Promised super-carriers are still lurking just over the fiscal horizon

As a hopelessly patriotic sort of person, I have a fantasy of one day being on holiday in the south of France and looking up from, say, a biography of Nelson, to see an aircraft carrier appear on the horizon. Only instead of it being an American one, it will be British. No doubt the captain will come ashore in a smart launch and, if I were to be lucky, he might invite me aboard for a sundowner. All would be well in the world, and I would sleep soundly, dreaming of past glories at the Nile and Trafalgar.

I am not the only one with this fantasy. Geoff Hoon says he has now taken personal charge of the Government's pet defence programme - to build two super-carriers for the Royal Navy. These will be the largest warships ever built in Britain, with four acres of flight deck apiece. In fact, they are so big that no single yard can build them and they will be constructed in bits, by a consortium of companies, before being put together by a "physical integrator", otherwise known as Kellogg, Brown & Root, a subsidiary of US vice- president Dick Cheney's alma mater, Halliburton. The Navy is salivating at the prospect of having some smart new toys to play with. The current military vogue is "expeditionary warfare", and Vice-Admiral Charles Style, commander UK maritime forces, says: "I absolutely believe this is a very relevant and important capability." Even the Department of International Development, eager to carpet-bomb Africa with aid, or, more usefully, help the victims of natural disasters, wants the carriers. So, how come, six years after they were first proposed, they have not yet been ordered?

Here is the rub. Despite all the brouhaha over the surprisingly fierce negotiating style of Mr Hoon, these carriers have got no further than the drawing board. They have, however, been provisionally named HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales. Something about those names, chosen by an administration that axed the Royal Yacht, worries me. Are they just a bit too unreal, a bit too good to be true? The last vessel to be named Prince of Wales, also the pride of the fleet, sank in unfortunate circumstances in 1941, after Churchill rashly sent it to defend Singapore without enough escorts.

Sadly, there is not much prospect of the super-carriers having enough escorts either. Another handful of frigates and destroyers have been cut, so the Royal Navy now has just 28 afloat, half the number it had at the time of the Falklands. Assuming a typical carrier battle group has at least six escorts, the Navy will be stripped bare to provide the minimum support, once these ships are supposedly at sea from 2012 onwards.

All this points to the really serious question: can we afford them? The initial cost estimate, now six years old, was that the carriers would cost £3 billion, plus their air complements. In theory, we should be able to find the money. After all, Britain is the world's fourth largest economy and a global trading nation. The trouble is that, over the past decade, the defence budget has been halved in real terms by both the Conservatives and Labour, to just 2.4 per cent of GDP. Every bill that comes in from Iraq is quibbled by the Treasury and the MoD has been reduced in effect to cannibalising future capability in order to fund Tony Blair's wars. Furthermore, as far as I can see, such are the burdens on the defence budget, the MoD has resorted to some pretty novel accounting. It treats some items as "near cash", an oxymoronic concept. It also records its hardware as £27 billion of capital assets. All those weapons, so expensive to maintain, depreciate rapidly and so are an odd kind of capital.

But there is really only one very significant thing you need to know about the Ministry of Defence's budget. It is to be found in note 21 to the accounts of a quango called the Defence Procurement Agency and it says future commitments "contracted but not provided for: £14.4 billion". That is the current cost of newly ordered weapon systems, which have yet to be paid for. But the Queen Elizabeth and Prince of Wales have not even been ordered yet, nor have their 70 joint combat fighters. The MoD protests otherwise, but that number looks to me like the black hole in the defence budget, blown by, inter alia, the Eurofighter. No wonder those doughty Scottish regiments are being merged or axed.

The "black hole" is also the ultimate financial consequence of the dualarchy which runs our country. On one side, there is Tony Blair, strutting around the world with a sword in one hand and a handkerchief in the other, sending the Armed Forces into battle. On the other side, there is Gordon Brown, with a fundamentally different idea of Britain as a soft power, a welfare state, whose principal foreign policy ought to be a "Marshall Plan" for the Third World. Mr Brown evidently has no time for the Armed Forces. Gerald Howarth, a Conservative defence spokesman, recently asked in a parliamentary question what defence establishments Mr Brown had visited. And the reply? Too expensive to find out. If any readers have ever seen Mr Brown at a defence establishment, perhaps they might write in to The Daily Telegraph to help solve the mystery.

The military are caught in the middle of this two-personality state - forced to deploy in Iraq and elsewhere, but without the proper support of the Treasury. So here is a pre-election challenge to Mr Blair and to Mr Brown, assuming they are speaking to each other. When will you order these carriers, and where, exactly, is the money to come from? Unless they can give satisfactory answers, my approach to the carrier question will be not to believe the Government, until I see the vessels bobbing on the horizon.

Rokke:

Before I say anything, I would like to commend USNBandit for having the patience of Job.
***Bandit did not display any patience, he was a jerk. He couldn’t shake any of my argumentation. He needed you guys to do that.

You are a credit to your nickname, and living proof that not all fighter pilots are arrogant assholes.
***Bandit was an asshole. He didn’t answer questions. He obfuscated. He accused. He claimed to be a fighter pilot, while I only claimed to be an afficianado, so his claim required more proof, more validity, more facts that lined up. Some of his facts did not line up but you tuys moved in to protect him.

Kevin, I have pinged everyone I know on FreeRepublic who actually flies or has flown military combat aircraft. Those
aircraft include the following: A-6, A-10, F-4, F-15, F-16, and the F-18. I not pinging them to gang up on you.
***Now that I have had a few years to reflect on this, looked at some of the answers from others in this thread, and grown even more thick-skinned and egalitarian, the conclusion I draw is that the end result WAS ganging up. The only real refutation of the kill ratio figures was not that it was invalid primary source material as I stated, it was that it doesn’t measure up to Real World Experience. And yet, the Real World Experience of the harrier is discounted in this thread. You guys are a bunch of bull shiite artists.

I’m pinging them to give them the opportunity to validate or refute what USNBandit has been trying to help you understand.
***Fighter pilots appear to have a short attention span. None of them read the whole thread. They approach things from their own PRESENT perspective, saying things like “that’s why the triplane isn’t the terror of the skies”. But a great majority of the primary factual evidence in this thread was from the Falklands and 1980’s red flag type exercises. In the contemporary exercises at the time, the harrier was turning off its viffing capabilities. The main original contention was that bandit said the harrier didn’t have a magic move, and lots of responses after that showed that pilots were staying out of knife fighting and close-quarter turn fighting because the harrier had an advantage.

You are obviously a big fan of the Harrier, and there are many things about the Harrier that make it a great aircraft. “VIFFing”, however, is not one of them.
***You lack an understanding of what viffing actually did. You seem to think that it ONLY involved pushing the nozzles 90degrees, but that was not the case.

Neither is its air to air capability.
***Undefeated in the air, second only to the F15 which it defeated in exercises at 7:1. I would say its air to air capability was the best when you consider that the F15 was designed to take out 5 air frames at such a wing loading & cost as the harrier.

In short, you really do have no idea what you are talking about.
***In long, I did know what I was talking about but I withdraw due to bootlickers, lack of time, and deference to your first hand knowledge.

I would like to believe that the fact that neither the RAF nor USMC considers the Harrier a primary air defense asset
***Harrier was not designed as a primary air defense asset, and yet its kill ratio is among the best and it took other primary defence assets in head to head exercises. That’s like saying the harrier van can beat the F15 ferrari in a quarter mile race most times, and yet it isn’t even designed for that task. That makes it a formidable van.

to be strong indicator that maybe your assessment of it is not accurate.
***My assessment was accurate.

Certainly USNBandit has done his able best to set you straight.
***I am sure he did his able best but he needed you guys to gang up, relying also on bootlickers like el bucko to finish up.

Having read this whole thread, it is very clear to me the USNBandit speaks with the knowledge of actual experience. It is equally clear that you do not.
***Explained upthread. I’m an afficianado. Bandit is a guvmint employee, paid to fly and didn’t do a very good job explaining things.

I have flown with Harriers and against Harriers. I think they are one of the coolest aircraft around. But air to air killing machines they are not, and they never will be.
***They were undefeated air to air, just like the F15. The operating issue here was the tenses used. I was using past tense and present tense. Bandit was using present tense and future tense, such as how well it would do versus the F22. So is Rokke, using present tense and future tense. Was the Fokker triplane a killer? yes. Will it be a killer in the future? no. Keep the tenses straight, keep the facts straight.

Despite the best anecdotes you can Google on the web.
***As stated upthread, most of the primary material I introduced in this discussion was pre-internet. I really wish I had more time when this thread was current, but I didn’t. Today, the USMC is buying leftover harriers from the UK as a hedge against the F35’s continued delays. If the F35 gets cancelled by zer0bama, it will be advantageous to upgrade harriers with better radar, missiles & avionics. That is also one of the red herrings exhibited in this thread, where someone downgrades an airframe by saying that “such & such missile” was added to it, making it a better platform. And yet, msot of the harrier’s kills were from rear aspect after maneuvering. The issue all along was airframe vs. airframe, not airframe + radar + avionics platform vs. airframe + radar + avionics platform.

Fascinating. Thanks for pointing me to this.
https://freerepublic.com/focus/news/4050755/posts?page=53#53

https://www.wearethemighty.com/articles/army-air-force-pitted-jet-fighters-attack-helicopters/

Air Force fighters got wasted by Army attack helos in this combat experiment
Blake Stilwell

Posted On June 18, 2019 16:05:50

The Army and Air Force once conducted an air-to-air combat experiment between jet fighters and attack helicopters. Called J-CATCH, or Joint Countering Attack Helicopter, it was not the first of its kind but the most conclusive using modern technology.

Final ‘Top Gun 2’ trailer will give you ‘Goose’ bumps
The results showed attack helicopters proved remarkably deadly when properly employed against fighter aircraft. And it wasn’t even close.

Air Force fighters got wasted by Army attack helos in this combat experiment
And for once, it’s not the F-35’s problem!
First conducted by the Army using MASH Sikorsky H-19s, airframes developed in the 40s and 50s, the modern J-CATCH test started in 1978, as the Soviet Union expanded their helicopter forces. Of special concern was the development of the Mil Mi-24 or Hind helicopter gunship. The four phase J-CATCH experiment started in earnest with the Army, Marines, and Air Force participating in simulations at NASA’s Langley labs.

The second phase was a field test, pitting three AH-1 Cobras and two OH-58 Scouts against a Red Team force of UH-1 Twin Hueys and CH-3E Sea King helicopters and developed many new helicopter air-to-air tactics and maneuvers designed to counter the Russian Hind.

Air Force fighters got wasted by Army attack helos in this combat experiment
The Russian Hind.

Phase Three is where the fighters came in. The Air Force chose F-4, A-7, A-10, and F-15 fighter aircraft to counter whatever the Army could muster in the exercise. The F-4 and F-15 were front line fighters with anti-air roles while the A-7 and A-10 had air-to-ground missions.

For two weeks, the helicopters trounced the fighter aircraft. The fighter pilots in the test runs sometimes didn’t even know they were under attack or destroyed until the exercise’s daily debriefing. The Army pilots were so good, they had to be ordered to follow Air Force procedures and tell their fixed-wing targets they were under attack over the radio. This only increased the kill ratio, which by the end of the exercise, had risen to 5-to-1 in favor of the helicopters.

Air Force fighters got wasted by Army attack helos in this combat experiment
Even the mighty BRRRRRT has its limits.

The fourth phase of the exercise saw the final outcome of the test: fighters should avoid helicopters at all costs, unless they have superiority of distance or altitude.

Discussion on P.1154 cancellation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6aHyuuthns

As for the RAF P1154, the late John Fairey, who was the Chief Test Pilot for the Sea Harrier at HSA /BAe was absolutely scathing of the aircraft in concept. The P1154 would have had to use afterburners on the front nozzles at least, and most likely on all four nozzles (the system was known as plenum chamber burning). This resulted in two major issues. Firstly you could not do VTO or VL with the aircraft from anything other than a specially prepared site (unlike a Harrier) as the fire out of the nozzles would destroy the ground under the aircraft, damage the underside of the aircraft with the crap kicked up and most likely melt the tyres. Also in forward supersonic flight you would have 4 afterburners mounted on the side of the aircraft, which would have required the whole back end of it (and most likely the inboard underside of the wing to boot) be built out of some form of high temperature resistant (and very expensive) alloy like Titanium, which the British had no major working experience with. His comments are covered in the Book “Empire of the Clouds” and he also covers the problem in a talk he once gave which is on Youtube. The page from the book is at https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=bGRdLl9PynIC&pg=PA241&lpg=PA241&dq=john+fairly+P1154&source=bl&ots=kgwddutH8i&sig=ACfU3U05lHtPbpNR8fVRg4RYVxJz6jVn-g&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjmos3Rw67qAhWhlFwKHfacA8YQ6AEwAHoECGIQAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false , while his talk about the history of VTOL flight in the UK is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOvNWRFDrX0 . THe P1154 issues are covered in the Q&A bit at the end.

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