At theend of the day the MOD will be double losers
 

I would imagine that the MoD will sensibly elect to leave/scrap the kit as they can't afford the UOR costs from their budget.

The Treasury will then notice that they have an entry on the balance sheet that relates to a mountain of kit of a military nature that they cannot realise via any form of sale.

As the No11 trumps Main building there will be a transfer of liability and MoD will find that Catch 22 was a pamphlet not a novel. The MoD have just bought something that doesn't exists.

The best way to deal with it might be to send out a small team every year to do a serial number check of all these "assets" allowing for a normal life cycle write off. Of course to maintain this farce a small logistics unit will have to be permanently stationed in order to keep the kit serviceable. So by spending on something they can never use they avoid getting billed for something they can never use. This sounds just the sort of thing that BaE might be willing to take on in perpetuity. :ugh:

I didn't say "my" money i said "us" ie you as well, and my main gripe was the waste of of the shelf kit that could in the future cost lives.....AND money:rolleyes:

Trouble is a lot of it was really theater specific, I mean a Jackal and a Coyote doesn't even have a windscreen or a roof :ok:..... just what you need for a rain swept Salisbury plain in mid winter.. :O

And think of the spares we can flog them......

Still you could have got a lot on the deck of a carrier though...... oops!

When it looked like we were going to evacuate Cyprus during the troubles, they had the bays put all the servicable high value equipment, correctly labeled up and palleted ready for a Herc to collect, the rest was either to be destroyed or readied in case another flight was available, Herc came in was filled, 15 mins later another appeared, opening the ramp and pushing out the other stuff, the guys were suprised to find it was the same Herc and all their nicely packed, labeled and prepped equipment was now sitting on the bottom of the Med..

"a Jackal and a Coyote doesn't even have a windscreen or a roof"

Nor do many of the lan drover s they were intended to replace.

Strucky - What is wrong with sea transportation is that Afghanistan is land-locked:

• The drive to the Pakistan border en route to the nearest sea port is extremely dangerous (the stories of the regular, numerous deaths of locally-employed civilian drivers do not make the papers) and difficult. It is no picnic once the other side of the border either.
• The fuel for the vehicles has to be flown in (expensive in cash terms) or trucked in (expensive in human terms).
• The spares for the vehicles necessary for such a trip are in very short supply as they are UOR items, not regular production items, and have to be flown or trucked in at enormous cost. (Getting the idea, now?)
• There are insufficient Heavy Equipment Tranporters to lift them all by road, so most would have to be driven.
• The convoys would need protection by both air and ground support and the manpower available for that duty will be diminishing as we withdraw. I cannot see ISAF providing it for us as they will still have a job to do in the parts of the country which have not transitioned to local control.

IMHO, the long and the short is that anything useful will come out by road early enough to be protected as it does so, anything of enduring value or that needs to stay until the end will come out by air, and anything else (including that which we cannot afford) will be written off and left behind . It has happened that way every time before.

all very well, but all those problems pose one big question........

If its all so flaming difficult how did the stuff get there in the first place? It wasn't all flown in.


How much did the Soviets leave when they pulled out?

... if true then simply following form since I recall reading reports that
when the British forces pulled out of the Crimea they abandoned huge numbers of their horses - left to to starve or freeze to death in the frozen wastlands of the region.

...

I'm too far up country to hear the British Army cheering this one. After quite a few years and quite a few million quid, they have nothing much to show from the FRES project. I had heard around the corridors of power (ok, Andover) that they would do almost anything to prevent Mastiff/Ridgeback etc becoming renamed FRES.

So, 10 years after we could have settled on buying a MOTS (eg Stryker) and upgraded along with other users we're still working on it. Here's how it seems to go, we tried to write down all of the characteristics of something like Stryker and then asked companies to bid against that description. And that is where a lot of our procurement budget goes. See MRA4 and Waste of Space threads for further examples.



Batco

True, but a lot of it was. Back then it was an Urgent Operational Requirement to get it into theatre in order to save military lives. The fleet has been built up over years as a steady trickle. We will want to leave quickly and in good order when the word is given. Getting it out again will not be urgent, an operational requirement or cost-effective, because the same military lives will be saved by being flown out over a period of days not by driving out through bandit country over a period of weeks.

Judging by what was in and around Bagram 10 years ago, loads. There was a local living in a T62 (I think) that had got stuck fording a stream a few miles from the airfield boundary and abandoned.

"""jamesdevice all very well, but all those problems pose one big question........

If its all so flaming difficult how did the stuff get there in the first place? It wasn't all flown in. """"

You would be surprised how much was flown in on AN124 and AN225 aircraft and as to earlier post how many were carried on each aircraft!!

:E

Surely if AFG is such a secure place by the time we leave, they can drive them to the ports....if not then shouldn't we be staying to finish the job? If you can drive tankers and food across the country then a few heavily armed vehicles would stand a chance....

It would be the ultimate road trip!

But surely we'll only be pulling out when we've 'won' and made the world a safer place?

Surely driving out through a newly safe & peaceful country, through a former Commonwealth nation and current ally would be a piece of cake?!?:ugh::ouch::confused:

EDIT...High Spirits - Oops, you're a split second ahead in the sarcarsm stakes!

Is the cost ofthe Antonov realistic? Presumably this is using it to ship all the way home? Why not ship the vehicles to a safer location and then take them by sea ?

whaen I wrote "ship" I meant "fly"!

Ginsters,
Good timing with the double sarcasm onslaught. Leaving the vehicles behind is a bit of a tacit admission that we have screwed the pooch as far as providing security is concerned....

Mustique, we haven't got the sealift capacity either. And back to the previous posts - why do we want knackered, special to type, unsupportable and unuseable stuff anyway?

In Egypt, when the US pulled out of the Aswan dam project they abandoned all their heavy equipment. Years later it was still where they dumped it.

We simply do not need the expense of shipping lots of equipment home when at the same time the numbers of troops that would be in UK post 2015 will be far fewer than now.

Sell it to Lybia as aid :ok::E

PN

Au contraire, we DO have the shipping capability (>14000LIMS of it). Specifically bought for the purpose of helping the Army meet people world-wide....

Point class sealift ship - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

That does not solve the potential issues of extraction and non-funded vehicle types. However, it means that costings based purely on extraction by air may not be the most appropriate to use.

On which point, is Atlantic Conveyor (II) still around?
the terms of its build financing was that is was available at short notice to the MOD

ah silly me, I should have checked first - she's in the North Sea at present though Swedish flagged.
How the heck did that happen?
Live Ships Map - AIS - Vessel Traffic and Positions

Interesting to note her displacement is 51648 t - more than twice the size of the Point ships @ 23,000 t
Whats the betting the MOD have forgotten all about her after having paid for the build....???