https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/b...ases-nk2hfns8c
Britain may halve fighter jet purchases
Britain could buy only half its target of 138 F-35 Lightning II fighter jets, according to sources close to the government’s defence review.
The UK has agreed to buy 48 of the
stealth multirole jets by the end of 2025 for £9.1 billion. It is the most expensive weapons system in military history..... A wider British aspiration to buy 138 of the aircraft over the lifespan of the US-led programme is seen as unlikely to be fulfilled, defence sources said.
The 138 figure was confirmed as an ambition in the UK defence review in 2015, but the Commons defence committee noted later that this decision was taken “following some hesitation”. Britain is not contractually obliged to buy any more than 48. It is understood that as part of the foreign policy, defence and security integrated review due to conclude in November, military chiefs have discussed the figure of 70 F-35s as a credible minimum total order.
Discussions are said to be continuing about how to balance investment in the American-designed jets that are state-of-the-art and in production, with channelling funding into Tempest, a next-generation fighter jet programme led by the UK that is at an early stage. A third factor in Britain’s combat air-power funding equation is a scheme to upgrade the RAF’s Typhoon fighter jets with the latest technology.
In the longer term the aim is for the
Tempest jet, which is due to come into service from 2035, to replace Typhoons when they are phased out of service from the late 2030s.......
Tobias Ellwood, Conservative chairman of the Commons defence select committee, urged ministers to think carefully before slashing the number of total F-35 orders. “In the first Gulf War, we had 36 fast-jet squadrons; we are now down to six. We’re getting close to having a niche combat capability. We can’t keep eroding our spectrum of capability in this way,” he said yesterday.
Air Chief Marshal Sir Michael Graydon, former head of the RAF, said: “Am I happy with the idea of cutting F-35s in the long-term? No, I’m not, because it would undoubtedly leave us even shorter of frontline combat squadrons.”
However, Justin Bronk, a research fellow in combat air-power at the Royal United Services Institute, said that although a fleet of 70 F-35s would be “on the lower end of expectations”, it “makes sense”. At that number, the RAF would be able to keep 60 in service, with ten held back to replace any aircraft lost to attrition or age-related damage, he said.
Mr Bronk suggested that investment in Tempest may create British jobs, but was sceptical that the resulting jet would outperform the F-35.
“Even in an optimistic scenario, the UK and Italy with potentially other partners such as Sweden will be able to contribute a fraction of the investment in both development and acquisition of the US to a next-generation fighter programme,” he said. “So it should be admitted up front that the overall capability is likely to be behind what the Americans are producing at a similar point, making the arguments for Tempest primarily sovereign industrial arguments rather than operational capability ones.”
Francis Tusa, editor of the
Defence Analysis newsletter, said: “It’s obvious 138 is a vaporous figure, unless you were to say, ‘Let’s scrap the army completely and spend the money on the RAF’. Support costs of F-35s [are] eye-watering and the availability rate is poor because of the waiting time for spare parts.”.......