More UK defence cuts!
Could be the last:
This is a bit of a non-story. For nigh on 60 years NATO nations have practiced combined, joint operations. There is absolutely nothing unusual in Allied nations providing other capabilities.
Admittedly, we couldn't do this by outrselves now.
This is a bit of a non-story. For nigh on 60 years NATO nations have practiced combined, joint operations. There is absolutely nothing unusual in Allied nations providing other capabilities.
Admittedly, we couldn't do this by outrselves now.
So when there is talk about resurrecting capability, that would be classed as re-opening the SDSR and is strictly verboeten and the SDSR will not be reviewed. But when the talk is of slashing more capability that is a study.
Erm ... really. Do they think we are stupid enough to buy the constant lies and spin? I wonder if politicians have a patron saint - if not my vote would be for the Roman god Janus to take on the job.
Erm ... really. Do they think we are stupid enough to buy the constant lies and spin? I wonder if politicians have a patron saint - if not my vote would be for the Roman god Janus to take on the job.
Melchett,
I don't see any contradiction here. According to the government, SDSR has not solved the entire affordability problem, thus more work is required and more capability MAY be lost. So taking more cuts, while we obviously don't want them, is the logical next step.
What would not make sense would be to revisit cuts that have already been agreed and reverse them.
I think there is still a lot of reluctance to recognise hard realities. Unless we think Joe Public is going to pressure the government into giving more money for defence, then we have to live within our budget. If our current plans are still unaffordable, then we WILL get more cuts. Anything else is dreaming.
BTW - The patron saint of politicians is Thomas More - who ended up having his head cut off by the king!
I don't see any contradiction here. According to the government, SDSR has not solved the entire affordability problem, thus more work is required and more capability MAY be lost. So taking more cuts, while we obviously don't want them, is the logical next step.
What would not make sense would be to revisit cuts that have already been agreed and reverse them.
I think there is still a lot of reluctance to recognise hard realities. Unless we think Joe Public is going to pressure the government into giving more money for defence, then we have to live within our budget. If our current plans are still unaffordable, then we WILL get more cuts. Anything else is dreaming.
BTW - The patron saint of politicians is Thomas More - who ended up having his head cut off by the king!
Last edited by Red Line Entry; 17th May 2011 at 12:51. Reason: additon of triv!
Not sure Dr Fox is actually proposing changing anything that will make more money available for services (or The Services") in the UK. All he is arguing about is the extent to which the overseas aid percentage is legally binding. Bit like the Military Covenant really!
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Maybe a useful addition to this post would be a list of the commitments that were cut during SDSR. Without a reduction in task, the SDSR was another thinly disguised defence cut.
QRA
AFG
Falklands
Add Libya
etc, etc.........
QRA
AFG
Falklands
Add Libya
etc, etc.........
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After the RN and RAF were savaged last October, it looks like the Army is about to take its turn sooner than expected!
Liam Fox: British Army will be cut further after Afghanistan mission
It certainly puts into focus yesterday's news about the spiralling cost of the Trident replacement.
New Trident fleet cost will top £25bn
Liam Fox: British Army will be cut further after Afghanistan mission
It certainly puts into focus yesterday's news about the spiralling cost of the Trident replacement.
New Trident fleet cost will top £25bn
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Stick a few silos on Diego Garcia for the end of the world and to placate our "we are still a big power" side, and then please start spending the money on defending the coastline thats 10 miles away and the airspace above my head.
Lots of bigger, wealthier and equally important countries as ours seem to manage! £25 Billion buys a lot of stuff, not that it would go back to the MOD.
Lots of bigger, wealthier and equally important countries as ours seem to manage! £25 Billion buys a lot of stuff, not that it would go back to the MOD.
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Serious question
£25 Billion buys a lot of stuff, not that it would go back to the MOD.
meanwhile...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13460836
British forces will face "significant shortages" of armoured vehicles until 2025 unless extra investment is found, a public spending watchdog has warned
Last edited by glad rag; 20th May 2011 at 08:53.
Is the chance of an air launched system once again, as has been mooted, at all viable does anyone think?
And I don't meant to be facetious in saying that. But we are shedding airframes at a worryingly rapid rate, and apart from having the platform to actually hang it off, I'm not convinced the associated infrastructure both physical on stations and enabling patforms exists. How many airframes did it take to keep a nuclear Q going before we handed the responsibility to the RN? How many B-52s did the USAF require to keep their airborne nuclear alert going during the height of the Cold War?
And then the costs of converting to an air launched system and integrating it on a platform would no doubt not meet with treasury approval in these straightened times. You might get away with converting Storm Shadow or adding to the TLAM fleet with air launched nuclear tipped, but again it's down to costs. I hate to say it but for now, I think this one will stay with the RN on the grounds of at least its a proven capability and (relatively) known costs.
Melchett,
Its the cost of a like for like replacement which has prompted the debate. Of all parliamentarians, its the Lib Dems who have suggested it along with the ludicrous notion of a shared deterrent with France. The latter can be dismissed with a single straight forward scenario; what if we feel the need and they don't? or vice versa.
At the point of handing over the Deterrent to the R.N. in 1969, the R.A.F. maintained, at that point, 5 squadrons with Blue Steel, Vulcan and Victor, with 5 more Vulcan squadrons, 3 at Waddington and 2 at Akrotiri with WE177s. As soon as the transfer occurred, that is within some weeks, I believe 4 of the 5 Blue Steel sqns disbanded. The one which was left, 617, soldiered on with the Waddington and Akrotiri Vulcans in the standby role with the WE177.
If it is determined to be cheaper (being the principal aim) to go down an airborne deterrent route again, then they'd need to look at an off the shelf aircraft I suppose. I can't see the GR4 being refurbished sufficiently to meet the requirement in the long term, nor the Typhoon for that matter. The best option might be the F35C or the F15 Silent Eagle? In which case, one would expect more of these to be bought than planned, over and above the order for conventional requirements. Another more radical option would be Taranis? I believe any of these platforms could be equipped to carry an ALCM with sufficient range to launch from a safe distance.
Anyone else?
FB
Its the cost of a like for like replacement which has prompted the debate. Of all parliamentarians, its the Lib Dems who have suggested it along with the ludicrous notion of a shared deterrent with France. The latter can be dismissed with a single straight forward scenario; what if we feel the need and they don't? or vice versa.
At the point of handing over the Deterrent to the R.N. in 1969, the R.A.F. maintained, at that point, 5 squadrons with Blue Steel, Vulcan and Victor, with 5 more Vulcan squadrons, 3 at Waddington and 2 at Akrotiri with WE177s. As soon as the transfer occurred, that is within some weeks, I believe 4 of the 5 Blue Steel sqns disbanded. The one which was left, 617, soldiered on with the Waddington and Akrotiri Vulcans in the standby role with the WE177.
If it is determined to be cheaper (being the principal aim) to go down an airborne deterrent route again, then they'd need to look at an off the shelf aircraft I suppose. I can't see the GR4 being refurbished sufficiently to meet the requirement in the long term, nor the Typhoon for that matter. The best option might be the F35C or the F15 Silent Eagle? In which case, one would expect more of these to be bought than planned, over and above the order for conventional requirements. Another more radical option would be Taranis? I believe any of these platforms could be equipped to carry an ALCM with sufficient range to launch from a safe distance.
Anyone else?
FB
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Simple answer to all the air-launched possibilities discussed above is in Wednesday's MoD News Release:
'Defence Secretary Dr Liam Fox has today announced that approval has been given for the early phase of design of the submarine that will deliver the UK's nuclear deterrent well into the 2060s.'
The bit about alternatives is covered later:
'The Coalition Agreement reflected the desire of the Liberal Democrats to continue to make the case for alternatives. That is why the Defence Secretary has also announced the initiation of a study to be undertaken by the Cabinet Office and overseen by the Minister of State for the Armed Forces to review the costs, feasibility and credibility of alternative systems.'
'Defence Secretary Dr Liam Fox has today announced that approval has been given for the early phase of design of the submarine that will deliver the UK's nuclear deterrent well into the 2060s.'
The bit about alternatives is covered later:
'The Coalition Agreement reflected the desire of the Liberal Democrats to continue to make the case for alternatives. That is why the Defence Secretary has also announced the initiation of a study to be undertaken by the Cabinet Office and overseen by the Minister of State for the Armed Forces to review the costs, feasibility and credibility of alternative systems.'
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Doesn't matter what the design is or isn't. A submarine is going to be pretty damned expensive. Anyway, world ends on Saturday after some big earthquake so it will not be a problem.
See you Monday!
See you Monday!
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The Economist's take. My bold :
The first casualty
The intervention in Libya has cast fresh doubt on the wisdom of last year’s cost-cutting defence review
May 19th 2011 | from the print edition
War on the cheap
“NO BATTLE plan ever survives first contact with the enemy,” Helmuth von Moltke, a 19th-century head of the Prussian army, famously observed. That is amply true of the Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) published by the government last October. Paul Cornish of Chatham House, a think-tank, thinks it might prove “one of the fastest failures in modern British strategic history”.
David Cameron’s resolve to take a leading role in Libya immediately called into question one of the main, if unspoken, assumptions underlying the SDSR: that no more “wars of choice” would be fought until the exchequer was flusher. So far, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) is just about coping with the demands of the Libyan intervention; the Treasury has not yet balked at meeting the costs from its reserve, even as they spiral. But it would have been a different story if the Libyan crisis had blown up only a few months later—because the campaign has relied on precisely the sort of air and maritime assets that the SDSR, preoccupied as it was with the land war in Afghanistan, blithely calculated that Britain could do without.
For example, HMS Cumberland, one of four Type-22 frigates identified for retirement, was on its way home to be decommissioned before it was sent into action, first ferrying British nationals to safety and then helping to enforce the maritime exclusion zone off the coast of Libya. Similarly, the Nimrod R1 reconnaissance aircraft, due to be scrapped in March, has won a stay of execution because it was needed in Libya. The brunt of Britain’s contribution to striking at the Libyan regime’s military infrastructure has been borne by Tornado GR4s. The number of Tornado squadrons is scheduled to be reduced from seven to five next month.
And had the SDSR not decided that Britain could take the risk of going a decade without an aircraft-carrier, the already decommissioned HMS Ark Royal and its Harrier jets would have joined carriers from France, Italy and America off the Libyan coast. Able to respond more quickly than the Tornados that are flying from Italy, the Harriers would have been especially handy for attacking Muammar Qaddafi’s tanks and mobile rocket-launchers. It turns out that much of the “legacy equipment for which there is no requirement”—to quote the SDSR—is still pretty useful.
The Libyan mission has also highlighted the weakness in Britain’s broader strategic thinking. Hew Strachan of Oxford University says the SDSR is “strategy-light”, and fails to convince on either China or the Middle East—the “two areas where big and really difficult conflicts could occur”. Afghanistan aside, he fears that British thinking attempts “to map a world 30 years away” and is not focused enough on the “immediate and unexpected”. Michael Clarke, the director of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), another think-tank, struggles to find evidence of strategic thinking that goes much beyond being America’s “most loyal ally”—and says there has been little reflection on what that notion actually means nowadays. Observers also wonder where responsibility for military strategy ultimately lies in the British system: in the MOD, the new National Security Council or with the overstretched prime minister?
The last hurrah
Liam Fox, the defence secretary, gamely argues that the Libyan operation is a one-off that could not have been predicted. But his private dissatisfaction with the defence settlement is palpable. This week a letter from Dr Fox to Mr Cameron, in which the former took issue with the government’s plan to enshrine in law its aim of raising international-aid spending to 0.7% of GDP, was leaked, as was another letter from Dr Fox to the prime minister about defence cuts last year.
His discomfort is likely to worsen. Dr Fox maintains that revising the SDSR would make sense only if the government suddenly decided to give defence more cash—which would mean either backsliding on cutting the country’s fiscal deficit or taking money from health, education or something else closer to the hearts of most voters than bombing Tripoli. In fact, the only changes under serious discussion involve even deeper and faster cuts in capability than those announced last year—which might not be anything like enough to bring spending into line with the actual defence budget.
Andrew Dorman, who lectures at the Joint Services Command and Staff College, reckons that the defence budget is set to shrink by between 20% and 30% in real terms, rather than the publicised figure of 8%. That is because the Treasury has left it to the MoD to sort out the £38 billion ($61 billion) black hole in spending commitments left by the previous government, plus the unbudgeted costs of replacing Britain’s ballistic-missile submarine fleet.
Mr Dorman expects new cuts to be announced soon that will include (among other things) speeding up plans to reduce the number of army units, and cancelling the remaining order for Chinook heavy-lift helicopters in anticipation of British combat forces leaving Afghanistan by 2015. However, he and others believe that Dr Fox needs to be still more radical, and that the pace of administrative reforms should be accelerated, culling not only the top-heavy civilian side of the MoD but also the bloated ranks of senior officers: proportional to its size, the British Army has four times as many generals as the US Army.
The crude ring-fencing by the SDSR of capabilities supposedly required for Afghanistan has created another pressing problem: a worsening imbalance between the various parts of the armed forces. Malcolm Chalmers of RUSI calculates that, by 2015, land forces will account for around 65% of total service personnel, compared with current levels of around 55% in America and France, 53% in Canada and 50% in Australia. One partial solution, advocated in a recent paper by Sir Graeme Lamb, a former director of special forces, and Colonel Richard Williams, a former commander of the SAS, would be to move to an army of 75,000, rather than the intended 95,000 (itself down from 102,000), with a larger and more integrated reserve component.
The basic question for British strategy is whether the ways and means implied by the SDSR can support the government’s still-ambitious military goals. Or, to put it another way, whether the government’s eyes for embarking on high-minded adventures of the Libyan kind are bigger than its stomach for resourcing them.
The first casualty
The intervention in Libya has cast fresh doubt on the wisdom of last year’s cost-cutting defence review
May 19th 2011 | from the print edition
War on the cheap
“NO BATTLE plan ever survives first contact with the enemy,” Helmuth von Moltke, a 19th-century head of the Prussian army, famously observed. That is amply true of the Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) published by the government last October. Paul Cornish of Chatham House, a think-tank, thinks it might prove “one of the fastest failures in modern British strategic history”.
David Cameron’s resolve to take a leading role in Libya immediately called into question one of the main, if unspoken, assumptions underlying the SDSR: that no more “wars of choice” would be fought until the exchequer was flusher. So far, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) is just about coping with the demands of the Libyan intervention; the Treasury has not yet balked at meeting the costs from its reserve, even as they spiral. But it would have been a different story if the Libyan crisis had blown up only a few months later—because the campaign has relied on precisely the sort of air and maritime assets that the SDSR, preoccupied as it was with the land war in Afghanistan, blithely calculated that Britain could do without.
For example, HMS Cumberland, one of four Type-22 frigates identified for retirement, was on its way home to be decommissioned before it was sent into action, first ferrying British nationals to safety and then helping to enforce the maritime exclusion zone off the coast of Libya. Similarly, the Nimrod R1 reconnaissance aircraft, due to be scrapped in March, has won a stay of execution because it was needed in Libya. The brunt of Britain’s contribution to striking at the Libyan regime’s military infrastructure has been borne by Tornado GR4s. The number of Tornado squadrons is scheduled to be reduced from seven to five next month.
And had the SDSR not decided that Britain could take the risk of going a decade without an aircraft-carrier, the already decommissioned HMS Ark Royal and its Harrier jets would have joined carriers from France, Italy and America off the Libyan coast. Able to respond more quickly than the Tornados that are flying from Italy, the Harriers would have been especially handy for attacking Muammar Qaddafi’s tanks and mobile rocket-launchers. It turns out that much of the “legacy equipment for which there is no requirement”—to quote the SDSR—is still pretty useful.
The Libyan mission has also highlighted the weakness in Britain’s broader strategic thinking. Hew Strachan of Oxford University says the SDSR is “strategy-light”, and fails to convince on either China or the Middle East—the “two areas where big and really difficult conflicts could occur”. Afghanistan aside, he fears that British thinking attempts “to map a world 30 years away” and is not focused enough on the “immediate and unexpected”. Michael Clarke, the director of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), another think-tank, struggles to find evidence of strategic thinking that goes much beyond being America’s “most loyal ally”—and says there has been little reflection on what that notion actually means nowadays. Observers also wonder where responsibility for military strategy ultimately lies in the British system: in the MOD, the new National Security Council or with the overstretched prime minister?
The last hurrah
Liam Fox, the defence secretary, gamely argues that the Libyan operation is a one-off that could not have been predicted. But his private dissatisfaction with the defence settlement is palpable. This week a letter from Dr Fox to Mr Cameron, in which the former took issue with the government’s plan to enshrine in law its aim of raising international-aid spending to 0.7% of GDP, was leaked, as was another letter from Dr Fox to the prime minister about defence cuts last year.
His discomfort is likely to worsen. Dr Fox maintains that revising the SDSR would make sense only if the government suddenly decided to give defence more cash—which would mean either backsliding on cutting the country’s fiscal deficit or taking money from health, education or something else closer to the hearts of most voters than bombing Tripoli. In fact, the only changes under serious discussion involve even deeper and faster cuts in capability than those announced last year—which might not be anything like enough to bring spending into line with the actual defence budget.
Andrew Dorman, who lectures at the Joint Services Command and Staff College, reckons that the defence budget is set to shrink by between 20% and 30% in real terms, rather than the publicised figure of 8%. That is because the Treasury has left it to the MoD to sort out the £38 billion ($61 billion) black hole in spending commitments left by the previous government, plus the unbudgeted costs of replacing Britain’s ballistic-missile submarine fleet.
Mr Dorman expects new cuts to be announced soon that will include (among other things) speeding up plans to reduce the number of army units, and cancelling the remaining order for Chinook heavy-lift helicopters in anticipation of British combat forces leaving Afghanistan by 2015. However, he and others believe that Dr Fox needs to be still more radical, and that the pace of administrative reforms should be accelerated, culling not only the top-heavy civilian side of the MoD but also the bloated ranks of senior officers: proportional to its size, the British Army has four times as many generals as the US Army.
The crude ring-fencing by the SDSR of capabilities supposedly required for Afghanistan has created another pressing problem: a worsening imbalance between the various parts of the armed forces. Malcolm Chalmers of RUSI calculates that, by 2015, land forces will account for around 65% of total service personnel, compared with current levels of around 55% in America and France, 53% in Canada and 50% in Australia. One partial solution, advocated in a recent paper by Sir Graeme Lamb, a former director of special forces, and Colonel Richard Williams, a former commander of the SAS, would be to move to an army of 75,000, rather than the intended 95,000 (itself down from 102,000), with a larger and more integrated reserve component.
The basic question for British strategy is whether the ways and means implied by the SDSR can support the government’s still-ambitious military goals. Or, to put it another way, whether the government’s eyes for embarking on high-minded adventures of the Libyan kind are bigger than its stomach for resourcing them.
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Not sure Dr Fox is actually proposing changing anything that will make more money available for services (or The Services") in the UK. All he is arguing about is the extent to which the overseas aid percentage is legally binding. Bit like the Military Covenant really!
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The only official TSR-1 was the the Fairey S.9/30 - a two-seat, single-engined biplane fleet reconnaissance aircraft. It flew during 1934-6 in both land- and seaplane configurations.
Although only one was built, it was the progenitor of the Fairey Swordfish
Although only one was built, it was the progenitor of the Fairey Swordfish