Posted on 11/15/2009 8:58:31 PM PST by sukhoi-30mki
MoD may sell aircraft carrier to India to limit cuts
Sale would leave Royal Navy with just one replacement
Tim Webb The Observer, Sunday 15 November 2009 Article historyOne of Britain's new £2bn aircraft carriers could be sold off under cost-cutting plans being considered by the Ministry of Defence. India has lodged a firm expression of interest, the Observer has learned.
The sale of one of the two 65,000-tonne vessels would leave the Royal Navy with a single carrier and could force Britain to borrow from the French fleet, which itself has only one carrier and is reluctant to build more. Last summer the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, proposed to Gordon Brown that the two navies co-ordinate maintenance and refitting so that one was at sea at all times.
According to senior defence sources, Whitehall officials are examining the feasibility of a sale as part of the strategic defence review that will start early next year and is expected to result in savage cuts.
The carrier programme has already been delayed by two years to push back spending commitments, which itself will end up costing the taxpayer more in the long run. BAE Systems began work in July on HMS Queen Elizabeth, which is due to come into service in 2016. Preparatory work on the Prince of Wales, due for launch in 2018, has also started. The two carriers will replace the ageing Invincible class and are three times the size.
There were fears that the government could scrap one altogether. But it is understood that the financial penalties would be prohibitive. About 10,000 jobs in Portsmouth, Barrow-in-Furness, Fife and Glasgow
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
The English welfare state has left England too weak to defend themselves.
With Ogabe's imposition of more welfare state benefits (including free health insurance), as well as our pending absorption of ten million illegal aliens turned citizens onto the welfare rolls, we are about to follow in Britain's footsteps.
Is this the same Britain that once ruled the waves? The same one that had thousands of ships as recently as World War II? That’s where socialism leads.
Maybe, maybe not ... it’s up to Americans to prevent it.
Damned. Two whole working aircraft carriers between France and England. Boy, that makes them world powers, doesn’t it?
Brazil has an aircraft carrier. So does Red China. And I had a model of the USS Enterprise.
Without a couple carrier task forces, you can’t project offshore power. End of story. End of England, end of France.
Where you boys gonna launch your aircraft from if you can’t get land bases, bunkie?
ping
Could I borrow a cup of sugar and an aircraft carrier?
bump
It’s an invitation to Argentina to go after the Falklands again.
Over the several years since the carrier program was confirmed I’ve posted a dozen times this would be the ultimate outcome. And I still think the second carrier will also eventually be sold, most likely to Australia.
Not sure if the Aussies have the resources for it-they are already building two amphibs/mini-carriers. India or South Korea seem to be a more realistic market.
Thats where WW2 lead. We paupered ourselves to fight that war.
My thought precisely; they’re sacrificing their security to fund bureaucrats at the NHS. We’ll be doing the same for the unionized employees of our own NHS equivalent.
That was temporary though; every free nation was pitching in. The CANDIANS had the 3d largest navy on earth, believe it or not (by wars end). The free world, and the US especially, snapped back fairly well.
Europe is still not over the effects of both wars. The loss of the type of men that fought, from their effects in civil society, left a disproportional amount of more weaker, effeminate, academic types to shape the society for decades. In the case of Germany, this has been all for the better. For GB, not so.
Under the prevailing assumptions that govern that society, I should think they'd be abolished.
I thought the main reason we fought the war was to dispose of all this eugenics bs. It seems it is still alive and well.
Every free nation pitched in EVENTUALLY. Britain bore the brunt of it for two years before the US decided to come in (actually, you never did decide to come in. Other people made the decision for you). US and Canadian soil was never directly attacked. US civilians didn’t have to endure bombing, and rationing, and foreign occupation - like the European democracies did.
Britain was in a very bad state at the end of the war. Virtually bankrupt. Apart from 450,000 dead, two thirds of the merchant marine was at the bottom of the sea. All of our foreign assets had been liquidated. Most of the cities needed repairing. The economy had been completely warped - the aircraft industry was far too large, and the total concentration on war production had left everything else struggling with old obsolete equipment. There were pro-nationalist uprisings in the colonies and the protectorates, inports had to be cut to the minimum because there was no exports to pay for them. The new socialist government is heavily panned these days for nationalising as much as it could, but if Churchill had remained in power he probably would have had to do the same. If we hadnt had a big loan from the US (and a rather smaller one from Canada) there is a real chance there would have been starvation, with all the attendent civil unrest.
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