The Falklands War was almost 30 years ago; I hope the RN isn’t making the basic military mistake of planning for the next war on the basis of how they fought the last one!

The new carriers are warmed over CVA-01s, indicating that the admirals never accepted the loss of large conventional flat-tops, and saw an opportunity to restore them when (a) Tony Blair was in Downing St and following his ‘ liberal interventionist’ policy, together with (b) Gordon Brown as Chancellor who wanted lots of jobs for his constituents in Rosyth.

The fundamental problem with the Royal Navy is numbers: the carriers, escorts, and submarines are so expensive that only small numbers of each are being bought – in IMHO, Britain would be far better served in the modern world with larger numbers of smaller, simpler ships. Forget about trying to keep up with the Joneses, sorry, the Americans; they’re defence expenditure is in a different league than any other country on the globe.

So what, we go with a massive fleet of GP Frigates and conventional powered subs for what purpose? conventional powered subs are no good for expeditionary warfare and there’s no real threat to the North Atlantic so why would we want them? as for smaller Frigates why? The most expensive things on them are the sensors and if you start to strip those away pretty soon you’re going to end up with ships that are only good for hunting pirates, put them in a real war with they’d be more or less useless.

30 Years ago we were in something called the ‘Cold War’ you might remember it you might not but it demanded that we had a large fleet of escorts capable of shutting off the North Atlantic from the Soviets, that threat no longer exists, having a navy built around eradicating that threat wouldn’t make sense.

As Geoff says other navies of the world have also reduced their numbers along similar lines I don’t see to much wrong with the direction the RN is taking, other than that we’d all like a couple of extra subs/frigates etc.

I don’t see what use Libya would have for Type 26. Libya needs a local navy, mostly to protect its EEZ. More like a coast guard, really.

Well that was why I mentioned the OPVs 😉

The new rulers have already made proclamations about exporting oil saying that they will give preference to dealings companies from countries that helped bring down Gaddafi, specifically Italy, France and Britian were mentioned. They also said that they would have to think about Brazil, China and Russia.

That sounds to me like China and Russia could find themselves locked out of new defence contracts for quite some time.

On a funnier note how long before somebody launches a thread discussing who should sell the new government fighter aircraft and what they should buy…

Within a week I would imagine.

The only example of Aegis facing a missile attack that I can think of is the GW I case where 2 Silkwork missiles were fired by Iraqi forces at the USS Missouri and USS Jarrett.

The Royal Navy destroyer HMS Gloucester shot down one and the other fell into the sea.

So hardly a coordinated attack, but not a great success story for the Aegis system either.

I don’t think there was an Aegis vessel escorting Missouri, I thought it was just Gloucester and Jarrett.

It was HMS Spartan, and it’s probably fair to say that for a good portion of that time she couldn’t be found because she’d returned to port :diablo:

Not a case of “talking down” anyone – more a case of what I said in the previous post I suspect. Enthusiasts (and I am one of course) are inevitably tempted to look at the world in a fairly insular way.

Fair enough then.