If this SDSR amounted to a straight fight for survival between Tornados and Harriers, could it not be argued that the R.A.F. would be left virtually an air force... without an air force of which to speak. Somehow the thought of retaining one Harrier squadron as against 7 down to 5 Tornado sqns, would represent a reprehensible depletion of the R.A.F. frontline. With only 3 out of the, currently, expected 5 sqns of Typhoons already here. I can't quite believe we'd be left now with an R.A.F. of just a frontline strength of 4 sqns. Don't forget, they'd need to be back out to Afghanistan. I think this would ruin the chances of them likewise getting involved in this Libyan NEO as the initials jargon goes. If that type of aircraft was needed, Tornados and or Typhoons would operate quit effortlessly from Malta, I'm sure. And without the same strain (if it were Harriers) on the Afghan deployment. This is a Navy and Army capabilities first and foremost argument.:E

FB:)

FB

Malta though part of the EU is non alligned and no "air bases" exist on the Island. They are within range of the still loyal Libyan Air Force as the two Mirages proved. The next ones that call might not be looking for asylum if Malta offers active HNS.:ooh:

Malta has cosied up to the Libyans for years as well - I can't see them welcoming NATO

and where will all these planes operate from?

The Maltese need their airport for the tourist trade - which keeps them afloat

Akrotiri, Nicosia?:ok:

FB:)

FB

Akrotiri seems to be the only possible UK option which no doubt is why we still keep it! I doubt we have any intention to go it alone though.

I miss the Sea Harrier as much as anyone, but I would point out that there are differing views on the capability of the Harrier GR9 in an air defence role. See the comments here on ARRSE from Magic Mushroom (yes, the same one):

Clearly GR9/AIM-9L is inferior to FA2/AMRAAM. I don’t discount that. Likewise, GR9 would not be credible against a modern fighter/active missile mix in many cases. However, you stated that GR9 had ‘no offensive anti air [sic] capability’. As someone with just a few thousand hours of AWACS experience (including flying in support of CVS and on several SKASaC sorties) I can tell you that you are incorrect.

The GR9 is slightly slower than the FA2 yes. However, it has significantly greater endurance and manoeuvrability.

Even without a radar, a GR9 with AIM-9L benefitting from SKASaC support would be as capable as a 1982 FRS1 sans AEW. Why? Firstly, the FRS1 Blue Fox radar was pulse only and therefore had extremely limited capability overland or against a high sea state (that’s why the PD Blue Vixen was developed). The majority of engagements in 1982 were ship controlled into the visual or pure visual pick ups. Meanwhile, in the Falklands we needed to keep DCA CAPs airborne due to the lack of AEW. FRS1 also seemed to do relatively well against supersonic capable Mirage III and Daggers.

With SKASaC providing wide area AEW overland and in all sea states (PD radar), GR9 could be maintained on deck alert and provide an AD capability at least on a par, if not superior to FRS1 sans AEW. When scrambled, SKASaC support would largely overcome the GR9 lead nose. Moreover, GR9 has a very nice EO/IR, defensive aids and RHWR capability, all of which were lacking from Sea Harrier (FRS1 or FA2). I’m not quite sure how you work out GR9 is limited to daylight VFR intercepts. I’ve personally controlled GR9s conducting night time NVG PIs and have seen GR7s kill F-16s, FA-18Cs, Mirage 2000 and Tornado F3s at night on exercise.

Too right there are differing views WE, here's just a couple of thoughts from an ex-Radar equipped, ex- AIM-7/Skyflash equipped ex-crab Air Defender :O:

So the author on ARRSE is comfortable with the fact that this weapons platform has much the same capability as it's predecessor had almost 30 years ago ( i.e. non-BVR, visual AIM-9L shot), and less capability than the much beloved F4-K had 40 years ago......:D:D

Oh chapeau - now control the GR9's on a sh1te night with thick 8/8ths clag all the way from the deck to 30k plus and ask them for an ident and/or tell them to engage (Thinks the Med on a bad day, North Sea, Eastern North Atlantic a lot of the year)...is the author only expecting the bad guys to have a go at the fleet on clear airmass days/night?

(apologies if NVGs now have magic cloud penetrating properties, us civvies are not privvy to such secrets)

Well, any capability is better than none.

By the way, the author is the same Magic Mushroom as can be found here on PPRuNe, in other words a VERY experienced RAF ISTAR type with a great deal of operational experience. I think his views, expressed on ARRSE, here, or elsewhere, can be considered credible. Sadly, such expert views (on all sorts of things) were most likely ignored during the SDSR process.

Of course, if the GR9 had recieved Link 16 and ASRAAM....

I shall be good and not mention the Sea Harrier. Nor the fact that India tried to buy some stored ones in early 2009, only for the MOD to say no. Presumably someone thought that they must still be airworthy?

Meanwhile, over here someone has mentioned the deterrent effect of carriers with respect to the current situation with Libya...

The Libyan Navy consists of two Koni Class frigates, of which only one is serviceable, the other being sans engines; two very elderly Nanuchka class corvettes (circa 1972), nine Combattante II fast attack craft (only five serviceable) and twelve, even older (ex-Soviet) Osa class missile boats that have seen better days (only four serviceable). If one were to look at the fire power of the same it become immediately obvious that these vessels would be no match for the two British warships in the area, three Italian warships including the aircraft carrier “Cavour” off Malta and the Chinese missile frigate “Xuzhou” steaming eastwards from Alexandria. Then add the unquantifiable number of French, Greek & Turkish warships in the watching – the hypothesis does not add up – the Libyan navy would be wiped out in minutes!! Only a “madman” would contemplate going against such a force – why do you think “Cumberland” got into and out of Benghazi without any intervention on the part of the Libyans? Probably because the “Carvour” and "Charles de Gaulle" with a hangers full of AV-8B MkII’s, "Rafales" and "Super Etandards" was not far away!!!

WEBF

I'm curious .... on what do you base your knowledge that MM is:

Might it be because he says what you want to hear?

Guess you were out when they called!!!:E

Not going to get very far then.....

MM may well be, and in contrast I am certainly well past my sell by date, but I bet that deep down inside, if the pooh has hit the fan and it's a dark and stormy night and g** knows what is inbound, MM would rather have a radar/AMRAAM equipped fighter available on CAP rather than a clear airmass only weapons system that's got the equivalent capability to that which the early SHAR's had in '82.

No argument from me on that.

Wrathmonk

If you look at MM's posts, both here and at other places, you will see his background, and his depth of knowledge with respect to this sort of subject. As for saying what I want to hear, I think that over half of the time his views have been different from mine. The quote from him regarding the Harrier in air to air roles was not a reply to me, it was however, interesting.

wiggy

I know what your saying. But with SKASaC or E3 Sentry support, the GR9 can still intercept aircraft beyond the range of any shipborne missile, and it can visually identify suspicious aircraft.

In day VMC....:rolleyes:

Having just read Mog's excellent Hostile Skies, it was obvious that the Argentine air force made good use of cloud cover to deny the FRS1 any visual acquistion - and the difficulty of flying the jet with limited fuel reserves, whilst trying to lock the radar and slave an AIM-9, were all too obvious. But F/A2 with 4 x AIM 120 and Link16 would have been a different kettle of fish!

Criminal lunacy to have binned the Sea Harrier F/A2......

Excellent ..... believe everything you read on the internet do you ....

in which case are you Lewis Page????

BEagle

Agree - as you know.

Wrathmonk

Making hundreds of posts over a number of years, and on different sites, would be a lot of effort for a sciolists don't you think? Do you wear a tinfoil hat?

Errrrr ..... you seem to manage it;)

Thanks!

Just had a reply from the Minister to a letter regarding this issue, the letter admits that the decision was about money, says that Harrier could not sustain Afghan operations and carrier strike (although neither can Tornado), and admits the problems of maintaining skills - and they haven't worked out how to maintain them - amongst other things international exchanges and training when the new carriers come along The most interesting part was what the letter did NOT say.

Well, no Minister can say they got anything wrong, can they?

More details later.

Uhh, this is Gadaffi we're talking about...

More articles:

The Great Harrier Carrier Scandal

Yet there is David Cameron trotting out this rot in the Foreword to the SDSR white paper, which was also signed by somebody named Nick Clegg: “In the short term, there are few circumstances we can envisage where the ability to deploy airpower from the sea will be essential. That is why we have, reluctantly, taken the decision to retire the Harrier aircraft, which has served our country so well. But over the longer term, we cannot assume that bases for land-based aircraft will always be available when and where we need them.”

So, the UK, alone among the leading powers, will get rid of its carriers and their jets with a fully functioning air wing potentially not available until 2020 and beyond? What’s the reality behind the scandalous situation, in which the country that invented the Harrier, which deployed the revolutionary aircraft and the ships they were meant to fly from to such deadly effect in the Falklands War, doesn’t need them anymore? The Italians, the Spanish and the Americans, as well as the Thais and the Indians will continue to fly them for quite some time. They must all be singing from a different hymn sheet to the UK and have no grasp of strategic reality at all?

The SDSR white paper states: ‘The Invincible Class carriers were designed principally to meet Cold War threats on the high seas, with short-range jets providing air-defence for a naval task group, without the ability to interoperate aircraft with our key allies and whose primary mission was anti-submarine warfare.’ In one feeble paragraph of spin, the SDSR overlooks the remarkable multi-role evolution of the Invincible Class ships from their original ASW role. Their Sea Harrier fighters defeated the Argentinean Air Force, the same jets rode shotgun overhead as the British Army pursued its forlorn peacekeeping mission in the Balkans.

The Sea Harrier FA2 was the most lethal fighter jet in the UK’s inventory for many years and as such flew Combat Air Patrols over southern Iraq in the late 1990s. During the Iraq War of 2003, acting as a helicopter carrier, Ark Royal sent ashore Royal Marines, too, while Illustrious evacuated British citizens from war-torn Lebanon just a few years later. In countless missions since the Cold War the Invincible Class proved themselves in every role EXCEPT Anti-Submarine Warfare (a role which nonetheless they could still do)

As for lacking ‘the ability to interoperate aircraft with our key allies’, that is just plain nonsense. In recent years American, Italian and Spanish Harriers have flown from the Royal Navy’s Invincible Class ships, due to the fact that the UK’s own Harriers were committed to flying Combat Air Support (CAS) for NATO troops in Afghanistan. Isn’t it also amazing that the Italian Navy’s new aircraft carrier, the ITS Cavour, is a development of the Invincible Class, while the Spanish have just commissioned into service the Juan Carlos, another ship that owes a lot to the Invincibles?

How did this sorry story come about? There are some disturbing claims circulating about the skulduggery of the RAF, which has retained it distinctly useless Tornados and super-expensive Typhoon fighters while volunteering the Harrier for the chop. The ultra-capable Harrier GR9, two squadrons of which formed the Naval Strike Wing, has life in it until 2021. However, since the Navy gave up the Sea Harrier in 2006, to save money in order to invest in the new carriers, the RAF has physically owned all the aircraft, hence the ability of the RAF to deal a death blow to Fleet Air Arm fixed-wing squadrons. Yet the saving if the Tornados were cut would have been £7.5 billion, while the ditching of the Harrier saves only £1.1 billion. On top of that the RAF will have to spend £1.4 billion on new engines by 2014 for the Tornados to keep flying. The Tornado also needs other investment in its operational capabilities to remain relevant. Whereas all 79 Harriers have, thanks to £800 million spent since 2005 on upgrades, the capability to operate both from the sea and over Afghanistan, only 31 Tornado GR4s out of 135 are fit to handle the Afghan mission, and of course have no carrier capability at all, and never will have.

Here is another one, (contains one or two errors, but the message is clear enough) from The American Spectator:

Senior officers have said British forces would struggle to mount even a small-scale military intervention as the cupboard for resources is bare.

They have also warned that there is little chance of even being able to mount rescue operations similar to that which Cumberland undertook in the future. Service chiefs have also warned the Prime Minister that destroying the Harrier jet force and scrapping Ark Royal would put personnel at considerable risk. The Army has just one battalion on standby for emergency operations and this is said to lack the correct equipment for training.

As well as other losses the Navy's amphibious landing force will be cut in half by the mothballing of the landing ship Bulwark and other craft.

One senior officer was quoted as saying: "We certainly could not do an operation like Sierra Leone again because we have no fast jets. Even to achieve and sustain a foothold ashore would be difficult." Another senior Navy officer said, "The locker is not just empty it's completely threadbare."

H. G. Wells suggested for his epitaph: "I told you so, you bloody fools!"

And in this linked article:

It is as if the weird Conservative-Liberal-Democrat coalition of Cameron and Clegg is simply unable to take sovereignty or national security seriously or to realize the obvious fact that the world may be moving into a new phase of dangerous instability.

It is true that much of the fault lies with the previous Labour Governments. A decade of the socialism of Blair and Brown has left the British economy a shambles. Yet even this doesn't wash as an excuse when one considers the stunning fact that Britain, allegedly too poor to defend itself, has actually increased its Foreign Aid budget, with the equivalent of about $1.6 billion going to India alone -- enough to pay for a large part of the Indian space program, or perhaps its aircraft carrier or nuclear submarine program -- the Indian Navy has 56,000 personnel compared to a projected 30,000 for the Royal Navy, as well as about twice the number of ships.

Among innumerable other examples of horrendous waste are the London Olympics and the six-figure pay packets of not only senior national civil servants but also of local government functionaries whose responsibilities revolve round such weighty matters as garbage collection.

Defense has, throughout history, been the first (some would say almost the only) justification of government. The history of the early Middle Ages shows peasants putting up with all manner of tyrannical lords, tax-collectors and robber barons, so long as they kept their part of the bargain and supplied defense and protection. The peasants revolted when their overlords lost the will or ability to defend them. Perhaps Cameron should read some of the accounts of knights in full armor being roasted on spits by the common folk they had failed to defend.

Cameron may have it brought home to him that there is more to leading Britain than membership of the Bullingdon drinking club, a cheesy smile, pretty wife, and cunning in party management.

From the Telegraph: Will Dr Liam Fox reopen the box?

It gets worse. Next Friday, as Mr Cameron arrives in Brussels to discuss the European Union’s response to the Libyan crisis, HMS Ark Royal, Britain’s flagship and last remaining aircraft carrier, will be formally decommissioned, two years ahead of schedule.

That sad ceremony, like the redundancy programme, is the bitter fruit of last year’s Strategic Defence and Security Review. To call the SDSR controversial would be a grotesque understatement. Field Marshal Lord Bramall; Major General Julian Thompson; Admiral Sir Jeremy Black; Lord Ashdown – the roll call of those who have criticised the SDSR is heavy with military honours.

Yesterday, Sir Laurence Martin, a former head of the Chatham House think tank, said the review amounted to “panicked asset-stripping”. Jim Murphy, the Labour shadow defence secretary, joined the chorus, calling for a “wider reassessment of the assumptions on which defence policy has been based”.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. The SDSR was supposed to prepare Britain and its Armed Forces for an unpredictable world, anticipating crises and equipping us to respond.

The bedrock on which British defence stands is British foreign policy. Soldiers, ships and planes all exist to promote and defend our interests around the globe. So what is our foreign policy?

If we’d had a working aircraft carrier, would it really be steaming towards the North African coast, ready to project British power and values into sovereign Libyan territory? Are we still that sort of country?

Some of the public reaction to the Libyan crisis suggests that many people believe the answer should be yes. Mr Cameron’s vacillations suggest his answer is: not sure yet.

The SDSR was also supposed to make the big decisions about the Services, their structure, size and mission. In fact, it deferred many major questions, launching a small armada of reviews, commissions and studies. One was a study of “force generation” ratios, the way the Services produce deployable units. Today, an Army of 100,000 can sustain a frontline force of around 10,000 in Afghanistan. Improve the force generation ratio and you need a smaller standing Army, an outcome as financially attractive as it is politically toxic. Likewise the deferred decisions about which military bases around Britain will close: announcements are due later this year.

After the article goes all over the place, like claiming that HMS Queen Elizabeth will not enter service until 2020, or that Illustrious will be unable to embark Harriers. Harriers are the THE issue here.

"There are some disturbing claims circulating about the skulduggery of the RAF, which has retained it distinctly useless Tornados and super-expensive Typhoon fighters while volunteering the Harrier for the chop."

No doubting their perspective. :=