Force Structure or Mass, are they important - are they finally viewed as important?
I am becoming increasingly confused and dispirited as I try to get my head around the subject of maintaining what we might once have called Fast Jet ‘force structure’ and what we now seem to be referring to as ‘mass’ in the face of an increasingly unstable and unpredictable world on the one hand, and relentless downward pressure on the defence budget on the other – with defence inflation complicating matters by ensuring that the defence pound will inevitably go less far today than it did a few years ago.
I can appreciate that with more efficient logistics and engineering, it may be possible to generate greater FE@R (Force Elements At Readiness) than was once the case – though I worry that the greater flexibility offered by service personnel (especially in wartime or on deployment) may have been lost in the pursuit of the most cost effective delivery of more predictable peacetime operational output.
I can appreciate that a target that would have required a dozen fast jets armed with conventional ‘dumb’ bombs, CBUs, dispenser weapons, and/or early generation ASMs might today be taken care of by a pair of Typhoons armed with Paveway IV, or F-15s armed with SDBs, or whatever.
And I can see that five squadrons of Typhoons to P3E standard, with Meteor for A-A, and with PWII, PWIV, Brimstone and Storm Shadow will be a much more capable force than today's Typhoon force, though in terms of mass, there will be no increase.
I get it that we may need less FJs than we would have needed in 1989, and I wouldn’t see a return to an RAF with 30 FJ squadrons as being either possible, practical or even desirable.
But when you need two simultaneous ‘shows of force’ by low flying FJs or four Fast Jet deployments in four different places, or you’re still going to need two individual aircraft or four lots of aircraft.
And for some roles and/or activities there must surely be an irreduceable minimum number of aircraft/squadrons required.
Until quite recently, people (and quite senior people) would say that you needed five frontline FJ forces just to do UK AD, Northern Q, Southern Q, the Falklands and a bare minimum of deployed AD. Many people I’ve spoken to over the years suggested that this was actually less than the minimum requirement, and that the old late Cold War UK AD force of two AD wings North and South (four in total, with eight squadrons) was a more sensible number for peacetime AD duties.
A very senior officer told me at the end of the Cold War that cuts were coming, because the public had been promised, and had been encouraged to expect, a ‘Peace Dividend’. He expressed the view that actually, they should have been warned to expect force structure increases in some areas, because the world would be more unstable and more dangerous, as the rival super-powers invariably loosened their grip on their client states, and as the lids came off some simmering troublespots. His point was that UK AD (like most parts of the British Armed Forces) had been scaled to meet peacetime requirements, and to ‘buy a little time’ for negotiation in the event of hostilities with the USSR and/or Warsaw Pact, prior to an eventual escalation to nuclear war.
Others pointed out that even relatively small (but carefully planned) increases in activity by Soviet long range reconnaissance aircraft could run the risk of running the RAF out of QRA aircraft, and I remember reading some horrific figures about how many Lightnings would be involved in the event of a determined push by a surprisingly small number of hostiles, or about times when the UK did almost run out of QRA F-4s (I think I remember reading the latter on PPRuNe).
If anyone would care to remind me of these stories, I’d be very grateful.
Was my source being unduly pessimistic or cynical? Should we be sanguine that a planned force of six FJ squadrons will be more than capable of fulfilling peacetime requirements and any likely contingency?
Or should we face the fact (if indeed it is a fact) that a current frontline FJ force of five Typhoon squadrons and three Tornado units is stretched to capacity by the routine peacetime AD commitments, plus a small number of relatively small-scale and low-intensity overseas commitments?
How worried should we be about the reduction to a maximum of six fast jet squadrons in 2019 (the three Tornado squadrons will be replaced by a single F-35 (admittedly large) frontline unit whose operational output will initially be fairly modest)? These units will comprise 107 Tranche 2 and 3 Typhoons and about a dozen or at most two dozen F-35Bs. Eight squadrons seems barely sufficient now, and god alone knows how the UK would cope if we ever needed to conduct a Corporate or Granby scale of operation – something that I suspect most of the UK public would assume that we would (or should) still be able to do.
Could five Typhoon squadrons be sustained if the 40 or so remaining Tranche 1 aircraft are retired at the same time, as is currently planned?
Is there any merit in the idea that the Tranche 1 Typhoons should be retained in order to buttress force structure/mass (perhaps allowing the formation of Squadrons six and seven, or perhaps merely to allow the overall Typhoon force to achieve a later OSD?)? My understanding is that the improvements that would be required to overcome the obsolescence issues facing the Tranche 1 sub-fleet could be addressed fairly cheaply, and that an eight-to-ten year life extension to those aircraft would make the upgrade ‘cost effective’.
Can we really be looking at retiring Typhoons many of which are only a third of the way into their planned fatigue lives?
Or should we be encouraged by the way in which politicians have actually started talking about mass? By the way in which No.12 Squadron was retained and then extended? Should we expect a modest increase in squadron or aircraft numbers in SDSR? (Keeping T1 Typhoons would seem to be the simplest, cheapest and politically expedient method of boosting numbers, surely?).