If I might be allowed to try to bring the thread back onto the topics relating to CVF (and aircraft).....
More orders this week -
Equipment Contracts
Sub-contracts have been awarded by the ACA to:
Imtech Marine and Offshore Ltd in Billingham, Teesside, and Portsmouth for heating, ventilation and air-conditioning, worth £120m.
Ship Support Services Ltd based near Rosyth for paint and scaffolding for the build process, worth £105m (SSS Ltd is a joint venture formed between Pyeroy in Gateshead and Cape in Wakefield).
Henry Abrams in Glasgow for transport of sections of the ship from the yards across the UK to Rosyth for final assembly, worth £85m.
Tyco in Manchester for fixed fire fighting systems, worth £15m, and
AEI Cables in Birtley, County Durham, for much of the 2,500km of cabling to be installed, worth £8m.
This follows on from earlier contracts
back in November:
Tyneside shipbuilders A&P are celebrating the return of Naval shipbuilding to the North East today with the award of a £55M contract to construct a section of the Royal Navy’s giant new aircraft carriers.
The massive construction project, which will provide around five years’ work for A&P and support the 210-strong workforce, will see A&P construct a 1,000 tonne section that will form part of the first of the Queen Elizabeth Class carriers. At 65,000 tonnes, these will be the largest warships ever constructed in the UK.
As well as ones from
September:
The sub-contracts include: £16m for 12,000 valves by Score Marine Ltd, based in Peterhead, who employ 675 people at the site; £15m for an integrated waste management system managed by Babcock Strachan and Henshaw in Bristol, helping to sustain employment for their suppliers for the next six to eight years; and £3m for ship lighting and lighting distribution panels by McGeoch Technology Ltd, based in Birmingham, as well as several other smaller contracts.
Although it is really nothing to do with this thread, I think this sort of spending is better for the UK than simply giving endless billions to banks - see some of my comments
here.
Here is a link to the
Uncorrected Evidence given to the Common's Defence Select Commitee on 15 December 09. On CVF:
Mr Davies: There are limitations, of course; we cannot do everything. Part of my job is establishing that we have got the right priorities. We continually review those priorities. Sometimes we therefore have to say maybe we are going to have to abandon something or else put it off or extend the period of procurement of some new system. We did that in the case of the carriers.
Q431 Chairman: At a cost of over a billion pounds.
Mr Davies: No, no. If you look at the figures in front of you -----
Q432 Chairman: £1.124 million in costs in subsequent years.
Mr Davies: But the cost of rescheduling the carriers, of re-profiling the procurement, was actually £674 million, a lot of money, I know, and you will see that in the report.
Q433 Chairman: Where are you going to find that £674 million?
Mr Davies: That is part of the new cost of the carriers, so we will be finding that over the period of procurement of the carriers.
Q434 Chairman: Is that the "save now, pay later" approach?
Mr Davies: I am not trying to disguise from you that by deciding that we could not afford everything that we wanted to buy this year we had to put some things off, but principally the carriers, and I thought it was responsible to do that with the carriers because we do not need the carriers until the JSF is available to fly off the carriers and they cannot be made available before 2016 anyway. That was a rescheduling which involved no loss of national defence capability but, of course, it involves a cost. When you push things forward it always involves a cost and I do not dispute that and do not deny that. It is a substantial cost, £674 million is over ten per cent of the cost of the two carriers, which is about £5.2 billion.
Is it me or was Davies reluctant to actually say anything?
Another snippet from that the Merlin HC3s will be marinised for operation from ships prior to the Junglies taking them over. On the subject of Merlin, 30 Merlin HM1s will be upgraded to HM2 standard, instead of 38.
Q425 Chairman: Minister, the Major Projects report out today, which I am just about to come on to, says that as a result of your decision to upgrade only 30 instead of 38 Merlin helicopters the Merlin force will be unable to provide simultaneous anti-submarine protection to more than one naval task force, such as an aircraft carrier or amphibious group, unless supplemented by Merlin helicopters used for training. Is that right?
Mr Davies: That sounds correct. If we had an anti-submarine threat against two task groups simultaneously I think we would pull out all the stops to get all the helicopters we could out there.
It has been rumoured that some of these unconverted HM1s will be used for MASC. Since the OSD for all versions of the Sea King has been brought forward, work needs to start on the conversion, including changing the Searchwater radar from using an antenna in an inflatable bag to using the radome position built into the fuselage.
Finally, I'll qoute from another of my posts -
here:
We have had a decade of presentation and no substance, dancing while the city burns. Will this year, or this decade, be any better?
The current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have led many in the media, and the public, and most worryingly politics, to conclude that future conflicts will be both land centric and against opponents without a credible navy or air force. Is this not a case of preparing the fight the last (ie current) war?
After Afghanistan, just about every other nation has a coastline. After Saddam era Iraq, other nations will not have had economics sanctions and arms blockade, and no fly zones for over ten years. We ignore that at our peril. Have a look at Iraq's Eastern neighbour. Over a thousand miles of coast (not including the Caspian), a large air force, and a navy that includes submarines of various sorts. The Revolutionary Guards also have naval and air forces. Large sums have been spent on sophisticated SAMs and modern fighter aircraft. Likewise North Korea is also a nation that is neither land locked nor has it been subjects of sanctions preventing it from obtaining arms.
The public seem to have concluded that there is no need for frigates, submarines, fighter aircraft*, AWACS, to name but a few - ignoring the fact that all of these have been busy. I believe/fear that the next few years will show how dangerous these assumptions are.
* Both land and carrier based.