Sea Viper

 https://www.navylookout.com/from-sea-dart-to-sea-viper-area-air-defence-for-the-royal-navy/

Sonar scans

 Interesting 3d sonar scans from the Falklands wrecks.

https://www.royalnavy.mod.uk/news-and-latest-activity/news/2017/november/03/171103-enterprise-scans-hms-coventry

The carriers

We are going to struggle to run two carriers, who knew?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-53186611

The NAO report:

https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/007678-001-Carrier-Strike-preparing-for-deployment.pdf

Prince of Wales arrives

The HMS Price of Wales has arrived in Portsmouth.  It will be interesting to see what happens with this one, my feeling is we will barely ever be able to get enough aircraft on Queen Elisabeth to make it cost effective:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hampshire-50445695

Royal Navy size

Good news article about the strength of the Royal Navy - although hardly a state secret what has happened.

https://news.sky.com/story/size-of-royal-navys-warship-fleet-is-pathetic-says-chairman-of-defence-select-committee-11771371

Tornado retirement

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-47291557

A new era? HMS Queen Elisabeth F-35 landing

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-45687169/hms-queen-elizabeth-fighter-jets-take-off-and-land-for-first-time

The Carriers

A long read about the Navy's new carriers:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/UK_aircraft_carriers

Nuclear propulsion

Interesting history of nuclear propulsion in missiles:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/03/best-bad-idea-ever-why-putins-nuclear-powered-missile-is-possible-and-awful/

Carrier arrives at Portsmouth

Great piece of engineering, crazy that we have two of these white elephants ordered in the care free Blair years:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-hampshire-40936075/the-31bn-hms-queen-elizabeth-arrives-off-isle-of-wight

A drone landed on it up in Scotland - asymetric threats anyone?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-scotland-40910090/drone-films-giant-carrier-before-landing-on-deck-at-invergordon

Carrier sea trials

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-40402153

Royal Navy retire Harpoon

Interesting article on the retirement of Harpoon from the Navy.

http://arstechnica.co.uk/cars/2016/11/royal-navy-retiring-anti-ship-missiles/

And covered by The Register:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/16/royal_navy_harpoon_missile_2018_withdrawal_no_replacement/

Type 45 review

I have always wanted to find time to read a national audit office report particularly on our defence industry.  They are surprisingly accessible this one is about the Type 45:

http://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/0809295.pdf

Building any sort of warship is an expensive exercise and the NAO are looking at cost overruns and how they could be mitigated.  The government is always looking to secure "hi-tech" jobs as well as provide a capability.  They generally achieve both but at greater cost.

These are really expensive warships, and Britain only ended up buying 6 of the planned 12.  Each ship is just over £1bn.  This buys the UK a "state of the art" air defence capability.

Some of the claims feel a little over stretched, a lot of the time making you feel the need to know that one ship is more capable then many Type 42 put together.

The problem lies in that with two aircraft carriers on the way, only one would be able to be at sea with 2 or 3 Type 45's as escort.  We've bought an expensive capability and too little of it to be useful for our constrained budget.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_45_destroyer#Propulsion

Articles on compromised carriers

These are old articles but give an interesting overview on the poor decision making for the sake of British jobs when it comes to defence.  Yes we really are building aircraft carriers where we will never be able to afford a full complement of planes!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/06/defence_committee_carrier_badness/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/10/f35_u_turn_idiocy/

David Cameron was stating that we have the fifth largest defence budget in the world.  It does us no good when we get such terrible value for money!  Companies like BAe have the gun to the head of the government over defence jobs and extract the maximum amount of money for it.  We often end up with over priced equipment that is years late.

Type 26 initial investment announced

Initial investment announced for Type 26.
 
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-business-31554494

Always interesting to see how this works, in some ways BAE have the government over a barrel - in order to safeguard British jobs.  So the question of is this the most effective capability often comes a distant second.

As with the Type 45 I expect the eventual number of ships will be much reduced as costs spiral (as they are bound to on a complex project which are often optimistically budgeted).

UK Carriers

Lots of news in the last couple of weeks about the first of the new UK carriers.  Although it is a big achievement to build such vessels - so much has been compromised that their effective usefulness has been limited.  Here is a good article from back in January about some of those compromises:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/06/defence_committee_carrier_badness/

Christopher Booker has a good article in the Telegraph today about the history of some of the big design decisions for the carriers:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/defence/10962798/Its-thanks-to-the-EU-weve-got-HMS-White-Elephant.html

The list is pretty big, a few that stand out:

1. Not nuclear powered, the carrier(s) will not have enough tanker support from the Navy.
2. Ski jump to avoid having to install catapults - now only one type of aircraft can be flown, the F35, which itself is in development trouble.  Ignoring of the electric catapult option.
3. Not enough escort ships to support a single carrier - where-ever it goes most of the Navy will have to follow.  There are only 6 Type 45's.

Carriers back to VSTOL

Well the U turn on the strike aircraft has been U turned. We are back to the VSTOL variant of the F35, which means less payload, less range, less strike capability. Actually we might not be able to operate in hot environments!

It gets us two things some cost savings (which I think you can immediately write off as there will be further cost overruns), and maybe a faster delivery.

Meanwhile our Navy pilots are training in America to keep skills alive, in the current day F-18. Why don't we structure the contract to have these from day one on the carrier and only buy into F35 when America has got it working!

At this rate we are going to end up with an expensive BaE carrier, with no inter-operability with the US - with which we can draw up to some danger spot and pretend to launch stealth aircraft from!

As always Lewis Page has a good analysis of the self interested parties involved in this kind of decision making:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/10/f35_u_turn_idiocy/

Harrier Purchase

The Royal Navy scrapped Harriers have been sold for spares to the US marines. It was always bit short sighted to scrap these aircraft (even if it made sense to cut back on Ark Royal, and keep the aircraft just in case they needed quick deployment). As always Lewis Page sums up the UK government myopia: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/15/harriers_saved/

MOD waste targeted

At long last targeting waste in the MOD:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-13923042

The problem would be where to start, for the money we spend we should have a balanced capable set of services - but we don't. A few things I'd like:

1. Buy best of breed proven solutions and license them for manufacture in the UK. That both gets something useful and solves the defence providing jobs problem.

2. Rein BAe in over cost overruns, the shareholders should share some of the burden.

3. Faster equipment procurement for things we need right now. Clearly where practical, but there is not point having focus groups trying to predict the need for the next 50 years, some things especially troop related can be reacted to rather than planned for.

HMS Invincible scrapyard

Shot of HMS Invincible being scrapped:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-13778654

So the end of an era, the veteran ship is no more. I'm surprised the breaking happened overseas, as the UK has some scrap specialism (thinking of the French carrier that was scrapped here):

http://dontgetdemoralised.blogspot.com/2009/02/clemenceau-at-breakers-yard.html

Maybe we only specialise in the more toxic jobs, Invincible probably would not have had too much of that.