Trident or Aircraft Carriers or JSF

[scorza]

With the chancellor's announcement that the proposed Trident replacement must be paid for out of the MOD budget (as opposed to some sort of central government fund), it's looking increasing likely that we won't be able to have all three of the above big defence projects.

Pure speculation, but let's assume we can only afford one, which one is the most important and therefore should be saved? Personally I reckon the Aircraft Carriers, I reckon that'll be better for British jobs and we'll just have to make do with Harriers.

 

[scorza]

irrelevant if thats the case then the aircraft carriers have already won as the steels been cut and one is in the process of being constructed I think. And the JSF is part of the Queen Elizabeth i.e. its the whole point of (at least one...) of the new aircraft carriers.

Steel can be re-cast, contracts can be cancelled, I'd be very surprised if the contract to build the carriers didn't have get-out clauses for each party. If nothing else the government could offer to pay the companies involved not to build the carriers, if the value of not building exceeds the value of building them then they will accept.

 

[scorza]

Sure, and have a dozen or so different political agendas pulling in a dozen different dirrections. A world class carrier group that never leaves port......

Sounds good to me, if only our armed forces had stayed at home instead of going to Iraq.

 

[scorza]

I say we need both and get a more efficient NHS system, or part funded by the private sector.

The NHS is already the most efficient health service in the world.

 

[scorza]

We need to unify the political agenda too!

Which we're well on the way to doing, we even have a European foreign minister now (who is British incidentally). I don't see a combined EU military as being as far-fetched as it was, especially as all our EU partners are looking to cut public spending as well - military integration is an obvious way of doing that.

 

[scorza]

ofc they will remember WW1 (last 6 months of the war) or WW2 (when they got bombed by Japan amd Germany declared war on the US).

More importantly, remember Suez when they stabbed us in the back?

 

[scorza]

BTW aircraft carrier = modern navy; not having an aircraft carrier is like having no navy.

Your analysis is correct but once upon a time Dreadnaught-class battleships = modern navy, until it became clear how devastating air power could be against traditional navies.

I think that in this new age of austerity and terror, we need navies to be cheaper and more effective - building bigger and bigger aircraft carriers is getting too expensive, just as building bigger and bigger battleships was in the '30s. Maybe the future isn't large aircraft carriers flying expensive super-sonic jets, but drones and missiles launched from smaller, cheaper vessels - maybe even subs, or something else entirely that hasn't been thought of yet.

 

[scorza]

Thank God someone has made this point.

I would also point out that Cruise missiles are NOT a viable deterrent. They have a much shorter range, and would need the launching submarine to be somewhere off the coast of most target nations. In fact they probably couldn't reach the interior of large countries. They also take much longer to reach the target, long enough in fact for the leadership of a target nation to have the possibility of escape.

Also they are vulnerable to interception.

Anyone who thinks they can replace SLBM's (Lib Dem's, i'm looking at you) need to do their homework. Either that, or they are hoping other people don't do theirs.

I don't think anyone in the LibDems has said they think Trident isn't anything but the best solution for nuclear device delivery, their objection is mainly along the lines of:

a) can we afford a gold plated solution? We can still be a nuclear power without Trident, hopefully retain our seat on the SC, and we probably and hopefully will never have to use them anyway
b) idealogical reasons e.g. Trident replacement might be against Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

 

[scorza]

Well yes, but going purely from tech etc, we are getting seriously old. Maybe crap was a bit of a strong word, but they sure as hell are not half of what they should be.

Maybe it's because we've been spending the defence budget on projects like Type 45, Eurofighter, Astute and ignoring the unfashionable, unsexy part of the armed forces - the infantry.

 

[scorza]

I don't think that Biohazard is belittling the Country exactly, I disagree with his stance on a nuclear deterrent but each to their own.

The problem with these kind of threads is the 'top trumps' attitude people use to compare.

We as a nation are and never have been in a position to have an enormous Armed Services (with the exception of the Navy during the height of the British Empire, although our Army was limited to expeditionary forces and conscription when neccessary), we make up for our lack of manpower with training and specialisation, at which we are the best in the world to this day.

The Royal Marines, for example, are often compared to the US Marine Corps and yet they are not even remotely the same, not in numbers (9000 RM to 250,000 USMC) or in specialist training.

It is time some of us stopped comparing and looked at the reality of the UK Armed Forces and how respected they are Globally, I have 17 years experience in the RM and we have trained everyone from US Navy Seals to Israeli IDF and Iraqi Security Forces. There is a reason for that, We are the best at what we do and we should be proud of that at least.

I asked this question before in SC and didn't receive a satisfactory answer; if the RM and British Army are the best in the world, why are the Taliban being so effective against them? If it's only because of IED's (I prefer to call them land mines) then why aren't they adequately prepared for that particular tactic being used against them? What is the use of having the best troops in the world if they can't actually win wars?

I appreciate that's a difficult question, especially with our troops still fighting and dying in Afghanistan, but nevertheless I think it needs to be asked and addressed if we're going to meet the 2015 deadline.

 

[scorza]

I'll let a former serving answer you thoroughly, but come on - it hardly takes a brain to figure out why IED's are so effective. Troops need to patrol. Think about it....

But this is what I'm asking, there's nothing new about land mines - why were we so unprepared for their use against us in Afghanistan? We were still rolling around in Land Rover Snatches until recently - doesn't matter how good your troops are if you give them crap, outdated equipment. As far as I can tell from what I've seen on TV, anti-land mine technology still consists of one guy walking out front with a metal detector - surely there's room for some innovation here?

Also, am I right in thinking that IEDs weren't really used in Afghanistan until they proved to be very effective against coalition forces in Iraq?