While there are Blackhawk rumours (and it seems to have risen again) – I was actually referring to UH-72 Lakota (I concede it has a shorter range than Wildcat). A door gunner (or ramp gunner on the Chinnock) seems like a jolly useful addition on a utility helicopter otherwise they would not fit them to the Merlin’s and the Chinnocks. I might be wrong but it seems to me that in order to avoid operating two types of helicopter they have merged a requirement for a light scout helicopter with a medium utility helicopter and gotten something that is not quite a good as if they gone with two separate helicopters.

Finally, I was quoting this story http://www.thinkdefence.co.uk/2009/05/lynx-wildcat-whats-in-a-name/ when talking about manoeuvrability, the Wildcat weighs more than Lynx AH9 and has the same rotor system so the author of the article thinks it will effect manoeuvrability, it is the one area where my argument was weakest.

EDIT: Just seen your other post – AugustaWestland own info say 7 soldiers and the British Army Website says 9 solider for the Lyxn AH9 – this is a capability drop, due I think to massive increase in protection to the soldiers being carried in the armoured seats

It also has a new airframe and new software, and we know how much software has grown important to make an airframe agile or not. I wouldn’t take it as Absolute Truth. However, the Lynx MK9A is not going to be replaced by Wildcat. Not immediately. Wildcat should replace the MK7 for now and the navy’s Lynx.

As to the merging of requirements, i can even agree. The Lakota (which is not really so american, since it is Eurocopter’s product) would have been a good scout, but with no utility function at all. The Wildcat answers to the need of the MOD to do a lot of things with less and less assets.
Having the budget power to run a fleet of “sole-scouts” and a fleet of pure utility choppers, probably the army would have gone on that route… But it had to reach an advantageous compromise.

We must reason in UK terms, not US ones. Especially with the incoming budget cuts that make it all even worse.

I thought the issue most people have with the Army Wildcat is that it lacks a radar – which would be useful in its role as a target designator for the Apache, cannot carry two door gunners as well as 8 troops so is not completely useful as a utility helicopter, weighs more than the Lynx AH9 and will not be as manoeuvrable, and costs more than an off the shelf purchase of US made helicopter to fill the same role.

EDIT: Checked the AgustaWestland website and the Wildcat can only carry 7 troops and that is without any mention of door gunner(s)

http://www.agustawestland.com/sites/all/themes/custom/newagusta/print-new-product.html

The navy version has a radar and if the army considered the radar a requirement it would be simple to put one on the Wildcat. There’s no money for that, and no requirement either. Differently from even the US, the UK’s Apaches are technically all “Longbow” apaches, thus with their own very effective radar.

No Lynx can carry 2 door gunners, indeed, but this is not seen as a true issue. Helicopters do not engage willingly in firefights: the machine gun on the chopper will be fired on targets at range and at choice of the helicopter crew. There’s no way a Lynx will hover under enemy fire with gunners firing from the side doors. This happens only in the movies, and the Lynx (just like any other helo unless we are talking of an apache) is not armored and even small arms fire is a more than serious issue.
The army Lynx will provide overwatch and support with the M3 machine gun, the air-version of the immortal .50, and will do so from a safe distance.

Less manoeuvrable? Is there any evidence it will be other than bold assumptions?

Original troop transport requirement for the Lynx was 7 men. 8 is two complete sections of 4 soldiers, and it is enough to fulfil the requirement of the army for this particular role.

The rumour of the Off-the-shelf purchase you mention is, i’m guessing, the one about Blackhawks. We do not know the details of that offer. We know that the Black would have made up another fleet to sustain, introducing training, spare parts, infrastructures, mainteinance costs that people overwatches happily.
And while the Blackhawk could transport 12/15 soldiers, it was not suited for the scouting role the army required.

The Wildcat is a Scout with a secondary LIGHT utility role. The Black is a medium utility chopper. Two different breeds that hardly compare.

Except for the fact that the Lynx couldn’t work in Afghanistan, so the Apaches operate in pairs, which is a lot less efficient that a Gazelle/Tigre team.

That’s why the Wildcat and Lynx MK9A with their more powerful engine and consequently better “hot-and-high” performances are a major step forwards the army is desperately pursuing from years.

Sacrifice their requirements in order to follow the trend of the moment and buy other utility choppers would have doubtful results at best: the utility choppers wouldn’t come for a lot of time still, and a bleeding gap in capabilities would remain in the scouting sector.
Rob paul to pay rob. And ultimately, “preparing for the wars of yesterday”. Because when most utility choppers come, included the new Chinooks (if they survive the review), the war of today will be ending and becoming one of yesterday. Now, utility choppers are very useful… but sacrifice the capabilities the Wildcats are required for in exchange for a bunch more of taxi-helos wouldn’t be smart.

The Gazelles are already disappearing. The current plan is that they’ll all be gone by 2018. Maybe that will be accelerated by the SDSR.

The Army needs a light/medium utility helicopter, something in the Blackhawk class, to replace the Puma. (NH90 would do nicely, but that’s not going to happen; Blackhawks maybe, or something basic like the AW139, or the AW149 if it ever actually happens, any of which would presumably be made by Westland.)

Chinooks and Merlins are too big sometimes, or their size isn’t required, and the Lynx Wildcat is too small, in terms of troop-carrying capacity. As mentioned earlier, the latest Super Lynx would probably meet most of the the Navy’s requirement.

My answer is simple: there’s no money to go your way.

The helicopter stratey of the MOD already called for the whole fleet to be made up by Chinooks, Merlins and Wildcats. With the SDSR dealing with even less money (a lot less) than it was thought available when the strategy came out, there’s no way in hell the Puma gets a dedicated replacement.
Nor could a 1 billion program like Lynx be erased with first airframe on the way to get handed to the army to be replaced by two different contracts, two different fleets, one of Lynx for the navy and a whole different kind for the army.
Total cost of the move would be absurd, and long term efficiency would be thrown to the dogs once more.

Better not to ask for Wildcat to be scrapped. If it does, it is likely to be left without a replacement, and if you go back to my post with the list of the FAA and AAC Lynx groups, you make yourself an idea of what kind of capability loss it would be to see Lynx go out in 2014 without replacement.
There wouldn’t even be choppers to embark on frigates anymore, since only 5 Type 23 use Merlins anyway at the end of the day.

And there’s still two regiments of the AAC on Gazelle. 2018 for such an under-used and outdated chopper…? It definitely has to go. When it was deployed to active ops last time…?

The Gazelles are on the way out anyway, the Pumas should go too, but so should the Lynx Wildcat, at least for the Army. The battlefield reconnaissance role is or will be covered by other ISTAR assets, including UAVs, and the general utility/transport role could better handled by something like an AW139, which can carry twice as many troops as a Wildcat. This would keep work in Westland, and replace the Army’s Pumas and Lynxes.

Actually, i was astonished to find out that the Gazelle planned retirement date is 2018.

They could very well be retired tomorrow in the morning, sincerely, since retiring any other kind would be far worse a lose.

While 22 Puma are set for an over 200 millions upgrade to stay in service up to the 2020, until the SDSR EVENTUALLY changes that labour decision for something else. As i already said, i’m certainly in favor of dropping the upgrade and Puma in exchange for new Merlin airframes.

The ultimate objective, though, is and should be to plan a future rotorcraft fleet centered on Chinooks, Wildcats and Merlins. Adding any other fleet to support and to train people for would be a waste of money that the MOD simply CAN’T afford.

My current bets are on the MoD funding Trident replacement but getting a better budget settlement closer to 10%

Interesting, not all of the scenarios outlined below would be a total disaster

Probably another case of a newspaper listing all options in one go, for instance dumping the SeaKings would see the Sikorsky PFI deal go ahead.

The deletion of the Puma and Gazelle fleets would be the most sensible options.
Scrapping the Wildcats would be a disaster: most of the FAA and AAC fleets of choppers depend heavily on the Future Lynx and cutting them would mean destroying almost completely both fleets as the current Lynx begin phasing out in 2014 if not even earlier.

The deletion of Sea King is something the RN hoped to do years ago when it asked/planned for 66 Merlins to cover all roles. This was not done back then, but it could certainly be done in a few years time now, by having as was already planned under labour the Merlins go to the navy.
The SAR service contract should be fixed in some way, though, to allow Sea King to truly bow out.
It would take a few years to get new choppers in service for the role, and hopefully they would not be S92 as it had been suggested. Adding another fleet to support would largely erase the savings obtained by phasing out Sea Kings. It would just replace a problem with another.
It would make more sense to center the PFI on Merlin choppers: the unit cost, i think, won’t be much different, and the savings can be obtained in training/support/logistics.

Any numeric reduction to the already overstretched Wildcat, Merlin and Apache fleets would be a total disaster, though, and it is an option to avoid at all costs.

Full text of Liam Fox’s speech here:

http://www.mod.uk/DefenceInternet/AboutDefence/People/Speeches/SofS/20100813TheNeedForDefenceReform.htm

Some nuggests:

Now, I didn’t come into politics wishing to see a reduction in our Defence budget.

Neither did David Cameron.

Indeed, we have both often argued in the past that in a dangerous world – the world in which we live – there is a strong case to increase our spending on national security.

But while we can never predict where events will take us or the unavoidable bills we will have to pay as a consequence, we must confront the ghastly truth of Labour’s legacy.

There is an unfunded liability in Defence of around £37 billion over the next 10 years.

The equipment and support programme alone makes up over £20 billion of this – that is equipment they planned without ever having an idea whether the budget would be able to afford it.

So we face the SDSR with unavoidably constrained finances.

There are three ways to conduct a Defence Review in the circumstances.

First, you could just cut a bit of everything.

This is what the Department sometimes refers to as the equal pain option across the Services.

We cannot continue living hand to mouth with endless salami slicing without any sense of security or stability in either the Defence industry or the Armed Forces.

That has too often been the solution in the past and we must do better now and in the future.

The second option is to protect current capabilities within a tight financial envelope and trim away any other spending including spending on innovative and future programs.

This would merely have the result of fossilising what we are currently able to do at the expense of capabilities we need to invest in for the future.

The third option is what I call the 2020 option.

It means looking ahead to the end of the decade and deciding what we want our Armed Forces to look like at that time based on the foreign policy goals we have set ourselves, our assessment of the future character of conflict and anticipating the changes in technology that we will need to incorporate.

We need to invest in programs that we will require to put our Defence on a sound footing for the years ahead and divest ourselves of the capabilities which we are unlikely to need in a world where the moral climate demands precision weaponry and where the battle space increasingly embraces the unmanned and cyber domains.

So the SDSR is not simply a random selection of cuts but the objective process by which we will shape the Armed Forces we will need at the end of this decade.

So, let me set out the process of analysis we are going through at the moment.

We are contrasting cost savings and the capability implications with the risks that we face in the real global security environment.

This means assessing any proposed change in a current programme or platform, against a series of criteria including:

First, the cost saving in years zero to 5, 5 to 10 and 10 plus.

Second, the capability implications – what capability will be lost as a result of this decision and what other assets do we possess that might give us the same or a similar capability?

Third, the operational implications – what operations that we currently undertake, or are likely to undertake, will we be unable to undertake as a result of this change?

Fourth, the ability to regenerate the capability, at what cost and in what timeframe.

And fifth, the risk in the real world that this capability currently protects us from or is likely to protect us from in the foreseeable future.

Rees Ward, Chief Executive of A|D|S, said:

“Although defence should contribute to solving the current financial difficulties, Dr Fox would be justified in looking around the Cabinet table to challenge other departments to match the contribution to budget savings that defence has already made over the last two decades. Defence spending is half the percentage of Government spending and of GDP that it was twenty years ago. Other departments, where budgets have grown substantially over the same period, should be challenged in the same manner before more is asked of defence given that the demands on our Armed Forces exceed what was originally planned within the current budget.”

I utterly agree with the point he makes.
Rest of his comments here: http://www.defpro.com/news/details/17553/

Programmes like CVF and the replacement of Trident are necessary
to mantain a significant british role in the present world.
I have the impression that a lot of money has been wasted in the
recent past following suggestive plans like those concerning FRES
Nimrod MR4 and some PFI.
Britain has been involved since 2001 in two wars but my impression
is that nobody in the past administration realized that in such a situation
more funds to the defence were needed to afford all the scheduled programmes and extras “ad bella gestanda”.
About the economics of defence I think that UK military expenses
are important for the only strategic industrial sector that remains in british hands.
I bag your pardon for my english and probably for the latin too.

The FRES was the most disgraceful program ever.
The Nimrod MR4 follows suit, it was unfortunate like hell. But it had its points, and to work on a plane already available promised to be the most cost effective option. Unfortunately, we all know how it ended up being in reality… It wasn’t studied with enough attention. For example, it was discovered that almost every Nimrod the MOD handed to BAe for the conversion work had been built to a different standard, which caused all sorts of troubles.
Admittedly, now we can certainly say that buying a fleet of P8 Poseidon would have been econonomically advantageous.
However, criticism against the plane itself is excessive. The program was ****ty managed, but the Nimrod MR4 is a damn fine hunter, and probably beats even the Poseidon in many fields.

As to the PFI for the RAF tankers, i don’t know what to say, honestly. Now it is fashioned to bash at this PFI, but i dunno if it is wise to do so or if it is just political bitching about an undoubtedly expensive program. I would have liked a lot more the RAF buying and owning its tankers, simple like that, but i doubt it would have been economically advantageous over the PFI.

As to the two wars and the funding problem, it is no novelty indeed. The UK fought two wars on a peacetime budget, and at the same time struggled to continue vital projects for the future like the CVFs.
For how it has been funded and for what it is been required to do in two different wars, the MOD, so often called “wasteful” and “inefficent” actually made MIRACLES.

The costs of many programs wouldn’t have escalated if the government hadn’t forced the MOD to constant delays. The CVFs being the most evident case, followed by Type 45, made horribly expensive by the lack of a firm commitment and by timely developments. You can’t plan to buy 12 ships and then cut down and down to 6 and expect the costs not to escalate.
Same risks with Astute, if 7 boats aren’t finally confirmed.
And in future with Type 26 and every other program.