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.
bookmark info bump
The reason I thought this was funny was because that may have worked against plume tracking IR missiles, but not against the average threat on the street today. The threat IR missiles produced today look at a different section of the IR spectrum in order to track skin heat and the heat in the engine section of the aircraft. This is done by using different detecting materials which pick up a different wavelength of energy. Within the next 10 years I would suspect that threat nations will be producing an imaging IR array detector like the AIM-9X has. It not only tracks skin heat, but builds an image of the target and uses its brain to say "hey, that's and airplane" or "hey, that's a flare, go after the airplane shaped target."
>Harrier vectored thrust results in a nose pitching moment because the front nozzles are located forward of the center of gravity. The increase in turn performance is derived at the cost of speed.
***Any time an aircraft chooses to turn, there is a tradeoff versus speed. But the Myles book shows that the Harrier using VIFF obtains a more efficient (fully blown) wing utilization, thereby reducing the speed cost and increasing the maneuverability better than any other aircraft:
“ What was happening was that although the wing was losing lift, this was being compensated by the lift from the deflected engine thrust. Thus, in a turning dogfight when an opponent had reached the point of stall, the Harrier would still be turning at ever decreasing speed and radius. When the enemy was forced to break out of the turn, the Harrier could reverse back towards him, throwing the nozzles aft and getting immediate maximum acceleration. Of course, the throttle setting had never been altered, and only the nozzle lever had been used. When the thrust was directed straight back again, there was no gradual build up. Acceleration was instantaneous…. If the pilot did it correctly, he entrapped air on top of the wing, ending up with what they termed a “fully-blown” wing. That, said the Marines, was how they were turning circles faster than the designers believed the aerodynamically capable of. … They were aviators of the old school who pointed to the Harrier’s loss of energy when the nozzles went down. What they ignored was that fighter pilots had always given up energy in the hard break maneuver with thrust off, brakes out, trying to force an overshoot.”
It appears that you are in the same rut as the old school aviators who “could not accept that the Harrier offered them that same capability, only magnified many times.” In addition, you do not address the underlying point, which is that this technology derived from the Harrier and was carried forward because of Air-to-air successes of its implementation.
>The answer to the rest of these questions is that the F-22 vectored thrust is derived from the same principal of vector mechanics
***That appears to be a slippery acknowledgement of the Harrier’s role in the derivation of this technology. You’re answering the question without addressing the issue, beating around the bush. The reason why any of this was being looked at was because of the effectiveness of VIFFing, that capability unique to the Harrier which you claim is not a “magic move”. If it was so effective in the Harrier, how can you claim it doesn’t have a magic move? The Harrier without VIFF lost to a T38 every time, but using VIFF it attains a kill ratio of 10:1 against your F14 in combat exercises.
> with a totally different application. The reason Harrier type vectoring is such a nonstarter is the complex nature of four moveable nozzles compared to two,
***That confirms my position that the cancelled P.1154 (supersonic Harrier) project would have been a superior fighter platform compared to the current generation, and perhaps even hold its own against the next generation except in stealth. That was a hugh mistake – the Brits could have owned the market for supersonic STOVL fighters 30 years ago.
>structural loading and fatigue issues, and dash performance issues since fighters like to be able to go fast and that means afterburner.
***Using afterburners in dogfights is often a bad idea, because of the ease of takedown by a heat-seeking missile, one of the reasons why the Raptor is aiming for sustained supersonic performance without burners.
The Raptor vectored thrust isn't supposed to produce a magic move it is supposed to provide sustained maximum performance.
***Fair enough, but where did vectored thrust come from? It came from that magic move the Harrier has that you claim it doesn’t have, with resulting kill ratios to bear out the fact.
>The reason I thought this was funny was because that may have worked against plume tracking IR missiles, but not against the average threat on the street today. The threat IR missiles produced today look at a different section of the IR spectrum in order to track skin heat and the heat in the engine section of the aircraft. This is done by using different detecting materials which pick up a different wavelength of energy. Within the next 10 years I would suspect that threat nations will be producing an imaging IR array detector like the AIM-9X has. It not only tracks skin heat, but builds an image of the target and uses its brain to say "hey, that's and airplane" or "hey, that's a flare, go after the airplane shaped target."
***Well, it looks like it’s my turn for ROTFLMAO. That is one interesting standard that you are holding up the Harrier to. An aircraft that’s been around for 30 years doesn’t measure up to a threat that MIGHT happen 10 years from now. That’s a little bit like F4 pilots laughing at P51 guys for using a little bit of flap deflection during ACM for an added advantage in maneuverability, especially considering the poor Kill Ratio attained in Vietnam as compared to the P51 pilots in WWII. The poor Vietnam Kill Ratio was the reason why the Top Gun program was started in the first place. Using that standard, the Harrier is not a good dogfighter versus a next generation fighter because the projected kill ratio of the JSF is supposed to be 20:1. Of course, using that same standard, the projected kill ratio against the F15 would be 3X higher, since the Harrier has a 3:1kill ratio against it. Oh, and the F14 might lose out at 200:1. Using your standard, maybe the Harrier is not a good dogfighter, and the F14 isn’t worth the jet fuel poured into it, but yet that doesn’t stop you from jumping into the cockpit. It appears that when you say, “the Harrier is not a good dogfighter”, you are using a Clintonian definition of the word “IS”.
To repeat, the more I tango with you the more I’m reminded of story of the guy who claimed to have wrestled a Grizzly bear. His cohorts checked on his story and found that what he wrestled was a one-eyed, de-clawed, de-fanged Grizzly. His story just didn’t add up, and your posts continue to fail the smell test. I’m afraid I’m operating at the edge of my radar in terms of time, wherewithal, discernment and knowledge – especially since you continue to be so selective about which questions you’ll answer. You’re working off odd definitions and strange standards against known facts. I’m going to have to leave it to the Aviation ping list to weigh in on your credibility.
Errr???...diagramming quickly...Thanks, Guys! :^)
***I may be revealing how dense I am, but I just don't get it. What does "diagramming quickly" mean?
I don't know what happened to Pukin Dog. Hopefully it's just temporary.
Try reading the post again. TODAY's threat tracks (and actually for the last decade) tracks skin heat and engine section heat. When I mentioned the AIM-9X it was to illustrate that the situation is only going to get worse. Basically this "hiding one's heat signature" would not have been effective for the past decade. Plus why would a pilot of a non-afterburning aircraft worry about doing this when deployment of flares would be much more effective.
To repeat, the more I tango with you the more I’m reminded of story of the guy who claimed to have wrestled a Grizzly bear. His cohorts checked on his story and found that what he wrestled was a one-eyed, de-clawed, de-fanged Grizzly. His story just didn’t add up, and your posts continue to fail the smell test. I’m afraid I’m operating at the edge of my radar in terms of time, wherewithal, discernment and knowledge – especially since you continue to be so selective about which questions you’ll answer. You’re working off odd definitions and strange standards against known facts. I’m going to have to leave it to the Aviation ping list to weigh in on your credibility.
I don't really see it that way at all. I look at your posts like the "annoying man." The "annoying man" is the self educated expert on aircraft who learned everything he knows from the internet, but has zero experience. He often shows up at airshows while you are standing next to your aircraft on display and lectures you about the "finer points" of ACM which he learned from watching "Top Gun" until the tape broke.
I've tried to offer my professional insight, but have obviously made the mistake of trying to educate someone with a V/STOL fetish.
Wrong again. Using afterburner when the opponents sensor nose or weapons are coming to bear is a bad idea. Not using afterburner at all, while engaged, is dumb. Of course you won't believe this because you read something different in a book entitled Harriers are Great and Everybody Else Sucks.
To me, the AV-8 is basically just fun to watch at airshows. That's about it. Given its lack of a fuel load, it basically can only bring one bomb to the table and even then, hope that no one on the ground with a BB gun gets lucky. And for air to air, you have one advantage but if you use it, it costs you all of your energy and leaves you a sitting duck.
Sure is fun to watch at airshows, though...
The Harrier is not much of a dogfighter.
I agree with USNBandit. The Harrier is a technical exercise that became operational, a computer video game made real in aluminum and steel. Nothing more. It is interesting, has a sexy profile, plan form and fantasy potential, but that's it. It's a concept, not a weapons system.
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. I'm pinging them to give them the opportunity to validate or refute what USNBandit has been trying to help you understand.
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. Neither is its air to air capability. In short, you really do have no idea what you are talking about. I would like to believe that the fact that neither the RAF nor USMC considers the Harrier a primary air defense asset to be strong indicator that maybe your assessment of it is not accurate. Certainly USNBandit has done his able best to set you straight. But rather than listening to him, you reported him to Jim Robinson as being a fraud. 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. 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. Despite the best anecdotes you can Google on the web.
Props to my peeps.
Bump to read the Kevin Omalley/USNBandit crossfire when I have more time.
>>The answer is that they didn't feel safe moving their carrier close enough to establish air superiority over the islands.<<
Actually, it was the threat of subs and the AAA threat, not an AA threat.
>> The Harrier holds its own against most of the other modern jet planes because of its maneuverability.<<
Ahhh. . . .not even close.
I will acknowledge the sub threat. I didn't mean to imply an AA threat affected the carrier positioning. I meant the Air to Surface threat like Exocet.
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.