Posted on 02/13/2005 5:28:59 PM PST by Eurotwit
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.
Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
They could pick up the Kennedy for a lot less than $3 billion. It's about 7 years newer than several of the carriers in the US fleet; the Navy had initially planned to use it through at least 2018.
They wouldn't have to worry about money for the battle groups if there wasn't such a welfare state. Maybe tighten the budget of the royals and privatize medicine a bit.
Super Carriers would be an absurd purchase for Britain. They took on a force that had 7 or 8 times as many combat planes as they did when they won the Falklands, and that was because they had the ability to generate carriers out of cargo ships. The STOVL capabilities of the Harriers proved to be unbeatable. There was even one air-to-air engagement of a Harrier vs. Mirage which came to a draw, and the Harrier pilot landed on some small supply ship while the Mirage pilot landed in the ocean and was shot by his own troups. It was the first air-to-air jet kill recorded by virtue of the ability to land vertically.
And “Tony Blair’s wars” are keeping the need for those carriers at bay.
There is an unspoken value to the RN having even just one supercarrier. If the Brits began to build one, the French would have to match it. And, with French arrogance, corruption, silliness and ineptitude, the project would break the country financially and still be a failure. The carrier they just build has had failure after failure, a great wine cellar but a lousy propulsion system. The French would turn a 3 to 10 billion dollar project into a 20 billion dollar project, make Chirac and his mistress even wealthier, but still wouldn't work on the high seas. So, go get 'em Brits, let's bankrupt the froggies!
While we're on this subject, did they ever find that propeller that fell off that French carrier?
Thanks, for posting this.
Try 23 years this coming May. Maybe Alzheimers is setting in early.
The USMC will be switching to the JSF.
Eventually but until then the Harrier II will remain in service for at least another decade.
Despite your handle, you don't sound like a "twit" or very much "Euro" to me.
Concerning carriers: I'm a retired soldier, that is, one who is not normally found on aircraft carriers. One time, however, I was Fort Monroe, Virginia on TDY (temorary duty). I looked out across what I believe is Hampton Roads (an apparent nautical term which I don't understand since there was no pavement that I could see) and saw the biggest ship I have ever seen. It was a carrier berthed several miles across the water. It was so far away it was just a grey silhouette (sp?). In any case, it was BIG, HUMONGOUS.
Ever since that time I have understood that there are ways other than pure airpower (B52s, etc) to project the power and intent of the Nation.
I can understand your desire to see an HMS Carrier on the horizon. When somebody on a foreign beach sees such a thing, he/she realizes that, depending on their attitude, either major help or a major disaster is on their horizon.
Also it would be nice if the Captain invited one aboard for a sundowner but what the hell, one can't have every thing, can one?
I don't care what any of the rest of the people who read this think, I say from this Texian to you, Thank God for the Brits.
Despite your handle, you don't sound like a "twit" or very much "Euro" to me.
Concerning carriers: I'm a retired soldier, that is, one who is not normally found on aircraft carriers. One time, however, I was Fort Monroe, Virginia on TDY (temorary duty). I looked out across what I believe is Hampton Roads (an apparent nautical term which I don't understand since there was no pavement that I could see) and saw the biggest ship I have ever seen. It was a carrier berthed several miles across the water. It was so far away it was just a grey silhouette (sp?). In any case, it was BIG, HUMONGOUS.
Ever since that time I have understood that there are ways other than pure airpower (B52s, etc) to project the power and intent of the Nation.
I can understand your desire to see an HMS Carrier on the horizon. When somebody on a foreign beach sees such a thing, he/she realizes that, depending on their attitude, either major help or a major disaster is on their horizon.
Also it would be nice if the Captain invited one aboard for a sundowner but what the hell, one can't have every thing, can one?
I don't care what any of the rest of the people who read this think, I say from this Texian to you, Thank God for the Brits.
Except that Big John is about 37 years old, now. That is a VERY long time for steel to be subjected to salt water.
(Big John Med Cruise, '86)
You don't want the Kennedy. It is in bad shape.
To all and sundry: sorry about the stutter, no excuse.
B14
As far as the Falklands go, if the Brits were doing so well why did they get so many small boys pasted while covering the landings? The answer is that they didn't feel safe moving their carrier close enough to establish air superiority over the islands.
As far as the love in with the Harrier, I always felt sorry for my friends flying Brit Harriers. When we were in the Gulf they would have to download most of their weapons due to the warm weather. They take off by running up their engines to 90%, wiping out the controls, releasing the brakes and going to full throttle. When they reach the ramp they slap the nozzles to 60 degrees and look at the EPR indicator. If they see less than 1.04, they eject. Not a great way to make a living. At least they have a beer waiting for them when they get back.
In early December 1941, literally on the eve of Pearl Harbor, the commander of the Prince of Wales task force, Admiral Sir Tom Phillips, met with his American counterparts in the Philippines. Informed of the strike on Pearl Harbor during the meeting, the American delegation urged Phillips to sail his battleship and battle cruiser to Pearl Harbor, to join the remnants of the U.S. fleet. With all of our PACFLT battleships sunk or damaged by the Japanese attack, the British capital ships would have been a welcome addition to the Allied naval effort, particularly Prince of Wales which had the speed to accompany carrier task forces. Phillips declined the American offer. Returning to Singapore, he sent Prince of Wales and Repulse up the Malaysian coast, in an effort to counter Japanese amphibious forces. Without fighter escort, the British ships were doomed. They were soon located by Japanese aircraft and sent to the bottom in less than three hours. Admiral Phillips went down with his command. In the end, it was Phillips decision to mount a suicide mission that resulted in the loss of two ships, and over 1,000 British sailors--not Churchill's decision to send the ships to SE Asia.
Please hold your comments down a little bit. I'm trying to unload some scrap metal here with some return for the taxpayers.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.