Should we buy British?
 

As has been highlighted by today's news from Portsmouth BAe shipyard, certain industries are designated as strategic and the UK military are legally required to "buy British". Is this the right course? What if relaxing this enabled us to afford lots more ships/aircraft?

You are then dependant to the whims of other countries, same with fighters, buying into the F35 is all well and good until it degrades your ability to build fighters yourself, once you become reliant on foreign built assets you then lose the ability as staff and the knowledge base are lost. Trouble is reduce the demand by shrinking the Navy etc, you then cannot justify holding the capacity to build them.

ShotOne, this should cheer you up; https://www.gov.uk/government/news/m...ew-rfa-tankers . Old news now but they are still being built in South Korea. This is good value for the MoD but arguably not that good for UK PLC. Unless we have some reciprocal trade agreement with the South Koreans, all the money leaves the Country. Buying British would most probably cost more but much of the money would stay in our home economy. The brains trust in the Treasury doesn't allow the MoD a buy British bonus, though. Funny old world.

So we bought Nimrod MRA 4. Question answered..?

Trouble with buying foreign is that country can dictate use, or non use, as the case may be, by denying spares etc. As Australia has found out in the past.

BAe. The company that has single handedly destroyed Britain's defence industry. Aeroplanes, ships....

Brian

Agree re found out in past, at least now most seems to come from the US,
not sure if that is good or bad !!!

I heard this said on radio yesterday by Lord West, saying he would take all MoD contracts away from Scotland if they voted Yes. He said development, production etc should always be in England (hastily changed to include Wales and NI.)

Rivet Joint?

Why wouldn't you ?

If Scotland leaves the UK, it would be like having them built in India !

It is moments like that when politicians, especially inexperienced ones like West, reveal their true colours. You could understand your average politician blurting it out, as he is unlikely to be aware of anything related to Defence, but for a retired Admiral to say it just shows you the inner thinking of both MoD and government.

Buy British but do so with caution.
 

BAe has over the years used the buy British policy of Govenments of both party's to ramp up the price and deliver late, they just took the Govenments and tax payers for a ride.

The first time they got a message that this should not continue was when they so overpriced the Buldog refurbishment that they lost the contract to the Grob 115.

But undaunted by this they continued to rip off The tax payer with the Nimrod MR4 that as usual was late and over budget .............. The only way to show the con artists at the top of BAe that the UK tax payer had had enough of their antics was to chop up the project outside their office windows.

Not forgetting that the AEW 3 was only conceived as a concept to keep the Unions quiet when UK bought the Boeing...it was not anticipated that an early general Election would bring a union dominated Labour party to power and we would actually buy it! Political, rather than capability/value decisions cost a lot of money in the long run.

In 1988, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Armed Forces told the UK House of Commons that the European Fighter Aircraft would "be a major project, costing the United Kingdom about £7 billion"
In 2011 the National Audit Office estimated the UK's "total programme cost [would] eventually hit £37 billion", for less aircraft.

This is typical. Our MoD and defence contractors produce often inferior kit, usually very late and at many times the original budget. Which might explain why we buy so much off the shelf from America. That way we get better kit a lot cheaper.

What we need is competition, a second British defence contractor able to take on major contracts and bring some efficiency to the market. An amalgam of Meggitt, Marshall, Qinteq etc might get there with some good management.

And maybe banning BAE from all new contracts until they get their act together.

There was a time when we made good kit at a good price and countries from all over the world bought their ships and aircraft from us. Unfortunately the power of the unions and weak management meant that potential productivity improvements were not implemented. So the rest of the world became more competitive and the UK lost the orders and the jobs. The main effect of union power is unemployment.

We pay tax and invest it in the armed forces as an insurance scheme - surely we should be looking at the technological and industrial elements of that insurance as being at least as important as the others?

Perhaps the problem is that in order to create something stable, a lot of companies have been squashed into a few huge ones and with that goes the customer's ability to bargain or change suppliers.

Then we would leave all those ships/aircraft parked in ports and airfields empty, because we can't afford the sailors or airmen to fill them (apparently)!.......

Assuming you mean fewer aircraft rather than less of an aircraft (as we nearly achieved both), are you allowing for the Germans buggering about with the RADAR fit, our lot sodding about with the gun fit, everyone sodding about with the final buy number and corresponding work-share and our lot sodding about again with the buy number and the production and delivery timetable?

t43562; you make a fair point. It reminds me of the "rationalisation" of the aircraft and missile industry in the late '50s. At least then, HSA could compete with BAC (and dear old Fred HP tried to compete with everybody) and nobody was daft enough to lump shipbuilders in with the deal.

Does anyone know where a list of our strategic assets can be found? The point I made above (badly) was that I thought Nimrod R and now Rivet Joint was one.

How do you figure that one out? The AEW3 was bought because NATO couldn't make its mind up and the Shack, well . . .

Then of course NATO bought the E3 after we committed to the AEW3.

Dervish,

Google is your friend. Just type in RAF or RN as a starting point and you will eventually get to everything you could want to know about our strategic assets. Nimrod R is in the process of being replaced by Rivet Joint. Two totally different aircraft but with the same mission.

It ultimately depends on whether we are producing what is needed and can be purchased at a reasonble cost (compared to products elsewhere).

It's not that long ago that Plod had to purchase British cars but that was untenable once the industry went down the tubes. Same could happen to the military.

Should BAE have been so quick to quit the civil market?

Is dispersed construction with bits being assembled in far flung parts as economical as all in one place?

I know small things like cars are assembled from components brought in, but flying aircraft fuselages, wings, etc or building large parts of a warship and towing it to an assembly yard with the attendant costs of towage does not seem to make financial sense.

It seems it is more a question of economics spreading the little pork in the barrel around more factories or countries. "Made in Britain" seems increasingly unlikely.

I suggest 'Buy British' when you can is a good policy providing manufacturers are capable of providing a product in a reasonable time and cost.

However, the UK (or should I say BAe Systems) has proved on many occasions that we are just not capable of doing either. Nimrod AEW3 and MRA4 are 2 perfect examples. If the UK decides to procure a new Maritime Patrol Aircraft in the future, there really is no other realistic option other than buying from overseas. Similarly, C-17, Reaper, Rivet Joint etc..

Bottom line is that there needs to be a balance if you want the capability.

Do get a grip PN!

NATO (including UK) was going to buy 24 E-3A to be based in the UK (location TBD - probably Fairford or Brize) but the nations could not agree the proportion of funding leading to delays. The UK pulled out of the program (as we needed AEW ASAP to cover the fleet due to the cancellation of the aircraft carriers) and was going to independently buy 6 x E-3A as the UK contribution to the AEW Force. In the meantime, the other Nations signed up and the base went to West Germany with 18 E-3A. At the time, the Unions thought that they ruled the UK and so the Government put a few pounds around UK companies for their proposals for an AEW to show the Unions that there was not a viable UK alternative to the E-3. GEC rolled out their test-bed Comet which was being used for antenna trials for the Tornado F2 Radar and clamed it could be made into an AEW platform - the rest of the disaster is well known.

Making new things requires that one make mistakes. If you want no mistakes then simply buy old stuff.

One question might be: should one make lots of small mistakes or a few big ones.

To imagine that you can have cutting edge technology without a huge failure rate is naive.

To put it another way: anything you have that works, no matter how shiny it is, is old news technologically speaking.

The problem with military contracts and projects is that everyone is expecting, and more seriously, accepting substantial timing slips, huge cost overruns and sometimes even serious performance shortfalls.

Defense departments in most parts of the world are run like old school European style state companies (postal services, public transport and archaic airlines) whereby nobody is ultimately responsible for the fiascos achieved and the state willingly ponies up the checks.

the Defense sector is, contrary to popular believe, not like all other sectors in the western styled economies, there is no normal client-supplier relationship and with the merger of big contractors in the past ,both in Europe and the US, into oversized monopolizing mogols thing s have gone from bad to worse.

Many times there is only 1 serious supplier for 1 , or a limited amount of client-states, if you kill competition you also kill the incentive to innovate with a limited budget, the JSF, A400M and many other projects are the epitome of these policies.

Companies like SAAB, Agusta Westland and to a lesser extent DASSAULT are a breath of fresh air but it remains to be seen how long they can hold the fort

Interesting responses; clearly there are two sides to this debate and I don't have an axe to grind either way. Where I do, is in procurement of air trooping and freighting. Rightly or wrongly we rely heavily on civil carriers for this. Yet even the PM used an Angolan carrier to visit Japan!! All too often these contracts are being placed with overseas airlines. That may well come home to roost in a much more immediate way; if we lose the capacity to build fighters, that's a problem in fifteen years. If we can't deploy our forces, that might be a serious problem tomorrow.

quote.
Not forgetting that the AEW 3 was only conceived as a concept to keep the Unions quiet when UK bought the Boeing...it was not anticipated that an early general Election would bring a union dominated Labour party to power and we would actually buy it! Political, rather than capability/value decisions cost a lot of money in the long run.

I was at "drinks with the Minister", dear old Fred (Sleepy) Mulley, and he reckoned the only time all sides of the house cheered him was when he announced the Nimrod AEW order. Talk about sods law.

PM

Didn't I read somewhere that half of the problem was the way the contacts had been written for the AEW 3, one Major problem they had was getting all the software to run on a minuscule hard drive where the simply and expedient cure was to upgrade the capacity of the hard drive, but with a infinite budget they continued to spend millions trying to get the software to fit on the drive.

Not just the computer... virtually the whole concept of the aircraft, from the troubled radar with its appalling aerials to the slow and laboured hierarchal input HMI, was flawed. However, with the cost-plus contact given to GEC which paid all the company's research costs plus an extra (10%?) profit, then the more they got it wrong, the more money they made!

Question is with software done for every piece of kit then who knows what lovebomb has been planted by supplier at a point in time to suit their agenda.

Nope. That will turn out to be one of the most spectacular errors a British business will make in our lifetimes!

One of the biggest issues that result in budget over-runs is scope creep. The design process is not cheap, but you often find that someone changes their mind and they have to start again. A lot of the previous design is wasted.

Of course, BAES are masters at encouraging this as its just money in the bank for them :hmm:

any +ve outcomes
 

We all know about the AEW Nimrod and loads of other programmes listed above but can anyone give any recent good examples of when we have bought British and it worked out well?

I am having great difficulty. We bought some minor kit from Meggitt <£5M that was a good example for me but that became spoilt when another UK company incorporated the same Meggitt kit in a higher order assembly and marked the Meggitt bits up double. They even tried to hide behind some design rights issue when it came to support (PDS and repairs). I know our Contracts Branch was very weak over the issue. Some of my most fiercest battles were with our own CB. They chose the path of least resistance at detriment to the public purse all too often IMHO.

So how did the AEW Nimrod programme adversely affect me and my team? When they [Waste of Space] lost the job the politicians were keen to back fill with something to keep Woodford going. They took work from us (Andover EMk3 for 115 Sqn) We; being an In House unit did not need to make a profit and in my mind were very effective (Cost Time and Performance). Sadly there is no going back.

Supporting inefficient industries leads to the loss of British jobs. In the end it just goes offshore. I don't know if there is a magic wand.

People on here must know of some good examples where we [Great Britain] are getting it right. Can we try and throw some positive light on the subject rather than just list the disasters.

(No I did not go and work for Meggitt or any other Defence Contractor when I left)

I think they should have been a damn sight quicker to quit the civil market, especially in shipbuilding because it seems their yards weren't all that good at it. It appears from what I've heard that they were too used to military standards, materials and practices, that commercial stuff was too much of a culture change for them to be successful.

As an example, my father still curses the day when as chief marine engineer for a major UK oil company he took charge of one of their new product carriers, fresh out of a mainly military shipbuilding yard that at one time formed part of the BAE empire. Six months after handover he was chiselling nuts off of flanges because they had seized/galled into a solid mass on lines that had to be taken out for cleaning twice a year. Non-(civilian)-standard flanges, bolt sizes etc. except at port interfaces made the lives of his engine room team & the Mate's deck crew hell and made getting spares and replacements expensive, slow and frustrating....... "Sorry, we can't tell you who to buy a replacement for that failed part from as it's use is covered by the Official Secrets Act" was apparently one response when they went hunting for a spare cooling pump.

The ships didn't last long. I believe one of the class only stayed with the company for a bare 5 years instead of a typical 20-25 and all were gone before their second survey was due.

You tick to what you are good at, and you try to do it better. When politics or commercial or legal constraints force you outside what you do well, It's never going to be pretty.

Let the commercial guys do the commercial stuff & the military guys supply the military stuff. The problems arise because the civil service can't grasp the difference between the two.

edited for premature post..........

In my experience it is caused when, having completed and submitted the requirement for tender and having received the costings from industry, the been counters in the treasury insist on cutting the price by half. This then leads to a new less capable requirement that meets the original industry cost figures but again the treasury wants it even cheaper. By the time that you have finally agreed a price, the contractor then has to raise the costs again because he has to allow for his expenses in keeping his specialist team together during the 2 years it takes the treasury to make up their minds. (And then HMRC decide that they will charge VAT on the final price despite advising you in the beginning that they would not and the whole process starts again).

Nimrod AEW radar
 

I remember that the British computer used was the GEC4080
a not very powerful thing usually used for process control. The
AEW radar was Synthetic Aperture which necessitates quite a computational effort.
Also quite a lot of processing was needed to remove Ground Clutter.
It was obvious at the time that the 4080 was not powerful enough.
Other sufficiently powerful but non-british computers were available, but not made in-house.

So indeed buy British, but only if good enough.

Please correct me if you know differently.

Define "British" in an era when companies routinely don't pay their taxes here! Designed and built here? Or designed abroad and built here? Or designed and built abroad, but assembled here? Successive governments have spun the last as "British" when all its provided are minimum wage short term un/semi-skilled jobs. And these are usually accompanied by huge government grants and tax breaks to build the assembly plant. Reading, Basingstoke and Blackwood come to mind on one major Army job. It would have been cheaper just to import the assembled product. I'm thinking of BOWMAN, our Army equivalent of MRA4.

Seem to remember insufficient radar cooling was a big factor on AEW.

And even that wasn't the right aircraft to buy, the Andover was foisted upon the RAF despite being more expensive and inferior to the opposition in the contract, simply because Handley Page wouldn't play ball and merge into what would become BAe..

The Andover had to have expensive and major work involving the kneeling undercarriage etc where the Herald was a cheap redesign that involved the fitting of a rear ramp giving you in effect a twin engined Herc, and trials proved it was far superior to the Andover off piste.

http://www.flightglobal.com/FlightPD...20-%201862.PDF

As for BAe and their megga expensive programmes and parts... VC Ten Squash Balls anyone?

The main radar was a PD radar but the choice of medium (rather than high) PRF led to repeated clutter notch holes throughout the velocity spectrum. To counter this, the radar had a very small clutter notch. Unfortunately the really large sidelobes caused by the poor antennae put ground clutter into the system at a velocity outside the clutter notch and processing these spurious noise returns caused the underpowered computer to crash within seconds - we could not point the radar at land within about 120 nmi otherwise down went the computer (hence the oversea only use at the time - the company claimed that this noise was caused by detecting lorries). The company's final gambit was to really open the clutter notch, but this gave more frequency spectrum blanked than open (due to the repeated notch caused by the too low PRF). The noise problem was solved, but very few aircraft were detected. (The aircraft was cancelled shortly after).

Indeed! The mission system generated too much heat and so aircraft fuel in one of the tanks was used as a heat sink. This meant that the tank had to remain filled and the aircraft could spend only limited time airborne without AAR, otherwise the system had to be shut down due to no heat sink fuel available.

Donkey 497

When I referred to BAE's spectacular error in quitting the civil market, I was referring to the sale of its stake in Airbus. Why would they possibly want to sell a reliably profitable business at Broughton and Filton, turning out the world's most advanced airliner wings?