UK SSBN replacement?

[ShotOne]

The UK Parliamentary defence select committee has put forward a new estimate for the replacement of Trident...at an eye-watering £167 billion! While that can be rationalised to a much smaller figure if divided yearly over the forty-odd years of the project, it's still a huge number. Another issue is the question of how visible submarines might be by 2050; it's possible in the next decade or two they may become very visible to relatively inexpensive sensors. I'm pro-deterrent but not at any price and these are big numbers. The Israelis, for instance, mount a fully credible deterrent for what must be a tiny fraction of this. Is there a cheaper way?

[Pontius Navigator]

Shot, there is a difference between a regional deterrent and a global one.

Arguably the Israelis could mount an IRBM on a fishing boat and have a viable deterrent.

Given our desire for a global deterrent we may need a more robust system. Then you could counter that only Russia could mount a viable MAD with smaller players fielding sub-strategic threats, ie not blanketing the whole country. A ship borne system might therefore be sufficient.

[Just This Once...]

With a readiness to fire quoted as 'days' and enough spare capacity on a single boat to host every remaining weapon we have (including the servicing margin) perhaps we could save money by just having something docked and taking the precaution to send the recall orders for the crews by 1st class post?

[The Old Fat One]

The Israelis, for instance, mount a fully credible deterrent for what must be a tiny fraction of this. Is there a cheaper way?

Fully credible against limited conventionally armed regional second or third world forces - probably.

Fully credible against one of the Big Five in a nuclear shooting match - nope and it's not even close.

To have any credibility (and therefore nuclear deterrence value) Trident has to a have a full "second strike" capability - which it does.

Another issue is the question of how visible submarines might be by 2050; it's possible in the next decade or two they may become very visible to relatively inexpensive sensors.

Assuming you mean state of the art nukes, outwith novels and movies, it will still be like looking for a carbon fibre needle in a haystack (in giant field of haystacks). It's ****ing hard to find things under the sea you know...ask the people looking for MH370 (and that's not even hiding).

[Wageslave]

It's hard to see how Israel could have a "fully credible" nuclear capability as they have never even admitted to having any.

[ExRAFRadar]

Or at least a v.g.

:D

[TBM-Legend]

Just place an order for Virginia Class boats and tap in to an established line. Low risk and way cheaper. Hand the UK unions a couple of Billion to appease them...

[ShotOne]

Well OK, I dont need to be sold on the concept of deterrence and clearly an SSBN is the gold standard. Even then though, I don't fully buy TOFU's B777 parallel: there's a lot more metal in a submarine and MH370 doesn't have a hundred and something people working, eating, breathing and using the gents. It doesn't contain a nuclear reactor, nor is it moving. But to come back to my question, -at any price? What if it goes up to £260 or £360 billion...still the same answer?

[WhatsaLizad?]

Shot,


If the hunted can be easily seen, so can the hunter.


The game started when the first caveman picked up a rock with intentions to use against his fellow primate. It hasn't stopped since then.

[PeterGee]

Can the OP provide a link to this select committee report. Actual replacement costs for the boats are around £11 billion as I understand it, with other costs making the programme circa £25B. The SNP driven number includes 30 year operating costs, disposal costs for the current fleet and the new fleet. Assuming the same measurements I struggle to see how this becomes £250B plus.

[Jimlad1]

Defence costs a lot when you look at a capability over many years of its life. An equally valid question would be 'how much has the Gr4 fleet cost since it came into service and if you'd been told this figure up front in the 1970s would you have been happy seeing GR4 purchased'?

[msbbarratt]

Another issue is the question of how visible submarines might be by 2050; it's possible in the next decade or two they may become very visible to relatively inexpensive sensors.Seems unlikely. The laws of physics haven't changed so far as I know. Finding several thousand tons of quiet, slow moving, deep-dived submarine in a medium as radio/light opaque as sea water in the vastness of the world's oceans is always going to be a real problem.

A large proportion of ASW still relies on some sort of initial contact - following it out of its home port, fotuitous spotting of a carelessly raised periscope on a radar, a comms intercept, a chance magnetic anomoly detection, an array of hydrophones listening to it as it travels, or by scouring the oceans with active pinging. With the trend towards quieter boats, passive sonar / hydrophone nets will inevitably struggle to keep up - it's hard to detect sounds that aren't really there in the first place. And if a properly designed well cared for submarine is skillfully driven about the only thing that is not really under its captain's control is the use of active sonar by an adversary. And even then it can be devilishly difficult for the adversary.

Mutally Assured Destruction may be a crazy idea, but a submarine is still best for that job. In an increasingly nuclear-armed world you may as well have the ultimate otherwise you may as well not bother. Half measures can be rendered useless overnight by another country's political whimsy, yet one cannot upgrade a deterrent overnight.

@PeterGee,

Can the OP provide a link to this select committee report. Actual replacement costs for the boats are around £11 billion as I understand it, with other costs making the programme circa £25B. The SNP driven number includes 30 year operating costs, disposal costs for the current fleet and the new fleet. Assuming the same measurements I struggle to see how this becomes £250B plus. Quite. It is indeed not going to be no where near that much. However, remember that Gordon Brown spent several hundred billion in a single afternoon saving the banks in 2008...

It seems reasonable to assume that the total program cost of the replacements is not going to be so very different to the total spend so far + planned disposal costs of the existing fleet of four. Magically pulling a number of £167billion out of the air when there's an objective real world representative example currently in service costing no where near that much suggests that the commitee's numbers lack credibility...

[ORAC]

This would seem to be alarmist (not surprisingly from a unilateralist) andinclude not using fixed "this year" costings (£2 billion a year in 2035 isn't as much in real terms as in 2020). Further, 6% pa is exactly what we spend on the current fleet (https://fullfact.org/factchecks/cost_trident_nuclear_deterrent-28864).

Exclusive - Trident programme to cost 167 billion pounds, far more than expected (http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/10/25/uk-britain-defence-trident-exclusive-idUKKCN0SJ0ER20151025)

.............In a written parliamentary response to Crispin Blunt, an MP in Cameron's Conservative party, Minister of State for Defence Procurement Philip Dunne said on Friday the acquisition of four new submarines would cost 25 billion pounds. He added that the in-service costs would be about 6 percent of the annual defence budget over their lifetime. The total defence budget for 2014/15 reached 33.8 billion pounds and rises to 34.1 billion pounds in 2015/16, according to the ministry.

"My office's calculation based on an in-service date of 2028 and a missile extension until 2060 ... the total cost is 167 billion pounds," Blunt told Reuters. "The successor Trident programme is going to consume more than double the proportion of the defence budget of its predecessor ... The price required, both from the UK taxpayer and our conventional forces, is now too high to be rational or sensible."

His figure was based on a presumption that Britain will spend 2 percent of its annual gross domestic product (GDP) on defence, as Cameron's government has promised. It also uses existing official government and International Monetary Fund figures, and an assumption of GDP growth of an annual average of 2.48 percent between 2020 and 2060.

Using the same figures, a Reuters calculation came to the same sum of 167 billion pounds.

Asked about the rising cost, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Defence said the government had published an unclassified version of a review on alternatives to Trident which "demonstrated that no alternative system is as capable, or as cost-effective, as a Trident-based deterrent". "At around 6 percent of the annual defence budget, the in-service costs of the UK's national deterrent ... are affordable and represent an investment in a capability which plays an important role in ensuring the UK's national security," the spokesperson said......

[Just This Once...]

Seems unlikely. The laws of physics haven't changed so far as I know. Finding several thousand tons of quiet, slow moving, deep-dived submarine in a medium as radio/light opaque as sea water in the vastness of the world's oceans is always going to be a real problem.

Unlikely seems such a strong word when, as you say, the laws of physics are applied to something unique, big and moving. Newton's third law ensures that a submarine's interaction with water will always have an effect.

If someone had mentioned using radar to look for the disturbance caused by a submerged contact 20 years ago I would have laughed. Moore's Law has already sucked away all remaining humour from this concept.

Having failed to see this coming I am clearly not ready to predict what will happen over the next 20 years....

[bobward]

Perhaps the report is based on previous cost over-runs on major projects - the two new carriers spring to mind. If a certain British defence contractor is involved, even this new estimate might be rather conservative.......

[skydiver69]

Perhaps the report is based on previous cost over-runs on major projects - the two new carriers spring to mind. If a certain British defence contractor is involved, even this new estimate might be rather conservative.......
A lot of the cost increase of the carriers was down to politicians slowing the project down leading to increased construction costs.

[Courtney Mil]

Bobward,

If you're talking about the B£167 calculation then, no. It's based on all the up-front costs and 6% of the Defence Budget thereafter. It does not look like they even tried putting cost over-runs into the calculation.

[Pontius Navigator]

JTO, a Shack, a real one, detected a submarine at depth using their ASV21. Took some analysis but it was confirmed by RRE I believe. It would have been late 60s.

[The Old Fat One]

Even then though, I don't fully buy TOFU's B777 parallel

of course - apples and oranges

But I was making the point that the ocean is a hostile environment and submarine is the master of it (27 years before the mast teaches you that). The idea that they will become "easy" to find anytime soon exists only in fiction. In fact I would suggest that our ability to develop ASW capabilities (probably throughout western forces) is a tad "sluggish" just now. (Deliberately understated to avoid pprune hysteria).

That's why the five full nuclear states (USA, Russia, UK, France and China) all stick their second strike buckets of sunshine in them.

It's a real bugger when inconvenient facts get in the way of a cost saving isn't it?

[Biggus]

Scottish Labour vote to scrap Trident - BBC News (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-34687735)

[Heathrow Harry]

trying to get Left of the Nats.................

[ShotOne]

I'd call that a statement of the obvious rather than an "inconvenient truth", TOFU. There's no dispute, at least not by me, that a submarine is a very safe place to keep nukes. But my "at any cost" question still stands.

HH I hope that comment is directed at Scottish Lab and not me; if it is, perhaps we could settle the matter with a yacht race...

[Heathrow Harry]

indeed - it was the sad remnants of ScotLab I was aiming at