Originally Posted by
Jabba_TG12
I realise this may be a bit obtuse but I found this buried away on an Andrew Neil blog on BBC.
I dont know how much of it is true and I realise that it may end up in another light v dark blue death-match, but I found its comments very thought provoking.
Also, I realise that this is a PILOTS rumour network rather than a political one, but...
Anyway, I'm waffling. Can anyone verify any of this info? Or is it hogwash?
It's a bit long and rather rambling in places (more on that anon), but...
12-years of hugely damaging, highly inadequate Labour govt Armed Forces' funding policies- accompanied by misleading public-statements and shameless Labour party self-promotion has likely contributed greatly to this...
The current aircraft carrier design/build programme provides a good example of how badly botched an urgently needed UK military project can become when being run/overseen by senior members of a governing party whose main objective with the project is increasing these member(s) re-election chances, as opposed to the main objective of the project being the nation's best interests:
The first question that springs to mind - almost as if to cue Jackonicko - is whether or not the CVF is urgently-needed. Just as JN is on record as saying it isn't needed at all, I'm on record (helpfully for insomniacs) as saying that if the government was/is serious about expeditionary warfare it requires carriers - but not at the expense of other capabilities such as (in no particular order) UK AD, the provision of MPA, SH, ISTAR and AT in sufficient numbers, and perhaps being kind enough to give the VC10 the opportunity to retire before the airframes are old enough to be given a state pension.
If the government isn't prepared to fund the full gamut of capabilities, then the fundamental question of whether we should aspire to expeditionary ops has to be asked, and if the answer comes back as 'No', or 'Yes, but only in a limited form' then the urgency for the CVF (yes, I know I should be calling it the 'Queen Elizabeth class', but...) is up for doubt. The author doesn't give us any sense of whether or not he has considered this matter or whether he's taken a 'the carriers come hell, high water or high tempo land operations' position. I suspect the latter...
Cherry-picking bits and bobs:
The Labour-handicapped design-decisions regarding the planned new carriers are- if the project proceeds- going to result in 2 warships that would barely be suitable to fight a mid-twentieth century type conflict, and certainly not 21st century ones...
His evidence for this stunning assertion is...?
Unlike France's plans for its 'French version' (PA2) of these warships- which are being designed and were to-be-constructed simultaneously- the UK's new aircraft carriers:
- won't be fitted with with deck-catapults for fixed-wing aircraft launches
But the design can be amended to accomodate such types; he's missing the point that the provisional decision to go with the F-35B meant that the expense of adding catapults (and what about the arrestor gear??) was avoided. It may be that we end up with a conventional carrier and the F-35C; we just don't know yet. So this charge is a bit of a straw man effort. I don't dispute the fact that it would be better if MASC came in the form of the E-2D, but given the current spending constraints, it seems unlikely that this would be procured anyway.
- won't be nuclear powered;
Because of the expense of doing this. The old USN conventional carriers weren't exactly slouches in projecting air power, so the chap needs to articulate why this is a bad thing and he doesn't. The use of nuclear power was thought to risk making the carriers unaffordable.
- won't be capable of carrying or deploying tactical nuclear weapons, such as depth charges, anti-surface-target, anti-ship ordinance, etc
A major problem being unable to carry weapons we don't have...
- won't be fitted with up-to-date 'inner layer' airborne threat defences. (Thanks to Labour's underfunding, the new carriers are to be fitted with a 25-year old 'Phalanx' inner layer defence system, once these Phalanx systems become available for cannibalization from retired/decommissioned RN warships);
The Americans are happy with Phalanx - CVN-77 has them. Can't recall if RIM-116 is to replace Phalanx aboard the Nimitz-class, though. His complaint seems to be that the Phalanx is old - is he, I wonder, making the mistake of suggesting that even though something works, it should be replaced because it's an old design?
- won't be fitted with any 'outer layer' airborne threat defence systems at all.
Not noticed the Nimitz-class touting SM-2/SM-3 capability recently...
Ship-launched outer layer airborne threat defences are basic equipment on modern, first world countries' warships such as aircraft carriers.
Apart from on American CVNs, if one takes the view that the Sea Sparrow is a point defence weapon (which is what the USN has always said it is on its web publicity, and in other
PR material in the days before t'interweb). Unless you take the view that the aeroplanes aboard might form part of the outer layer defences...
- won't be fitted with any sub-surface threat defensive weapons;
Nor was Ark Royal, nor is, as far as I recall, the Charles de Gaulle. Unless you count the ASW helicopters, of course...
The chap seems to be a tad obsessed with giving the CVF nuclear weapons storage, but again - are we seriously suggesting that a government in the UK is going to restore tactical nuclear weapons capability to the FAA/Joint Force Lightning II (Joint Force Dave if you wish to set BEagle's teeth on edge...
)
why would other first world countries'- such as the US, Japan, S. Korea, France, and even Italy- be investing many, many millions of pounds in armour and airborne threat defences for their navies' aircraft carriers??
The Japanese and South Koreans are investing in conventional aircraft carriers? Quick, someone - tell them! The Koreans have a vessel which displaces less than the CVS; and the Japanese Hyuga is only a tad larger than the Korean effort. By the by, part of the Hyuga's defences include the apparently useless Phalanx...
I'd suggest that the rest of the blog post becomes a bit of a rant, coupled with a spot of Frog-bashing; some bits of his argument give the impression that he secretly wants us to sign up to the CVN-X, which - if that is the case - is a tad... barking.
Immediate govt actions to upgrade the Royal Navy's grievously degenerated, dangerously inadequate capabilities are needed... not more false-logic avoidance of reality...
Now that I can agree with - albeit he should substitute 'British Armed Forces' for 'Royal Navy'...
Mr Lewis has posted similar stuff on the Telegraph's have your say pages - he did something rather long and rambling about how the last budget should've increased funding for the BBC, and there's another link-fest about carriers in the have your say section of the Torygraph from 29th Sept this year (although the Torygraph page won't load, the Zimbabwe News Wire's direct lift of the page does....
)
My take would be that while there's some merit to some bits of his argument, he has a bit of 'let's return to the days when we had big aircraft carriers, Lord Reith at the helm of the Beeb and were, frankly, jolly rude to the French on all occasions' (not that there's necessarily anything fundamentally unsound about the sentiments...
) which seems to overwhelm his analytical faculties.