciful.
Taranis is spawned directly from FOAS (along with a lot of classified and cutting edge work).
R&D which has paid dividends is very politically persuasive, which is why i think my theory about Taranis development softening the loss of Tornado is actually not bad at all for the RAF.
The direct link of Taranis to FOAS is less direct than you think. FOAS in its original form was a study of what should have been replaced the Tornado as the RAF’s primary deep strike platform.
Favored RAF option being the 2-men crew stealth bomber, incidentally.
It included other approaches, too, included extreme-long range cruise missiles launched with parachute-extraction from the back of cargo aircrafts and other proposals.
It is a dream, like it or not, because as was so easily foreseen, there’s no budget for it. The same Taranis, that is more a “descendant” than a real evolution of FOAS, risks not to go any further forwards since an agreement (and moreover a budget) for continuation of the work on the prototype after the currently planned flights does not exists and risks to never be funded.
Even if it is, Taranis is effectively a study platform, not a real UCAV, and as such it will be incapable to do anything more than SIMULATED bomb drops.
So, for now, both FOAS and even Taranis are dreams in their own way.
That, sometime in a (far…? How far?) future, the RAF will be using a UCAV, is almost certain, for how military technology and trends are evolving. Unless the air force is closed down at the next round of cuts, soon or later UCAVs will be part of it. But sincerely, to link this to FOAS itself is not entirely honest, in my opinion.
Liger30I sorta agree on your second point, even if i prefer to be very, very careful until official announcement that the amphibs are safe comes out.
But on the first point, i don’t know. It does not seem very flattering for the defence minister to be overcome by his own military adviser, which is chosen to take over direct role of Prime Minister’s advisor.
The Prime Minister’s advisor should be Fox. That’s what doesn’t really fit.
Liger30Re, the possible cutting of all the RN’s amphib capability – did anyone notice from where the newly appointed special advisor to the PM comes from?
Col Morris of the Royal Marines.
2+2=?
I do hope it means the RM and their ships are safe, but it is a hope. Until Tuesday, i’ll be nervous like hell about it all.
Anyway, as i suspected Fox is being cut out. I expect him to eventually resign soon enough.
And he’ll have all my support, because he was the first defence minister in ages that actually knew what he was saying and that tried hard doing the best for the services. I don’t know if he was the one to leak his letter for the prime minister or if someone did it for him.
I don’t even care.
It was a much needed act of wisdom of which i’m grateful. It exposed the folly of some of the cuts proposals. And if, as i hope so much, Amphibs and Carriers and Nimrods come out “safe” from this disaster, that will be largely thanks to Liam.
Had he been defence minister years ago, the armed forces would be in an incredibly better state today.
Which makes me worried, again, because i don’t know what will be of the forces after SDSR if he quits or is in any way emarginated from the decision-making.
Becuse France has nor been in active combat since 2001, fighting two conflicts which have been eating into the defence budget all that time and wearing out kit & ammo at a greater rate than the budget allows for….
I’m not sure that’s all of it, but it certainly had a relevance.
However, wars shouldn’t burden this much on the Forces’ modernization needs. Wars are not peacetime-budget voices, and should have never, never, never been financed from peacetime MOD budget.
Liger30No, the Tornado IDS fleet was due to be replaced by a seperate system orginally.
Oh, yeah, of course. You mean the FOAS… but that died so long ago. Another one of the dreams of the RAF. I think it is not even worth considering, personally.
Much as I hate the thought of getting rid of the Tornado, it might be a necessary evil, but it would leave a gaping capability gap, unless we can speed up a2g integration on Typhoon.
On a side: Would it possible to integrate RAPTOR onto the Typhoon? Seems a shame to lose the combat ISTAR it delivers.
I think it exactly like you. I love the Tornado. Utterly. But losing it is the only way to make a real cut and real saving, which hopefully will save most of the rest.
Of course, ideally, the weaponry-integration plan for the Typhoon should go ahead faster than planned, double pace, starting from Brimstone all the way up to Storm Shadow and ALARM.
As to the RAPTOR pod, i think it is certainly feasible to move it to the Typhoon’s own centerline under-fuselage pylon. It will take a separate integration process, perhaps, but it is arguably one of the most needed capabilities supplied by Tornado, and one of the best ones, and it truly shouldn’t be lost.
There’s no real alternative to scrapping Tornado: the only other way to make comparable (but probably still smaller all the same) savings would be to ground immediately the whole Harrier force and scrap Illustrious and Ark Royal immediately with them.
1981 rewind.
How long before someone asks “where’s our strike carrier?” and the admirals cough embarassedly and remind the guys that the carriers and their planes are gone…?
Really no. The total incapacity to deploy aircrafts at sea for years is a gap that can’t be accepted.
It would also inevitably lose knowledge for the carrier ops and make it harder and more expensive to get the new one(s) working.
The Tornado fleet should offer, all by itself, a 10% cut at the very least. I read somewhere it could save as much as 7 billions in four years. It seems a little too much, actually, but for sure it will be a large amount of money.
Possibly even more of the 10% that apparently is being requested.
Sad as it will make me to see the Tornado bow out, if it avoids nastier cuts to come, then really there’s no other way to fix things.
I was thinking more for the future, when the time comes to replace the Typhoon and the F-35, it might be better to have a single, carrier capable platform that can be used by both the RAF and the FAA.
Like France did with Rafale and like the UK could have done if a the big sparkle of light that someone had in 1999 about a “Sea Typhoon” possibility had come earlier and had been followed.
For the future, it is certainly the way i’d want the air force to go.
The Apache AH1, in this sense, is the best example: army-creature, but navalized and with folding rotors. Was that a smart idea!
In the future, it should be the basic rule for pretty much every helicopter and airplane of the services, i say.
Make the Joint Helicopter Command TRULY joint.
And toss in the air force as well. It can still be RAF, but it must be able to deploy from land and ship-bases alike.
Liger30Looks like the Italians had the right idea all along….
You mean me…?:D
Because Italy itself actually plans a massive (and unrealistic) buy of F35A to replace Tornado and AMX, and as many as possibly 65 F35B to replace the Navy’s Harriers and give the air force a jump jet force as well.
A fleet of just Typhoon and F35 (either B and C, or B, or C) was the UK’s plan from the very first moment, so it is nothing new either.
Liger30If we are to believe the rumors, the RAF actually wanted F35C as a sweetener after FOAS-cancellation: there were rumors that the RAF wanted a bunch of F35C to use for deep strike, on top of the F35B to be used by the navy. The Royal Navy was less demanding in this, and was happy of the F35B… at least until range proved shorter than promised, bring-back weight proved a problem and weapons bay had to be shortened.
This, plus the cost overruns, means the Navy certainly would not cry at the idea of getting the F35C.
Only problem, of course, which scares me as it must scare the admirals, is that F35B could do even with a PoW pulled out of high readiness state.
F35C can’t do without catapults. When QE is out, there’s nothing available. Simple as that.
In time of crisis, a major problem. In peacetime, an oppurtunity to send F35C on Charles de Gaulle and brag about glorious interoperability and collaboration and other happy things.
Overall, i do not think the RN or RAF would be displeased at all to move to the F35C version. What will displease the RAF would be the F35C going to the Navy and not to the RAF.
But attention! This may not be the case at all! RAF may still get all the F35C that are bought, regardless of the fact they are necessary for the carriers.
Once more, the navy might still be the loser.
Actually, i suspect that this will exactly be what happens. The F35C will be bought for the carriers, but still end up in RAF’s (greedy like with the Harrier Gr9…? hope not) hands.
IF the navy does get all the F35C, however, i will not cry. I will be happy, because those planes will be used in the best possible way: at sea, to project power abroad, and to be available WHERE THEY ARE NEEDED.
Also, it would be, finally, a much needed lesson for the RAF: once more, just like in the “East of Suez” clash, they spent long time contrasting the navy’s own fixed wing capability and the carriers.
Last time they wanted to kill the carriers to get the TSR2. Carriers killed. But… Oh, surprise! TSR2 killed as well! (what a shame, by the way…) Then it was F111, and that got cancelled as well.
The RAF is almost as bad as Dannatt. Time they grow up. They are the real image of inter-service rivalry.
Sentimentally, i say i’d love to see FAA colors on F35C.
But as people in here know already, my dream is for an even 2/2 squadrons, so that the navy’s got its 800 and 801 NAS and the RAF saves the glorious tradition of the Dambusters of the 617° as well.
As to the drones: they are the way to go. The future lays in the drones, and i think everyone here can agree on that. Their use has been growing at INCREDIBLE rate.
Now. Point is, Liam Fox was very vocal from the very start about such creatures as the Mantis.
He got it right, and realized very early that:
1) Drones are a new, massive market. Everyone wants them, and Britain is already starting to lag behind most other producers in the field. Mantis and Taranis are wonderful machines, but they are prototypes.
Little is available in terms of small and mini-drones, and similarly ground drones are not available in the UK, while Israel has the G-Nius, the AvantGuard (which the army hopes to buy at some point and would save so many lives scouting ahead of dismounts with its ground-piercing radar and sensors and remote .50 machine gun…). Italy’s industry is always making serious machines in this field.
The UK has a chance to create three machines of absolute excellence: Mantis, Taranis and Talisman, the underwater drone of Bae Systems. Sephyr is a world-beating machine, and the US have already understood it and stepped in: their money should secure its future, but the UK may lose the advantages of its own creations because of idiotic funding decisions. The FAST surface drone for mine-clearance was a very smart idea, but i don’t hear of it anymore from as far back as DSEI 2007, which gives the suspect that the programme was killed in one of the many cuts to research funding. It should be resurrected NOW, and it would be late already. It should pursue these programmes NOW, so to be in a leading position for exports as well. The Mantis is better than the Reaper, and it would certainly have a wide market.
2) Drones are useful and in high demand
3) Drones can be useful in High End warfare and COIN alike
4) Drones are “cheap” (compared to manned platforms)
5) Drones put no crew in danger
Liam Fox was a great supporter of britain becoming a leader in the market for Drones, and i suspect he was a great supporter of the Scavenger requirement of the MOD.
It calls for acquisition of 10 MALE drones to cover the role that at the moment 3 Reapers try to fulfill. MALEs with attack capability, in other words. This screams “MANTIS!!!” loud like Hell.
8 more machines are required to act as communications relay and long-endurance surveillance. Which screams “ZEPHYR!!!” equally loud. With up to 3 MONTHS planned as endurance, the prototype already flew with a UK Mod-mandated COMMS pod.
Was it for Liam Fox, i’m pretty sure the Scavenger order would see 10 Mantis and 8 Zephyrs mandated for the armed forces, with the second part of the experimentation on the Taranis to go ahead immediately, without hesitations, so to be ready to get all of Europe on the UK-lead train in time (NEURON, Barracuda and so along aren’t being easy programmes, nor very succesful ones).
Now, though, i have fears.
You’ll have noticed that Cameron himself will be exposing the SDSR on Tuesday. Already, worried voices are rising that Fox might be trying to get himself out of the disaster of a review he believes is a great mistake.
If it is true, and i believe it is, this could be very bad, for many, many reasons. And endanger even drones.
I suspect that Fox might really quit if a suicidal decision is taken, like scrapping the amphibious fleet, something he clearly (and wisely) opposes.
Regardless of what the armed forces need, and of what would be logical if we think the RAF is going to shrink so damn much, it will be ultimately politician’s word which decides what king of funding release to the MOD. After all, i don’t think that, if the review was based around sound reasoning, a proposal to cut the amphibious fleet would have come out. It simply is unreal in the strategic picture.
The cuts are only the start of it. A violent stop in the modernization of the forces is likely to follow as the infamous “38-billions” overspend is tackled.
Liger30I don’t think senior officers ever failed to point out what they needed to get the job done. Either publicly or privately, they always present their facts.
Politicians then regularly ignore the warnings.
And when the military is given a mission, it has to do with what it’s got. You really think they can say “no, we can’t”…? They have to obbey and find a way to do the job.
Liger30And yet they are to get a one-billion cut in the SDSR.
2004 replay. Different chancellor, same ending. Gordon Brown or someone else, it ends up being the same it seems.
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