The Russian Navy would be almost certainly be better off scrapping those outdated money pits and building some modern and more efficient ships.

Mr Beedall does indeed know plenty about the RN and matters concerning it i would imagine he would have quite a few sources within the MoD, RN and industry. I would guess he is also ex-RN, ex-Shipbuilding or at least served some time.

He’s definitely ex RN, couldn’t tell you in what capacity he served or rank attained though.

Those 10 missiles would have 10 warheards (Mirvs) on them after a couple of years, thats why Russia doesn’t want them there, even though they already have the advantage in SAM/ABM defences.

To what end exactly?

An extra 100 warheads to add to the thousands the US already owns? Yeah that really makes sense. Paranoid much?

Actually have just seen this:

Your not a Ceasar, or a War-Mongering tough guy, your just a long line of dumb yanks, that have picked on countries that don’t the weapons capability to fight back, the day when Rus and AMERICA ARE GIONG TO FIGHT are coming to head, and I want to see the look on YOUR face when your nationand millions of your countrymen become ash what are going to do then (so called warmongering tough guy) you get no points for defeating weak nations that can’t fight back anyway.

I’ll conclude that you’re just a nuclear warmongering moron.

Hell i’d vote for him.

And it’s more likely to be a year and half to 2 after the election before things start to happen if we go with Liam Fox’s view that an SDR can be done in a year and that it will be the main instrument of change. But if we believe the colossal prick that is George Osborne we’ll be able to hear Mr Beedall shoot himself within weeks of the election as we cancel every major program we have, the more urgently needed, the quicker it’ll be cut.

As a side note, it was nice to hear that Liam Fox and a bunch of other Tories basically slapped Osborne for what he said and outing himself as a moron.

Yep that Time article made him out to look a complete pillock, next time he starts talking about potential cuts to defence programmes it might be a good idea if he didn’t admit that he didn’t know what he was talking about in the next sentence.

Mr R B for Minister of Defence? We’d have a bloody good navy that’s for sure.

Without the RN carriers i imagine the UK would of still tried to take back the Falklands but not to sure how this would of worked. Could involve special forces and lots of paratroops to secure a beach head and land some troops as fast as possible. Lots more SAM’s and lots of Air to air refueling to provide some kind of cover but granted it would be a very hard mission. I just can’t see the Uk giving up the Falklands. We would of seen container ships converted to Harrier carriers and all kind’s of idea’s getting made up. Much more risky and maybe more deaths but the UK would of done it anyway.
It just show’s how relevant carriers and SSN’s are to a conflict. Without then it would of been hard. We would of seen special forces blowing Argentine aircraft on the main land or other high risk missions. This would of made world opinion less in UK favour by doing attacks on the main land but needs must.

You may well be right there, but even so in the scenario you’ve suggested the RN still needed carriers even if they were improvised ones.

I think it would be wiser to get rid of that old carrier and buy some additional air refueling tankers.. Its cheaper and makes more flexible (read quicker) alerts possible during out of area Ops.

Its not only a carrier which sucks up the budget rather quick but you also need an escort and support fleet to keep it going.

You might want to have a read about the Black Buck missions and how effective they were.

Past armed conflicts like the Kosovo war, Falkland campaign and Iraq required large scale AWACS and air to air refueling capacity. There was less need for aircraft carriers. Even in OEF, air to air refueling is required to operate USN fighters over Afghanistan.

To say that carriers were not necessary to the Falklands conflict is one of the more ridiculous things I’ve read on this site, as pointed out the Flaklands was also won without AWACS.

Not particularly encouraging but then hardly surprising either. Still its only words at the moment and politicians words mean nothing to me, we won’t find out what their real intentions are until they get in power.

You could actually view this article as one big piece of excuse making for not cutting those three programmes – “didn’t know cancellation costs at the time, now I do, want to cut them but can’t, sorry”.

Doesn’t really mention what happens after the last of the Vanguard replacements gets built, could be just the same situation as before, let the infrastructure go, but that is a very long way off.