Ministry of Defence's F-35 blunder: £57B and counting

Britain's Ministry of Defence (MoD) is being criticized for undermining its F-35 stealth fighter program through years of short-term budget decisions that have increased long-term costs and left the fleet understrength and undercapable. A scathing report from Parliament's Public Accounts Committee (PAC) highlights "significant …

[Anonymous Coward]

Again why beancouters

Do not have a bloody clue

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Again why beancouters

This is not just the bean counters. This is also likely to be because of lack of / confusing policy from the Torys.

The F35. The turd that keeps on smelling.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Again why beancouters

And now a turd that's under the control of a non-trustworthy nation.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Again why beancouters

That's on the US for selling it to you.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Again why beancouters

Actually on us for being stupid enough to drink the kool-aid and buy the bloody thing!

[Charlie Clark]

Re: Again why beancouters

Yes, the whole policy was a mess from start to finish because it was clear that the desired capability could not be funded. So, the decision was taken to try and buy it piecemeal.

IIRC the decision was to buy the aircraft carriers but initially with no aircraft… It would have been better to delay the whole thing.

And the F35 was never really suitable for UK and NATO's expected area of deployment – though we were all still full in on the "war on terror" at the time. The F35 suits America's need to project power around the world; a need which is as much psychological as it is strategic which is why the costs are always allowed to explode. Blighty hasn't had the need nor the ability to do this since the end of the empire in the 1960s.

Russia's war in Ukraine, and Trump's inability to understand how the rules-based order benefits the US but requires allies to enforce, have given Europe the chance to rethink its defence needs and procurement. Rafales and Gripens along with Ukrainian drones and missiles make a lot more sense for a small, densely populated continent with possibly at least one aggressive neighbour.

[Like a badger]

Re: Again why beancouters

We might hope that the British bunglement would now realise that buying all their key equipment from Yank suppliers was a stupid, stupid, stupid idea, and think about how they're going to meet future defence asset needs either domestically or as a joint European effort. Then again, I know that's a forlorn hope.

[alain williams]

Re: Again why beancouters

buying all their key equipment from Yank suppliers was a stupid, stupid, stupid idea

Fortunately we have more Eurofighters than F-35, but less from the USA is good, even more so since the coming of the orange one.

[I ain't Spartacus]

Re: Again why beancouters

We might hope that the British bunglement would now realise that buying all their key equipment from Yank suppliers was a stupid, stupid, stupid idea

Like a badger,

What was your alternative? We should criticise politicians when they fuck up, but also recognise when they have to decide between imperfect choices.

Nobody else in Europe was willing to invest in a 5th gen fighter, and we didn't have the buget to pay for it on our own, while also having to pay out for updating Typhoon. Often with very little help from the Germans.

So we joined F-35, which was designed to be a very NATO project, in that it's not actually a US aircraft because there are bits of it only made in the UK, and other partner countries. But as the only tier 1 partner (who put in R&D cash) we got 15-18% of the workshare, so far on less than 5% of the orders. The problem is much more that it's a Lockheed Martin project, and they've made a massive horlicks of the software. The engine problems aren't helping either. But even with minimal European initial investment, more enlightened past US leadership got other NATO countries onboard with a modern fighter project - which is currently the best game in town - as there's no other 5th/6th gen aircraft available for anyone to buy.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch we're also in on the ground floor with Tempest, which might be the only 6th gen game in town, if the US won't sell F-47 to anyone else. We've also learned from Typhoon and not gone with Germany, who blocked a sale of 72 Typhoon to the Saudis and another 30-odd to Turkey - that's 100 orders the Germans lost us - the Saudis having now done a deal with Trump - although the Turks may be about to buy Typhoon. But gone in with Japan and Italy.

Also realising the problem with the US, we've been Europeanising (is that a word?) our missiles for decades, in order to avoid the US. Not because of Trump, but because of ITAR. And now have a family of top tier missiles, not reliant on the US - as well as Typhoon being ITAR-free. We only use US missiles on US kit, like Apache.

Given that situation, I'm not sure what the politicians in the UK could have done differently? Other than make our own 4th gen Harrier replacement - which may have got no other sales. Our main partner on that had become the US Marines, and they would be unlikely to join a UK project, and I don't think we had the budget to solo a stealth one, even if the program would obviously have been simpler, not burdening the F-35 with a STOVL version.

[Charlie Clark]

Re: Again why beancouters

The decision to buy aircraft carriers without planes could and should have been avoided.

Fortunately, as you say, the desire to make us less dependent upon US tech has been accelerated and we might finally be seeing the necessary readjustment in the European/NATO defence industry that might lead to better kit being produced more quickly and at far lower cost, though "national interests" will repeatedly mess foul things up.

Having Finland and Sweden in NATO is major boost.

[I ain't Spartacus]

Re: Again why beancouters

The decision to buy aircraft carriers without planes could and should have been avoided.

How?

At the time this was literally impossible!

They ordered the carriers and the planes about the same time, and had to delay the carriers until the planes were ready. Admittedly we could have kept Harrier for a few years more. Should have even. On the other hand every department but the NHS got cut after the 2007 crash.

[EvilDrSmith]

Re: Again why beancouters

"At the time this was literally impossible!"

Well, ~ish.

There was no other VSTOL option apart from F35B, and given that the Royal Navy has by far more 'corporate knowledge' of maritime aviation than any other navy (the list of naval aviation firsts is nearly all the Royal Navy / Fleet Air Arm), when they said they wanted VSTOL, that is a solid basis for assuming that VSTOL was the right choice for the Royal Navy.

VSTOL meant F35B.

If they had gone for 'Cats-n-traps', there would have been three choices:

F35C - built that wasn't available at the time either.

F18 - Obsolescent, so not a sensible choice

Rafale.

So we could have ordered the carriers and the planes to fly off them, with confidence that the planes would be available on time, but only if we had adopted Rafale.

There are good reasons why we didn't do that, but strictly, it was a possible option.

[I ain't Spartacus]

Re: Again why beancouters

when they said they wanted VSTOL, that is a solid basis for assuming that VSTOL was the right choice for the Royal Navy.

EvilDrSmith,

I've read some interesting stuff on the design of the QE class. Here's a good example in the excellent Navy Lookout

They did it backwards. They wanted the ability to launch 150 sorties a day - but reduced it to 110 a day, with the ability to surge up to 150 for the odd day. That gave a 65,000 tonne ship. I think the US carriers can generate 160 a day, but that's on 90,000 tonnes+. You can get more sorties out of STOVL operations, because you can land planes more quickly.

Also, in the Falklands War there were multiple days where weather was so bad that it would be impossible to launch or land on a CATOBAR carrier.

RN studies came to the conclusion that the difference between a 40,000 and a 50,000 tonne carrier was only 10% extra in cost, but 50% extra aviation capacity. The bigger your deck, the faster you can move stuff around - and therefore the more you can launch or land at once.

We'd also selected F-35 before we selected the carrier. Or at least, made the political decision beforehand. Which I'd forgotten until looking at that article again (not read it in years). The joint Harrier program wiht the US Marines had been pretty successful.

The other problem with CATOBAR is the training requirements. The French have a huge problem with their carrier, because they can only afford one, and so it's out of service a third of the time. For most of a year during refuelling, not to mention longer major refits. Building two gives you redundency. However you then look bloody silly if both are working, but you only have a big enough air group for one. But you can't really have squadrons without ridiculous amounts of extra training that can do carrier landings, unless it's VSTOL. Hence the joint Harrier force was such a success, and they wanted that for the F-35. Now it's possible we'll end up with that anyway, get pissed off with LM and not buy any more F-35, but go Tempest for the RAF. At which point, we'll only have one air group for a carrier, plus a couple of spares plus the training aircraft to bodge an extra squadron for the second carrier. As was done in the Falklands. Although I'd still take that over buying more F-35 if LM can't sort their shit out - and then spend the rest of the cash on a few more Typhoon and many more Tempest.

[UnknownUnknown]

Re: Again why beancouters

… and bake in the VSTOL requirement hobbling capabilities by them only being useful for one type of expensive and late plane.

[EvilDrSmith]

Re: Again why beancouters

"We've also learned from Typhoon and not gone with Germany,"

That might be giving too much agency to the UK - my understanding was that the Germans choose to link up with the French on the Future Combat Air System (or SCAF, in French, but I can't remember the French spelling), and in doing so choose specifically not to be part of (at the time Anglo-Italian) Tempest.

Obviously, the usual siren voices then declared that the UK should adopt the 'European' option and give up Tempest, which being Anglo-Italian, was of course also a European option, but apparently not the right sort of European. The Anglo-Italian Tempest was to be the product of an existing partnership with a track record of Tornado and Typhoon, so an incredibly successful - technically and commercially - one; much more so than the last attempt at a collaboration involving France, who walked out of the Eurofighter / Typhoon programme and developed their own (really rather good, to be fair) Rafale.

I have always assumed that the German decision to link with France was a purely political one, made back when the NATO defence spending target of 2% was viewed with amusement by German politicians as something on par with scary monster stories to tell children.

Anyway, FCAS/SCAF seems to lurch from political/commercial disagreement to political/commercial disagreement, while still maybe being on schedule for a 2040's service entry data as planned, while Tempest seems to be making good steady (and dispute-free) progress for a service entry data of 2035, a date driven by the third partner nation - Japan, and with other nations expressing interest: Saudi appear to be seriously trying to get involved, and Sweden I believe walked away a few years ago, but on the ground of 'not at this time, but keep us informed' attitude.

[I ain't Spartacus]

Re: Again why beancouters

EvilDrSmith,

You have a point. We were going with Germany originally. FCAS/SCAF was us, Sweden, Germany, France, Spain and Italy. I think it was partly an anti-Brexit thing for France and Germany to dump us and go off with Spain - to create FCAS/SCAF. At least they said it was Brexit, but it might also be that they had a joint tank project going, which Germany was supposed to lead, and so it made sense to have the French lead the aircraft. Of course, neither has got much of anywhere so far - because they can't agree on anything.

With relief we dropped the SCAF, but that left Europe with 2 FCAS programs, and the US with 2 NGAD programs - one Air Force one Navy. Not confusing at all.

FCAS/Tempest lost Sweden because they've decided to concentrate on upgrading Gripen and building stealth CCA drones. Which may make sense for them, their threat is Russia and they don't need long range, but the simpler and easier to support in the field their aircraft are, the better. The reason that Gripen would be really good for Ukraine.

So we've got FCAS/Tempest with Italy and Japan. Plus the Saudis would like in.

SCAF/FCAS is France, Germany, Spain and now Belgium. If they don't fall out.

NGAD has become F-47.

Other NGAD became FA-XX for the US Navy, and then the rumour is the Trump administration wanted to cancel it, but Congress want to keep it going.

[Aladdin Sane]

Re: Again why beancouters

My prediction is France are going to France their way through FCAS/SCAF and Airbus D&S will buy their way into Tempest, bringing part of the tech stack from FCAS with them. Though the irony of the Luftwaffe fielding aircraft called Tornado, Typhoon and Tempest isn't lost on me.

[I ain't Spartacus]

Re: Again why beancouters

Aladdin Sane,

The Germans are apparently now publicly looking at alternatives to SCAF. But they've missed the boat. Italy, Japan and the UK have signed the Edgewing partnership - which as I understand it is the industrial partnership structure, with workshare all carved up. Obviously if someone brings more orders, they can get some work - but probably not as much as F-35, which is designed to bring new people in.

The problem with SCAF is that France aren't sharing the intellectual property. As did happen with Typhoon. For example Typhoon uses the Eurojet engine, built in Germany. Which is basically a Rolls Royce engine with some tech transfer to Germany to let them build it. Which by some accounts I've read delayed the program in order for German industry to catch up to what RR were already doing on their own. Tempest is planning to reuse many systems from Typhoon, I presume SCAF would similarly use stuff from Rafale

Whereas Mitsubishi are already an RR partner and design their own small engines, so may have stuff to bring to the party - or may just license build RR's latest design? Italy already have a lot of avionics from their own firms, plus a bunch of UK radar tech in Typhoon that may be brought across. Germany bought money to Typhoon, but also problems, and I'm not sure they had much of the tech at the start.

Take the Typhoon radar. It's needed an upgrade for years. It's fallen behind, though the old one is still decent. So we have the ECRS - European common radar system. But Germany and Spain wouldn't join and so ordered a cheaper version, using some of the underlying tech from the Leonardo UK designed ECRS Mk2 from Hensold. And Italy only joined Mk 2 in 2021. So we've got a common fighter with 4 different radars, from three different manufacturers. And the good AESA radar took ages to come to market, because nobody would join the UK in investing in it, so with lower budget it got delayed for years. If we'd all done it together, we could have had this system a decade ago.

Captor is the original. ECRS Mk0 is the early version of the AESA sold to Qatar and Kuwait (I think?). ECRS Mk1 goes to Germany and Spain. ECRS Mk2 is not just an AESA radar, but one that can do electronic attack, in the same way the F-35 radar can do - so you can use your radar to jam other people, while it's still doing radar stuff. Very shiny.

[Roo]

Re: Again why beancouters

"The Germans are apparently now publicly looking at alternatives to SCAF. But they've missed the boat. Italy, Japan and the UK have signed the Edgewing partnership - which as I understand it is the industrial partnership structure, with workshare all carved up. Obviously if someone brings more orders, they can get some work - but probably not as much as F-35, which is designed to bring new people in."

While the initial R&D might be already carved up - adding in additional manufacturers is still possible - and I would argue highly desirable for the following reasons:

1) Resilience through second sources - helpful if your plant gets burnt down by a guy who was promised $500 on Telegram in return for torching a critical bit of military manufacturing capability.

2) Proving out production transfer & scaling out - essential for ironing out problems that will inevitably crop up when you want to scale up from a dozen units a year to several hundred or even thousands a year.

3) Ramping up production (quickly).

[Robert Sneddon]

Re: Again why beancouters

Always, always remember that "Dassault" is French for "Does not play well with others".

[Like a badger]

Re: Again why beancouters

What was your alternative? We should criticise politicians when they fuck up, but also recognise when they have to decide between imperfect choices....Nobody else in Europe was willing to invest in a 5th gen fighter, and we didn't have the buget to pay for it on our own, while also having to pay out for updating Typhoon. Often with very little help from the Germans....So we joined F-35, which was designed to be a very NATO project, in that it's not actually a US aircraft because there are bits of it only made in the UK, and other partner countries. But as the only tier 1 partner (who put in R&D cash) we got 15-18% of the workshare, so far on less than 5% of the orders. The problem is much more that it's a Lockheed Martin project

The fact that we got a few trade offset deals doesn't alter the fact that the design, the specification, the software, the bulk of the airframe, the wings and the engine are all US. Even the inferior wing is down to a need to fit into the smaller USN assault carriers. The F35 is as thoroughly American as mom's apple pie and school shootings. The fact that nobody else in Europe wanted to pony up for a fifth generation strike aircraft doesn't either fully justify the "need" of the RAF or RN to buy such a hugely expensive, hugely complicated aircraft. Sweden put the Grypen into the air as a near enough sovereign project, engines excepted, France put Rafale in the air as entirely sovereign project. Eurofighter is a European assembly project, the actual development was largely BAe's EAP, the engines Rolls-Royce. It would have been eminently possible for the UK (with or without partner nations) to developed a competent 4-5 generation strike aircraft.

Given that situation, I'm not sure what the politicians in the UK could have done differently?

It was obvious for decades that the RAF would need a strike aircraft to replace Tornado (and subject to a decision on carriers, there was the FAA need). Tornado itself was of course a camel, with its heritage influenced by the far earlier cancellation of TSR-2, the bungled UK attempt to buy the US F-111, so an element of history repeating in part. Politicians and MoD ignoring future needs for many years doesn't in my book justify a shitty choice "Look, poor us, we had no choice!"

Against all probable threats the UK didn't need the claimed superiority and capability of the F35 when we ordered it, or now. Much of the pressure came from the 2010 defence review, when that friend of Russia, David Cameron decided to down size all of the military, and scrap the Harrier. At the time the plan was for the F35C, but then due to planning and estimating fuckups on the carriers we had to plump for the B. The sheer idiotic complexity and cost of asking for almost every possible capability in one aircraft was inevitably going to result in problems, and those include the fact that operational availability is shit, we don't have the maintenance crews for it, it doesn't fire any weapons we make, etc. It also contributed to the cat-less carriers, meaning there's only one choice of aircraft. Now we're compounding the F35B problem by ordering a handful of F35A which form another microfleet, and we can't even refuel the flying turd with UK assets. Maybe it's just me? Well no, Chatham House aren't impressed with the F35A either.

If politicians had their hands tied, then it was because they tied them themselves.

[I ain't Spartacus]

Re: Again why beancouters

Like a badger,

The fact that we got a few trade offset deals doesn't alter the fact that the design, the specification, the software, the bulk of the airframe, the wings and the engine are all US. Even the inferior wing is down to a need to fit into the smaller USN assault carriers.

They're not trade offsets. The rear of the fuselage is built in Lancashire. For every aircraft. We paid to get our guys into some of the design decisions and to get lots of the work. And to keep our fighter design guys in existence, so we'd still have the ability to do it in future. It costs money to keep an industrial capacity going.

Harrier had been an effective partnership with the US Marines for decades. Though initially a UK aircraft. Replacing it would also have to be a partnership, because there was no Cold War army requirement, so Harrier 3 would have had to be a Navy only project for maybe 50 aircraft. At horrendous cost.

We haven't solo-designed a fighter aircraft in decades. We have the tech and the capacity, but it would cost a huge amount of money, because we'd be the only people ordering it. So all the R&D costs of a new fighter, spread over a few tens of aircraft, instead of hundreds.

The F-35 isn't expensive. It's expensive to run, but the airframe is cheap. Due to volume of manufacture. Only the F-16 is cheaper, or top-end Western aircraft. It's also extremely capable. Which is why it keeps winning competitions amongst NATO governments to buy new aircraft. Because stealth is important. If stealth wasn't important, people wouldn't be buying it. Even if their policiticians took the short-sighted decision not to invest in it back in the 1990s and 2000s. Whereas ours did. That's the problem with most of our European allies, apart from the US (and to a lesser extent France). This forces us to operate more closely with the US in order to get capabilities that would be better done with Germany, if Germany had been willing to pull its weight in European defence in the last 30 years.

Against all probable threats the UK didn't need the claimed superiority and capability of the F35 when we ordered it

Yes we did. You're more short-sighted than the politiicans you criticise here! You don't get new military capaibilty when you need it, unless you ordered it twenty years before. That's how it works. That's why military procurement is so fucking hard. That's again, a problem with our European allies. Who often won't invest. So unless we go back to spending 5-7% of GDP on defence, we can't do this stuff alone, and have to partner up with whoever is available. With Tempest we actually had a choice. For once.

F-35 is a mostly US plane, but designed specifically by the US to be attractive to NATO allies, because the Clinton administration (and the Bush ones either side of it) wanted NATO to have stealth as well - but they weren't willing to pay for the R&D. Hence there are bits of the program not replicated in the US - so nobody totally controls it. Even if LM's software department are totally fucking it up.

It was obvious for decades that the RAF would need a strike aircraft to replace Tornado (and subject to a decision on carriers, there was the FAA need). Tornado itself was of course a camel

Indeed. The replacement for Tornado was Eurofighter. The later tranches were designed for strike. But after the severe losses Tornado took in the 1st Gulf War, it was clear that low-level bombing was no longer the best answer. And that medium level stand-off attacks with electronic warfare and/or stealth was the better way to go. Oh and Tornado was not a camel. It was a top of the range strike bomber designed for the Cold War, with a very odd Interceptor version F3 - that was actually quite good for the G-I-UK gap, but would be a lot more dubious against front-line fighters. The other replacement for Tornado was F-35 - for the stealth bit.

At the time the plan was for the F35C, but then due to planning and estimating fuckups on the carriers we had to plump for the B.

No it wasn't. The plan was always the F-35B. That's why the US were willling to partner with us, because we had the Harrier experience. The Navy requirement was for a STOVL carrier, they looked at a CATOBAR alternative and rejected it.

If we'd not gone for the F-35, then it would have probably been a CATOBAR carrier and F/A-18E. We could have also then bought E2 Hawkeye's, though the French paid €2 billion for 3 of those in 2021. So CATOBAR does have its costs - that's 2/3rds of an aircraft carrier.

The Gripen is not all that sovereign either. It uses a GE engine. The old radar was based on the Blue Vixen radar, from the Harrier, that later became the Eurofighter's CaptorE. The Gripen E may be based on an AESA update of that, similar Leonardo UK tech to ECRS - or may be something different - a quick Google wasn't clear. Much of the weapons loadout is US, apart from Meteor (joint European), IRIS-T (German) - in fact there's only one Swedish only weapon I can see, which is the RBS15 anti-ship missile. It's a good aircraft, but it's not cheap and it's not stealthy. And France's sovereign Rafale is also good, but there are only about 40 total naval versions, and they were very expensive for that reason.

This is a lot more complex than you seem to realise. And most of the decisions spring from research choices made 20-30 years ago - and industrial development choices made continuously for decades.

The one thing I agree with you on is F-35A. We shouldn't buy it. Because I don't think we should use tactical nuke gravity bombs. I think the MoD's idea of buying a mixed fleet of 7,000 missiles, from a few 2,000km ballistic missiles to a bunch of cheaper cruise missiles is a much better bet - then we keep Trident for the big stick. Plus in building a ballistic missile - we prepare the tech for if the US stop cooperating over Trident, so we can then replace that - if required.

[MachDiamond]

Re: Again why beancouters

"Nobody else in Europe was willing to invest in a 5th gen fighter, and we didn't have the buget to pay for it on our own, while also having to pay out for updating Typhoon. Often with very little help from the Germans."

It's the battle with "new shiny" syndrome. A big issue with the latest shiny is the cost of acquisition that means not many can be bought and the enormous cost/hour to fly the damn things (~$33,000/hr flight time). Most of us hope there will never be a local need for these sorts of systems and if there is, it will be a giant hit every time one is destroyed. With a high operational cost, there can't be as much training in the actual aircraft for pilots.

I find a wonderful beauty in large numbers of simple things. It's nice to have a few difficult to cultivate orchids in the garden, but a vast field of sunflowers is more satisfying to me. A large number of less expensive and simpler jet fighters can mean better pilot proficiency and an overall lower support cost since mechanics will also be able to become far more proficient.

I guess fewer and fewer people have been introduced to Mr Clarke's "Superiority" and the dangers of substituting "better" for "good enough". Replacing quantity with dubious unproven quality.

[I ain't Spartacus]

Re: Again why beancouters

A big issue with the latest shiny is the cost of acquisition that means not many can be bought

Mach Diamond,

F-35A is cheaper to buy than Typhoon, Rafale or even Gripen. Despite being more complicated and having stealth. Plus having some pretty amazing avionics - although Gripen has apparently got very good electronic warfare capabilities and Typhoon (at least for the UK and Italy) is getting ECRS mk2 - a shiny new AESA radar that can also do electronic attack. i.e. it's a radar, it's a radio, it's also a ranged jammer.

F-35 was designed to be cheap, like F-16 in order to replace it in US and NATO service. It's failed on that criteria, but it's still very cheap for the capability you get, and that's why it keeps winning purchasing competitions - despite its many flaws.

As the Russians just proved in Ukraine, mass only gets you so far. You need a mix of mass and quality, depening on what you're trying to achieve. Russia used to have a veritable mass of tanks. Now most of their tanks have been destroyed, for little gain. Similarly Russia's frontline air force had over 1,000 planes, to Ukraine's 50-odd (at least at the start of the war). Yet lacking the quality (and/or the training) to overcome Ukraine's old Soviet air defences, they had very little impact on the first year of the war. And that's before Ukraine got tooled-up with limited numbers of modern Western air defence systems - so Ukraine were rocking 30 year-old S-300s and BUK's - the sort of air defence that it took nearly a week to mostly neutralise in Iraq in 1991. Same level of tech, but with 30 year older NATO air forces. Russia's air defence kit is in general a lot newer than that, even if it's mostly upgraded versions of the same kit Ukraine has. So the threat that NATO air forces have to deal with is quite severe, and one stealth aircraft is much more likely to survive having to fly in a modern integrated air defence system, which means that 1 F-35 is more than 2 Rafales in that context, because it's likely to survive more missions. The downside being it couldn't be in two places at once. But then Rafale is, as I said, more expensive, so that's not a trade-off.

Piss-poor organisation of the spares and maintenance network for F-35 means that maintenance costs aren't dropping. And that's a bit problem, I totally agree. Higher costs to maintain stealth coatings are worth it, and were unavoidable. Engine maintenance was a totally avoidable clusterfuck. Although it should be pointed out that some of the maintenance issues are underinvestement in the spares by the very governments now complaining about the costs and delays.

[MachDiamond]

Re: Again why beancouters

"F-35A is cheaper to buy than Typhoon, Rafale or even Gripen. "

All you've done is make a list of even more jet fighters that aren't worth the money spent on them. Even at a higher price, they could still be less expensive if the operational costs are less.

The newest fighters do have better specs, but the question becomes if those specs are applicable to a given scenario or enough realistic scenarios to be worth the cost. The Hawks are always predicting conflict with the most sophisticated adversaries. The reality seems to be different with small dustups and proxy wars.

A new top-end drum kit won't make me a better drummer. It will just make me a poorer drummer. If I also have to pay a higher cost/hour to play the new drum kit for some reason, I'm not going to get more proficient than if I buy a less expensive kit that costs me very little/hour to play. I might also be able to buy several less expensive kits to have one at home, one at a rehearsal studio and another someplace else so I'm spending more time playing and less time in setup/teardown. A pilot with less advanced tools but vastly more flight time can make the best use of what they have. There will also be better availability just due to have more to begin with.

[Ganso]

Re: Again why beancouters

"We've also learned from Typhoon and not gone with Germany, who blocked a sale of 72 Typhoon to the Saudis and another 30-odd to Turkey - that's 100 orders the Germans lost us -"

If Satan himself comes cash in hand ordering a bunch of Typhoons, well why not, it's all about the money, amirite?

[Jellied Eel]

Re: Again why beancouters

Rafales and Gripens along with Ukrainian drones and missiles make a lot more sense for a small, densely populated continent with possibly at least one aggressive neighbour.

Or we just build a Eurofighter Mk2 that has the capabilities the UK & Europe wants. Europe retains and develops capabiltiies and doesn't have to wait 5+ years for a software update to launch a new missile. Potential to save billions which could be used to build our own next-gen fighter. Plus a bunch of cheaper fighters that have long endurance, lots of ammunition storage and can be used to knock down Geran-sized drones and maybe slow moving cruise missiles.

Which is also why we don't actually need Ukraine because they aren't really doing anything with drones that we couldn't do ourselves. Other than perhaps demonstrating that necessity is the mother of invention and non-traditional defence procurement and production gets bombs on the ground faster. Much the same with missiles, like the curious case of the Flamingo, which probably isn't Ukrainian and is probably overpriced. There's an ongoing fraud investigation looking at how an etertainment company connnected to Zelenksy ended up with a $1bn+ contract to produce a V1 knockoff that might cost almost as much as a Tomahawk. Which is also why it wouldn't be much use to NATO given it's too big, too heavy and too bulky to fit in any standard launch containers. It also apparently takes 15-20mins to ready for launch, making it vulnerable on the ground, and being a large, slow cruise missile, would also seem easy to intercept in the air.

What the conflict has demonstrated though is the old adage that quantity has a quality of its own, and we need the capability to produce lots of the stuff Russia is currently slinging at Ukraine, and more advanced strike missiles.

[Charlie Clark]

Re: Again why beancouters

Why the attacks on Ukraine? – the Flamingo isn't brilliant but as part of a swarm it will do its job, especially as Russia's air defence capability continues to degrade. And, as long as the US won't sell Tomahawks, is probably the only option for destroying large facilities deep inside Russia. I'd rather have these guys on our side than against us after the war. Corruption is a problem, but when I look at the US defence industry, I think it's just more institutionalised there.

Planes aren't going to stop drones – the Ukrainian interceptors are already doing this at an increasing rate. And Russia has not really upgraded its attack capability, it's just producing more of it. But at the same time, tanks and artilley production are well down and cannot be compensated by glide bombs, whatever the range. On the positive side: sausage meat production is up, which is nice.

[Jellied Eel]

Re: Again why beancouters

Why the attacks on Ukraine?

Why do you think I'm attacking Ukraine? I'm simply pointing out some of the realities on the ground, and being objective.

the Flamingo isn't brilliant but as part of a swarm it will do its job, especially as Russia's air defence capability continues to degrade.

This combines a couple of assumptions. So having enough of a strike package to create a swarm. For targets close to Russias borders, that might be possible, ie a mix of drones and Flamingos and the hope that Russia's GBAD can't spot a 12m+ missile with a 6m wingspan and a hot AI-25TL turbofan strapped on top, and preferentially target that. The potential range of 3,000km has been hyped, but also makes creating a swarm harder. So decoys that can keep up, or enough Flamingos to hope they get through and aren't shot down en route. Apparently 3 were fired into Crimea, 2 were shot down, one landed near its target but despite having a 1,000kg warhead, didn't appear to do much damage.

So maybe you decide to just launch 20 Flamingos and hope one makes it. So then all you need to do is move 20 very large missiles to launch sites, and hope those movements aren't detected, or movements can't be tracked back to storage sites, or manufacturing locations. Range might help, so launch from deep in western Ukraine where Russia's ISR isn't as strong. But then Russia has been striking industrial buildings where production or storage of weapons might be located.

And you're assuming Russia's GBAD is being degraded rather than Ukraines. Which is a bit of a catch-22 because without long range missiles, Ukraine can't do SEAD and try to destroy air defences. The threat does mean Russia needs to produce and install more GBAD to protect locations inside Russia, but then it's busy churning out systems like their Pantsir, which it seems to be able to do faster and for a lot less money than Patriots or IRIS-T.

And, as long as the US won't sell Tomahawks, is probably the only option for destroying large facilities deep inside Russia.

If Ukraine is churning out 50 Flamingos a month, then why does it need Tomahawks? Especially as it (we) can't afford them and there aren't many ground-based launchers available. Plus the escalatory risks, ie Ukraine wouldn't be able to launch Tomahawks without US/NATO help. If Ukraine unilaterally decides to yeet Flamingos at the Kremlin, then that would be their decision and they'd face the consequences.

Planes aren't going to stop drones – the Ukrainian interceptors are already doing this at an increasing rate. And Russia has not really upgraded its attack capability, it's just producing more of it.

Planes are stopping drones, ie F-16s over both Ukraine and Poland, and Ukraine has also got some gun equipped light aircraft to shoot down drones. Russia has also apparently upgraded both their drones and missiles to make them harder to intercept. And it's possible (or probable) that intercept rates are decreasing.. plus a lot of those claims are rather questionable anyway, unless Ukraine is counting ground interceptions as successes. But this is also part of the capability question. So it's questionable if sending F-35s to intercept Geran-style drones with very expensive missiles makes sense, compared to having cheaper aircraft to do that role.

But at the same time, tanks and artilley production are well down and cannot be compensated by glide bombs, whatever the range.

That's a theory unsupported by evidence. Tanks are still being produced, Russia still has a clear artillery advantage. And glide bombs are compensating, especially with the appearence of rocket-boosted FAB glide bombs dropping 250, 500 or 1000kg bombs well outside artillery range.. Which is also an F-35 question. Do we really need stealth, or an aircraft that can just carry & drop/launch a belly full of big bombs?

[EvilDrSmith]

Re: Again why beancouters

Regarding Flamingo, there was a certain amount of initial coverage, and then it's gone a bit quiet, so hard to reliable assess numbers and capability.

The reported first use on a target in Crimea was three missile fired, 1 failed to reach the target (cause unknown) one struck a building on the target site, destroying it, and one landed on the beach where target-patrol craft (including hovercraft) had been present on the pre-target imagery, so in fact, it appears two of the three reached the target and achieved some effect against the target, based on imagery made public.

On announcement, it was claimed 1 missile per day production, to increase to 200 per month by end of year. Whether that is being achieved is no more or less certain than the idea that the Russians are churning out Pantsir.

The missile is little more than a tin tube, readily made in any metal bashing facility.

The warhead is a FAB freefall bomb, of a type that is sitting unused and otherwise unusable in Ukrainian inventory.

The jet engine a proven and extensively made cheap and simple jet, which apparently has a reputation for a short service life (when used in training aircraft), so many have been replaced by longer-lasting western made versions, meaning that there are loads of the Ukrainian built version to be had globally.

Basically, this is a long range missile made from spare parts that the Ukrainians were not otherwise using.

Its big, it's moderately (not very) fast, it's not stealthy, and it flies low, but not very low (like Tomahawk does), so yes, it is relatively easy to shoot down, in theory.

It also has a 3000km range, which means that the area of Russia that the Russians now need to provide air defence to is huge.

Pantsir is good to engage to what? 20km maybe, if the terrain is suitable. Even if the Russians are churning out Pantsir, the best they can hope is to ring all their oil refineries, oil storage tanks, drone factories, etc, etc and try and defend any and every point target - and there are now huge numbers of point targets that now need to be defended.

Flamingo significantly complicates Russia's Air defence problem.

I suspect that the reason Ukraine want Tomahawk is because:

They are fighting off Russian Genocide, and want any and every viable weapon they can lay their hands on.

Tomahawk flies lower and is a more clever missile, and has a different warhead option, so it provides the Ukrainians with an improved ability to match weapon to target.

The different flight profile of Tomahawk further complicates Russian air defence.

Getting Tomahawk is also a political statement of support for Ukriane

[Jellied Eel]

Re: Again why beancouters

Flamingo significantly complicates Russia's Air defence problem.

I suspect that the reason Ukraine want Tomahawk is because:

Flamingo doesn't exist, isn't as good as claimed, or the production (ok, assembly) facilities have already been struck and destroyed. Firepoint's offices already have been. Again it's one of those cognitive dissonance issues in that if Flamingo exists and has been in production for as long as has been claimed, then it doesn't need Tomahawks. Flamingo outranges it, has a higher payload and if the payload is based around standard NATO bombs, has the same capabilties, so cluster, bunker busting or plain'ol HE. Navigation might not be as fancy as a Tomahawk, but with INS and an unspecified datalink capability, it should be good enough for government work.

But it's also the general air force & aviation problem along with layered defences. As long as Flamingos can be detected, the further it flies, the more options to intercept. Ukraine uses their F-16s for this, Russia also has interceptors that aren't really being used in this conflict, but could intercept big, slow, unstealthy missiles. NATO also needs this capability, and F-35s might not be the best solution for that job.. Especially if we've ordered 48 so far, so kind of £1bn+ to shoot down <£20K drones.. Which Russia has also been fitting cheap turbines to so they can more closely match the profile of a cruise missile. And if Russia can do this, then so can Iran, China, DPRK or even the Houthis.

Which is where we're living in interesting times because Tomahawk might be pretty much obsolete in the face of serious GBAD, and more nations or even non-nation state actors are realising that they to could build their own V1. I mean Flamingo. Or just drones..

They are fighting off Russian Genocide, and want any and every viable weapon they can lay their hands on.

Oh dear. You don't really believe that, do you? Especially when the opposite is pretty much true and Ukraine's civil war began as a result of Kiev's efforts to de-Russify Ukraine. But don't forget money. Lots and lots of money. With no receipts necessary. Some of which is circular, ie money for Ukraine goes straght into the pockets of our defence industry. But it's also a rather enormous fiscal drag with the UK facing tax increases to send money to Ukrainian oliigarchs.

Or Rutte demanding that the NATO members reduce social spending in order to send money or weapons to Ukraine. Which then makes it just a tad harder to order the next tranche of F-35's the UK is sorta committed to, replace weapons and ammunition we've given to Ukraine already and develop new stuff to fill the capability gaps that this confict has highlighted.

[Charlie Clark]

Re: Again why beancouters

Most of your strawmen can be countered by comparing attacks over the last few years: yes, Russia has improved its capacity and the capability of drones and missiles, but apart from the Gerans these are really only minor improvements. But last year strikes of around 120 drones were sufficient to overwhelm Ukrainian air defence systems. Now attacks need to be much bigger and combined to be successful, which they unfortunately are.

A year ago there were very few long range attacks by Ukraine on Russia at all. In the last six months along Russian refining capacity is down by over 20%. Where are those Pantsir systems you're talking about? Apparently not in Saratov or Nizhny Novgorod or elsewhere as Ukraine brings Russia an early Bonfire Night. And they're not sufficient in the combined attacks. Flamingos won't be used in these unless sufficient quantities are available or the relevant air defence systems are taken out. Tomahawks would be a great help.

Russian tanks are still mainly refurbished antiques and, along with artillery systems increasingly rare at the front: Russia used to have more than 10:1 advantage. But it deployed them poorly without adequate protection. Ukraine continues to use its much smaller resources at the front successfully in combined arms attacks, with drones augmenting the air forces.

Prighozhin and his murderers could see Chasiv Yar from the smouldering ruins of Bakhmut in early 2023. If he was alive today he'd still see the Ukrainian flag over Chasiv Yar.

Glide bombs are great at destroying things but, given the range now required to launch them, simply cannot provide the same level of attack support as artilley which is why Putin is sending the mobiks to their deaths in a gruesome slow motion parody of World War 2. Of course, he doesn't want them to return alive anyway.

[Jellied Eel]

Re: Again why beancouters

But last year strikes of around 120 drones were sufficient to overwhelm Ukrainian air defence systems. Now attacks need to be much bigger and combined to be successful, which they unfortunately are.

If you look at the maps Ukraine puts out, which aren't reliable but provide some clue.. Russia is striking targets all across Ukraine. Which is much the same as Russia's problem would be/is, ie trying to defend multiple targets. It's also using large strikes more frequently, which will drain air defences faster.

Russian tanks are still mainly refurbished antiques and, along with artillery systems increasingly rare at the front:

You should probably stop watching Denys. Reports from Ukrainians on the front say that artillery isn''t slowing down, but their supplies of shells is. Which is probably a drone effect, ie Russia hiiting anything that moves towards the front line meaning ammunition isn't getting through. Tanks are a more interesting question because Russia is still churning out new tanks, but where are they going? If you look at reports from analysts like RUSI, they estimate that production exceeds replacement rate and Russia's tank production still exceeds the entirety of NATO. Plus drones again, so when tanks do appear on the battefield, they tend to get swarmed and don't last long.

Glide bombs are great at destroying things but, given the range now required to launch them, simply cannot provide the same level of attack support as artilley which is why Putin is sending the mobiks to their deaths in a gruesome slow motion parody of World War 2. Of course, he doesn't want them to return alive anyway.

You really need to stop watching Denys. Glide bombs have been hitting targets 80km+ away, which is well outside of artillery range. You also seem to be projecting. Sirsky is busily stripping units from elsewhere on the front lines to try and save Pokrovsk. Other Ukrainian commanders are pointing out that Bakhmut2.0 probably isn't a good idea and Russia will just attack at points that Sirsky has weakened for a PR exercise.. Which is probably a last roll of the dice for Sirsky and if/when Pokrovsk falls, so will Sirsky.

[Charlie Clark]

Re: Again why beancouters

Denys? You mean Davydov? I haven't watched him for years because of his tendency to exaggerate. Still, I think he does a good job of making the day to say slaughther comprehensible for many. And he hates Putin, so what's not to like?

I don't think anyone really knows what's going on in Pokrovsk. Maxim Tucker for The TImes has given some excellent and sobering reports from his visits to the front: no reason for either side to cheer, but the Russians are having by far the worst of it. Russian doctrine still seems to be time and numbers will win but they've very little to show for it, not least because the campagin doesn't really compare with their historical ones. Well, except maybe Afghanistan and Chechyna.

Still, I agree that Pokrovsk, or anywhere else, should not be held at all cost. Defensive lines behind must be prepared. And no commander, not even Budanov, is indespensable. But Putin got rid of probably his most competent (and possibly brutal) commander when he sacked Surovkin. But Gerasimov and Shoigu are still there as is probably Lapin. Still, why bother with good commanders when the tactics are always the same: move forward slowly and try not to die? Putin, like Trump, rewards only loyalty.

There are problems with the Ukrainian leadership, as we all saw in the summer, but nothing compared to the incompetence,corruption and nepotism in Russia.

[Jellied Eel]

Re: Again why beancouters

I don't think anyone really knows what's going on in Pokrovsk. Maxim Tucker for The TImes has given some excellent and sobering reports from his visits to the front: no reason for either side to cheer, but the Russians are having by far the worst of it. Russian doctrine still seems to be time and numbers will win but they've very little to show for it, not least because the campagin doesn't really compare with their historical ones.

It's why it's important to try and take a balanced, objective view with multiple sources. Sadly our 'leaders' don't agree, and think they can control the narrative via censorship and propaganda. Yesterday, Zelensky said everything is fine in Pokrovsk, today, the consensus amongst the military mappers seems to be the majority of the city has been captured. There are also videos of Russian soldiers clearing other towns in the cauldron unopposed, which might mean Ukraine has managed to evacuate some of their forces.

I think you're also making the mistake of viewing doctrine through a propaganda lens. There are many claims of tens of thousands of Russian casualties, but very little evidence to substantiate this. If true, then Russia ran out of soldiers a couple of years ago, so is no longer an existential threat to Brussels. Or the claims are false, hence the desperation for a cease-fire because Ukraine is close to collapse. But also 'analysts' tend to confuse Soviet and Russian doctrine, and Russia has been developing their tactics. There are no 'meat wave' attacks, instead Russia uses their DRG small teams to probe and exploit weaknesses. Which has had some bad consequences, like a Ukrainian commander pleading for forces to take security seriously after an artillery crew were slaughtered 'like kittens' by a DRG team that had got through the UAF lines.

You could also argue that this campaign does pretty much match historical campaigns. Like Germany & Ukraine v Soviets during WW2, and it seems to be going much the same way. Germany felt secure enough in Ukraine for this-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werwolf_(Wehrmacht_headquarters)

and another large camp built for Himmler nearby, but then the Soviets & Soviet-aligned Ukrainians demonstrated that they were living in a false sense of security. Kursk had much the same outcome of WW2 and it remains to be seen if Russia wants to repeat the capture of Odessa. But biggest mistake is assuming this is a war for territory rather than the stated attrition. Then if you look at what Russia is doing, it's bouncing the rubble with artillery, rockets and bombs, then advancing.. Which is also why many of the casualty estimates are implausible.

And no commander, not even Budanov, is indespensable.

This is also shades of WW2 with a certain Austrian nutjob who surrounded himself with yes-men and ignored the advice of other commanders. Which might also be why Russia is allowing Zelensky to live. I think Budanov might be in trouble, especially if the mysterious Blackhawk failed. Which is also a drone thing given atack drones like Anduril's Anvil could probably take out a helicopter just as easily as it could a drone.

But Putin got rid of probably his most competent (and possibly brutal) commander when he sacked Surovkin. But Gerasimov and Shoigu are still there as is probably Lapin. Still, why bother with good commanders when the tactics are always the same: move forward slowly and try not to die? Putin, like Trump, rewards only loyalty.

Surovikin is still around and is in charge of all the CIS air defences. I think you're again making the mistake of using Ukrainian optics. Yes, Surovkin has a reputation for getting the job done. Thus far, the SMO has been about attrition, conserving Russian forces and minimising Ukrainian civilian casualties.. Which you might find hard to believe, but compare casualties for this conflict compared to our adventures in Libya, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan etc. Putin, unlike Trump doesn't have the same fragile ego. But there's growing pressure to finish the SMO, especially after increased attacks into Russia.. So if we keep escalating, Putin could always swap out Gerasimov or Shoigu and Surovikin and give General Armageddon orders to finish it.

But back to the story.. how would F-35s fit into a campaign like the SMO, especially if they aren't actually that stealthy? Then perhaps there might be better systems we could be investing our money into.

[EvilDrSmith]

Re: Again why beancouters

"Thus far, the SMO has been about attrition, conserving Russian forces and minimising Ukrainian civilian casualties."

Impressive, three untrue statements in one sixteen word sentence.

The 3-day SMO (I know you don't like it when people call it that...ODHSNM) was supposed to see all significant Ukrainian resistance overcome in three days, with the plan allowing for it to take up to ten days. It was not about attrition, it was Putin and the Russian army trying to do Shock and Awe; trying to achieve a rapid victory that was done-and-dusted before anyone could effectively intervene.

That's why we saw the (supposed) best of the Russian army, with the latest, most modern equipment, charging down the roads towards Kyiv and Kharkov and Odessa with no proper flank protection, on the narrowest of fronts, and being decimated by Ukrainian territorials armed with NLAW as a result.

If the 3 day SMO had been about attrition, the Russian drive towards Kyiv would not have had to be abandoned after 4 or so weeks, when the army ran out of food and fuel and tires and etc, with the Russians gifting vast stocks of their latest military equipment to the opponent that they were supposed to be attriting (I'm sure that you remember the images of Ukrainian farm tractors hauling off T90's and SAM systems etc - the rest of us do).

While I suspect that you'll declare that the Russians have only suffered 3 casualties - one for each day of the SMO - looking at a range of sources and assessments, including some official Russian government data, it seems near enough certain that Russian casualties passed the 1 million mark this summer just gone. Not withstanding the comment from the person that isn't Spartacus, below, who has seen data suggesting that Russian casualty ratios are holding around the typical 20th Century mark of 1 dead per 3 wounded, there are other credible assessments that suggest that's the best case, and the worst case is closer to 2:3. Unlike the Ukrainians, who are clearly making significant efforts to recover and treat their wounded, Russian casualty evacuation and front line medical care is conspicuous by its absence. If what we have seen is the Russians conserving their manpower, I suspect the Ukrainians would look forward to the Russians become spendthrift with it.

As for you third assertion - well, while your first two comments make you look comic (don't worry, we are laughing at you, not with you), your third is just vile.

The Russians are engaged on systematic murder of Ukrainian civilians. Missile/drone strikes are targeting Ukrainian cities indiscriminately. The Russian practice of 'Drone Safaris' is well documented, whereby they are practicing drone attacks by targeting civilians going about their normal lives (and are proud that they are doing this, posting video on social media). And of course, post the forced retreat of the Russian army from Kyiv, we all saw the extensive war crimes committed by the Russian army at Bucha and elsewhere. The Russians are engaged in systematic war crimes and genocide. They are deliberately seeking to inflict civilian casualties.

[Zolko]

Re: Again why beancouters

The 3-day SMO (I know you don't like it when people call it that...ODHSNM) was supposed to see all significant Ukrainian resistance overcome in three days

and exactly that happened. Russia entered Ukraine as a troll into a virgin, and they wanted to use that demonstration of force to convince NATO to stop meddling in Ukraine. Similarly to the Cuban crisis, do you remember that ? Then, when the Istanbul negotiations started, 2 weeks later, Russia retreated from some areas to show their goodwill and end the war (SMO, sorry), but the UK prime minister Brian Johnson torpedoed that accord as is documented everywhere, and that's the pojnt when the SMO transformed into the current war.

So the entire fault of the current slaughtering of Ukrainian men in uniforms is on UK/NATO : without those interventions it would all be over since a long time, without the millions of Ukrainian dead and destruction. And remember : this is not the first time that UK is responsible for a war with its millions of casualties, that happened also for the 2003 Irak war when then-prime minister Blair sided with Cheney's and Wolfowitz's lies.

I can't understand how British can try to whitewash themselves from their war-crimes.

Yes, Russia wanted Ukraine to surrender unconditionally, and that's what is going to happen anyway.

[EvilDrSmith]

Re: Again why beancouters

Which is utter balderdash.

The Russian retreat from Kyiv was due to their military failure.

The attempt at peace talks early on failed because of Russia maintaining their maximalist war aims, and because, having been forced to retreat from Kyiv, the extensive Russian war crimes at Bucha et al came to light.

The actual historical record (including the testimony of the Ukrainians who were actually involved in the negotiations) prove that no foreign leader forced the Ukrainians to do anything.

It's also interesting to note how on this site (which is still more-or-less UK-centric in readership), the lie is always that it was Boris that intervened, while on a US-centric site I lurk on, it is an identical lie, except that it is all the fault of Joe Biden. It's unusually considerate of Russian propagandists to adjust the lie to suit the intended audience.

The one thing you said that is true, and which of course undermines your argument that it's all perfidious Albion's fault, is that "Russia wanted Ukraine to surrender unconditionally".

Russia wanted and continues to want Ukraine to surrender unconditionally. Russia offers no fair and just path to peace, and has not once entered into peace negotiations in good faith.

[Jellied Eel]

Re: Again why beancouters

The attempt at peace talks early on failed because of Russia maintaining their maximalist war aims, and because, having been forced to retreat from Kyiv, the extensive Russian war crimes at Bucha et al came to light.

More projection-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_negotiations_in_the_Russo-Ukrainian_war_(2022%E2%80%93present)

Russia's demands at the start of the invasion included recognition of Russia's annexation of Crimea, recognition of the Donetsk People's Republic and Luhansk People's Republic as independent states, as well as "demilitarization" and "denazification" of Ukraine, but did not clearly say what these terms meant.

Along with neutraility, ie no NATO and ambivalence around Ukraine's EU membership and language from the original Ukraine-Russia Friendship Treaty respecting each other's culture, traditions and religions. Which is also what the DPR & LPR wanted, and voted for, ie the autonomy they had before the coup and was removed, triggering Ukraine's civil war.

Russia wanted and continues to want Ukraine to surrender unconditionally. Russia offers no fair and just path to peace, and has not once entered into peace negotiations in good faith.

No, it doesn't, and has never demanded surrender. Russia's instead built on Istanbul and repeatedly expressed willingness to negotiate peace.. But the problem is the two parties, ie Russia and NATO/EU/Ukraine are very far apart on terms. It's us that have the maximalist approach and demand a return to '91 borders, NATO membership, the return of Crimea. Plus the insistence on a ceasefire with no-fly & no-ship terms. Russia is never going to agree to that given Merkel pointing out that the Minsk cease-fire agreements were just a pretext to allow Ukraine to rearm and rebuild the UAF ahead of their planned invasion of Donbas, which is what lead to the SMO starting in the first place.

Sadly, it's us that have been negotiating in bad faith, and why the conflict is likely to continue until Kiev is forced to capitulate and seek terms.. Which I think is likely to be fairly soon, helped by Zelensky making some wild claims around the situation in Pokrovsk, which Ukrainian MPs have already called BS on. Whether this will lead to Zelensky's removal and replacement and how remains to be seen.

[Casca]

Re: Again why beancouters

And another propaganda piece from JE.

Your "balanced" view is pure kreml propaganda as usual

[Casca]

Re: Again why beancouters

And you should stop believing the script you get from kreml

[I ain't Spartacus]

Re: Again why beancouters

Putin is sending the mobiks to their deaths in a gruesome slow motion parody of World War 2.

Sadly it's worse. It's a slow-motion parody of WWI.

We're up to about 1917. Forward, strong, heavily defended trench lines are no longer survivable against determined attack. So we've now gone to weaker but deeper layered defence lines, with strongpoints (as Germany did in 1917), but drones now handing out more of the death than machineguns. But still lots dead from artillery.

Will there be a 1918, where both sides manage to find some way to achieve large enough breakthroughs to achieve actually dangerous movement of the front line? Or are we stuck in 1917 for another few years?

[EvilDrSmith]

Re: Again why beancouters

I suspect that the Ukrainians are looking for a 1917 style victory, assisted by a sustained attack on the Russian oil industry.

While everyone tends to get excited about the bangy-stuff-go-bang, the important stuff may be bean-counter stuff:

Significant year-on-year reductions in new vehicle (car/van/bus/HGV) sales reported by the Russian motor industry which coupled with the Russian army impressing civilian vehicles, indicates a smaller and aging (and logically, increasing expensive to run and unreliable) commercial transport fleet serving the civilian market.

Russian railways reporting severe staff shortages, having to allocate staff, locomotives and rolling stock to the army as priority over civilian use, and experiencing repeated failures due to a backlog of / lack of maintenance (assisted by the actions of the Russian 'resistance' movement) and with management now taking short cuts and blaming the workers when it goes wrong - a couple of weeks ago there was a fatal rail crash after the driver was ordered to exceed the line speed.

Petrol shortages leading to increasingly long queues and increasingly irate drivers.

Civilian roads degrading due to lack of maintenance to the point where even the big Russian trucks are sometimes struggling to navigate the road.

Add in general inflationary issues and shortages that come from wartime generally, and while the populations of Moscow and St Petersburg may be largely unaffected by the above, and still be happily spending like there is no tomorrow, the population of the vast mass of Russia East of the Urals may not be quite so happy.

At some point, the Russians out in the sticks may just have had enough, and decide they no longer want to send their young and not so young men to die for Czar Putin.

[Charlie Clark]

Re: Again why beancouters

I think the anti-colonial wars are a better fit, even in places where the colonial power had numerical superiority: American War of Independence; Boer War; but also the American Civil War.

[Charlie Clark]

Re: Again why beancouters

The comparison is interesing but the lines are more fluid that WWI

[I ain't Spartacus]

Re: Again why beancouters

The comparison is interesing but the lines are more fluid that WWI

Charlie Clark,

In some places. But not many. And by 1917, if you could take the pain, you could move the line. It just took lots of fire support, lots of aerial reconnaissance and lots of casualties. What there wasn't, was the ability to move the line any distance. As is still the case in Ukraine now.

You can never get a comparison that totally fits. In Ukraine the front line is huge, but neither side has anything like the personnel available in WWI. But then there are more drones, and intelligence gathering is better. So it's harder to move anywhere within 5-10 miles of the front lines.

But the casualty levels seem similar to mid-period WWI. Russia are taking 1-2,000 casualties a day! From a force in Ukraine of under a million. 3-5% casualties a month is not good.

Worse, the other comparison to WWI is the death to injury rate. Obviously nothing's published, but there's a press organisation doing collation of local press and social media death announcements in Russia. And comparing that to the best looking estimates of casualty rates suggests Russia are still losing 1 dead for every 3 seriously injured. In Afghanistan, the US and UK got that down to 1 in 13! Admittedly that was by redesigning casualty treatment and with massive use of money and helicopters. Using Chinooks for frontline casualty evacuation in a peer conflict would be suicidal. But Ukraine have got their rate to something like 1-7 or 1-8 - from the figures I last saw.

It's depressing. Putin's leadership is truly shit.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Again why beancouters

I can't help thinking that the way to stop drones is more drones - autonomous AI driven hunter drones swarms with automatic shotguns that latch onto anything below a certain size and speed going the wrong direction.

[EvilDrSmith]

Re: Again why beancouters

Well, there is the Octopus drone; developed by the Ukrainians, and going into mass production in the UK, with production going both to Ukraine, and to NATO states:

https://www.forcesnews.com/ukraine/shooting-down-shaheds-uk-and-ukraine-produce-interceptor-drones

https://www.thedefensenews.com/news-details/Octopus-100-Interceptor-Drones-Enter-UK-Production-Under-Build-with-Ukraine/

[Jellied Eel]

Re: Again why beancouters

Well, there is the Octopus drone; developed by the Ukrainians, and going into mass production in the UK, with production going both to Ukraine, and to NATO states:

Anduril's Anvil was delivered to US and UK in.. 2019, so again.. Why Ukraine? Especially if Anduril has patents, and lawyers, and go 'Hey, this looks familiar'.

[Charlie Clark]

Re: Again why beancouters

No, it's destroy the factories.

[Robert Sneddon]

Re: Again why beancouters

Tomahawk is not a good fit for Ukraine since it needs specialist hardware they don't have, like VLS cells or large-ish submarines to launch it. They already have air-launched cruise missiles and their own indigenous Neptune and Flamingo missiles. What they could probably use are engines and advanced guidance packages to fit onto their own home-grown missiles.

[I ain't Spartacus]

Re: Again why beancouters

IIRC the decision was to buy the aircraft carriers but initially with no aircraft…

Of course it bloody wasn't!

They designed the bloody carriers around the capabilities of F-35 from the start!

Otherwise they'd have gone CATOBAR (cats 'n traps), which was the other design option. But at the time that meant designing round F-18 or (spit!) Rafale. Buying French aircraft for the Royal Navy! For shame! Now stealing them, like a Napoleonic ship-of-the line... Has anyone ever done a boarding-action on an aircraft carrier with cutlasses?

BAe did offer a carrier version of Typhoon, which is apparently theoretically possible. But with no other takers that would have cost more than we invested into the design of F-35, in order to be the only tier 1 partner.

And the F35 was never really suitable for UK and NATO's expected area of deployment

F-35 was specifically designed by the US to be a way to get stealth into the hands of its NATO partners, without them being willing to invest in a 5th gen program. Except us. The (over) complex supply chain was specifically designed for it to be attractive to NATO partners and it was supposed to be cheap, in order to replace everyone's F-16s. To be fair, you can get an F-35A for about $75m - which is cheaper than almost anything else new. Although the per hour flight costs are way higher.

The US was planning to have F-22 for itself, and F-35 to repalce F-16 - and to sell to allies. But then the Cold War ended, and budgets got cut, and they only ordered a quarter the planned F-22s and it's even harder to upgrade than F-35.

In fact [cue the surprise music], Lockheed Martin also fucked up the latest software upgrades for F-22 - and they had to bring in Boeing to sort out their software problems! And it's worked! So clearly Boeing Defence can do software, even if Boeing Space and civilian can't.

[ParlezVousFranglais]

Re: Again why beancouters

Not quite true - both carriers were originally planned to accommodate CATOBAR, that's why they are about three times the size of the previous Invincible class. The original brief was for the carriers to be future-proofed for the widest possible range of aircraft. Not installing the Cats was purely a cost decision - it could still be done at a future time. (of course, the UK will never find the money though...)

Also worth noting overall that the US itself is also still wrestling with F35 purchases due to cost - the Navy is still buying Super Hornets, and the USAF is still getting upgraded F15's along with it's F35's but interestingly is reviewing the possibility of going back to buying upgraded F16's as well to bolster it's overall numbers - as you noted above the F16 is still being built & sold in significant numbers to various airforces around the world, and the USAF (and congress) are entertaining the possibility of a significantly upgraded package around the F16 airframe

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Again why beancouters

I thought the original brief was to design the carriers so that CatTrap could be added at a later date, but when it was revisited it was found that to actually fit CatTrap would mean extensive work - and by extension cost a LOT of money. Not having that capability severely limits the type of aircraft that can be deployed on it. I'd say that was rather short-sighted.

[MyffyW]

Re: Again why beancouters

The assessment (by BAE, who built the carriers) concluded that it would be too costly to convert them to cats-and-traps (which would enable them to fly the F-18 or Rafale or any other naval variants such as E-2 AEW not built by BAe). This had the unfortunate, entirely coincidental, side-effect of only BAe fixed-wing aircraft (and maybe the V-22 Osprey) being able to be flow from the BAe built, BAe reviewed, definitely-nothing-dodgy HMS Queen Lizzie and HMS PoW.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Again why beancouters

I think there's a gap in the market for an EMALS that can launch something in the 7-10 tonne class and a navalised Aermacchi M-346 Master or similar to use it (originally I thought a T-45 meets Hawk 100 Seahawk). These days carriers are mostly used to project power against 3rd world countries with 3rd generation air defences and you don't need the full stealth pack, saving the F-35's for air defence against peer level opponents.

As well as putting them on big carriers, they could also be used to create light fleet carriers using Helicopter assault ships as a base (Mistral?Dokdo/Isuzu class).

[Robert Sneddon]

Re: Again why beancouters

The issue with EMALS is that it needs a lot of electrical energy in a very short period of time to launch an aircraft. That energy has to be generated somehow and stored somewhere on board a ship that is already doing other stuff with its generating capacity like powering its propulsion system hard into the wind and powering all the Sparkly Bits that keep the lights on and the Bad Guys from sneaking up on you.

[I ain't Spartacus]

Re: Again why beancouters

Robert Sneddon,

The QE class were designed with spare electrical capacity, in order to have room for growth. Things like laser weapons, which should be fitted as they become available. Whether it's got enough for multiple catapult shots using an EMALS is a question I'm not qualified to answer. However they did leave space in the design for extra plant near the engines. So they can presumbly fit some more diesel generators and then a bank of capacitors or chunky batteries - depending on how much juice you need for EMALS and how quick.

That's the advantage of having gone for a 65,000 tonne design, rather than the 40,000-50,000 originally being looked at. Similarly the PIP propulsion/power upgrade to Type 45 has involved shoving an extra diesel set in there, in order to give them massive amounts of reserve power, partly to make sure that they don't have the problems with lack of redundency, and partly because their radars keep gettting more-and-more power-hungry. Plus they're definitely getting laser weapons. They had 2 gas turbines and 2 x 2MW diesels, they're keeping the turbines and now getting 3 x 3MW diesels. The advantages of building your ships big, so you can upgrade them as required.

I get the impression QE could have medium sized drone-catapults fitted with relatively little work. Although given how much trouble the US have had with EMALS, and that we stopped our EMCAT program because we decided to go STOVL - I'm not sure the ship is the problem, so much as the catapults themselves.

[Jellied Eel]

Re: Again why beancouters

Things like laser weapons, which should be fitted as they become available. Whether it's got enough for multiple catapult shots using an EMALS is a question I'm not qualified to answer. However they did leave space in the design for extra plant near the engines. So they can presumbly fit some more diesel generators and then a bank of capacitors or chunky batteries - depending on how much juice you need for EMALS and how quick.

Or perhaps another crazy idea. So I think it was a mistake not to make QE nuclear powered. But with SMRs, there's the potential to perhaps add those later, if more power is needed. I guess in theory those could generate steam or electricity, but adding steam catapults and storage but that would need a lot more rework. And I guess drones and planes share the same challenge, ie maximum takeoff weight to launch without a catapult, but the a drone doesn't need all the support systems for a human pilot. But obesity also seems to be an issue witth the F-35 and as more features have been added, power & weight have increased.

Which I guess then goes back to whether F-35s are fit for purpose, or if we/EU should be prioritising development of more focused aircraft based on the mission, so fighters, bombers, CAS etc rather than multi-role aircraft that end up as a compromise.

[I ain't Spartacus]

Re: Again why beancouters

Jellied Eel,

Going nuclear would have been mad. USS Enterprise had 6 submarine reactors, running in parallel. This design was apparently a complete nightmare. We'd have had to spend a fortune designing a large reactor, and that would have cost as much as a carrier itself. Plus a test reactor would have to be built, and run for a few yeear - so we're talking adding half a decade to the carrier build process. And then only getting one carrier, like France has, so only having carrier strike available for an average of 8 months a year, and sometimes not for a couple of years. Obviously we could license the US or French design, to save time and money - which would be cheaper and less risky. But then you have to refuel them. For a French carrier that's every decade or so, the US use highly enriched uranium, and so it's every 20-25. French refuel a submarine in about 8 months, so probably takes a year. US nuclear refuel and refits take 3.

So nuclear means twice as expensive a ship, with much longer maintenance cycles, an extremely complex system requiring a corps of highly trained and specialised engineers - and you can't dock in a few countries that won't allow nuke ships. Also it means only getting one carrier and having no redundency and having years without available carrier strike.

Finally we're not going CATOBAR, so don't need that ultimate speed to generate wind over the deck.

On your catapult point, I don't think power matters. The only way to go full CATOBAR is a multi-year refit and redesign, which isn't happening until we look to replace our current F-35B airframes, around 2040. because you'd have to widen the flight deck, in order to get the angled landing deck in there. Plus we'd need to buy Cats and traps. The Yanks are charging France $1.321 BILLION for the EMALS and arrestor system for their future carrier! I can't believe re-starting EMCAT and developing our own arrestor system would be any cheaper. That includes maintenance and a spare set for practise ashore, so let's say a cool £1.5 billion for 3 sets for us (for 2 carriers). How many F-35Bs can you get for £1.5 billion? Plus the $2bn they're charging France for just 3 E2D Hawkeye AWACs brids. That's not enough for 24 hour coverage for one carrier, so we'd really need 5. Good job the F-18s are cheap, because we won't be able to afford anything else! And they'll be old by 2040.

Something smaller, for drones, that can land without arrestor gear is going to be much less power hungry. Or medium weight jet powered one way attack drones, that don't need to land again.

[Jellied Eel]

Re: Again why beancouters

On your catapult point, I don't think power matters.

Physics says it must. It's basically a system that provides external energy to help accelerate an aircraft so it generates enough lift to avoid an embarrassing splash. So then it's how to generate that energy, and keep it charged so it can launch enough aircraft quickly enough. So generating enough high pressure steam and storing it in.. the thing who's name escapes me. Or for EMAL, enough electricity and store that. And then also have enough energy to keep the carrier moving, power all the ships systems and also provide hotel services to keep the crew happy.

And then maybe also providing power to any future DEW, where power definitely matters because it's trying to transfer electricity(ish) from the ship to the target, and also having to fight the inverse square law and attentuation from humidity, spray, fog etc.. Plus how effective they'd be vs an incoming hypersonic missile that's already been designed to resist that energy transfer. Which is also where I disagree wrt nuclear given Rolls Royce makes the PWR2, and is working on the PWR3. They're compact power sources, don't need fuel bunkers or refuelling tankers for underway replenishment etc. But a bit late for that because the decision was made.

The Yanks are charging France $1.321 BILLION for the EMALS and arrestor system for their future carrier! I can't believe re-starting EMCAT and developing our own arrestor system would be any cheaper.

That's because they can and they have a distressed customer. Which is also one of those long-term strategic things. The US currently isn't a very reliable partner and also doesn't want Europe as a competitor.. Which is also the problem with the US getting bored with Ukraine and expecting Europe to bankroll that conflict, buying US systems and giving them to Ukraine.. Which means a drain on Europe's economy and a collosal wealth transfer, instead of developing and expanding our own defence industry

How many F-35Bs can you get for £1.5 billion?

Well, one interpretation of the NAO's numbers is.. one. Which is nuts, and should raise questions about whether we should go for the next tranche, or cut our losses and invest in European aircraft production instead. Especially when we also have to wait 5yrs for a software update so we can use our own weapon systems. Then other potential geopolitics. So the US bailed out Millei and bought him an election in Argentina. Maybe Argentina turns their sights on the Falklands again, the US supports that venture and we might not be able to rely on F-35s.

Plus the $2bn they're charging France for just 3 E2D Hawkeye AWACs brids. That's not enough for 24 hour coverage for one carrier, so we'd really need 5. Good job the F-18s are cheap, because we won't be able to afford anything else! And they'll be old by 2040.

Sure, because the US can. But also where drones might be a better alternative because they don't need all the human support systems, including basic like space for crew. So perhaps France/Europe should instead invest that $2bn in a drone equivalent of an E2D. Politically, that would count as NATO spending, even though it would upset the US.

Something smaller, for drones, that can land without arrestor gear is going to be much less power hungry. Or medium weight jet powered one way attack drones, that don't need to land again.

Yep. Drones have certainly been a massive disruptor, and I think also bring into question the wisdom of conventional carriers, and aircraft like the F-35. Drones can already do pretty much everything an F-35 can do, and are a lot cheaper. Plus there's always been a problem with carriers given the balance between ability to project force, and needed to protect the carrier. Weapon systems were developed as 'carrier killers', that situation has just got a lot worse thanks to the proliferation of air and sea drones. So more assets needed to protect carriers, or carriers needing to operate further from targets, reducing their strike potential. Houthis also possibly chased off US carriers with pretty low-tech solutions, and there's the growing potential from other non-state actors/terrorists. So shipping lanes offer plenty of choke points where capital ships are vulnerable in transit. Then Ukraine demonstated how those threats have increased by beng sneaky and packing drones into shipping containers.

[I ain't Spartacus]

Re: Again why beancouters

Jellied Eel,

On power, I said it doesn't matter because we're not going full CATOBAR until the late 2030s, at the earliest. If project Ark Royal persuades the government to open the cheque book (which it won't) - then we'd have to bang in some serious power upgrades.

The most upgrade that's going to happen soon-ish is small catapults for medium-sized drones. Those smaller catapults, needing much less power, and only operating a small portion of the airgroup - can probably be covered by the carriers existing power reserve. Worst case, they install a chunk of batteries/capacitors/giant flywheel.

Well, one interpretation of the NAO's numbers is.. one.

There is no sane interpretation of anything that says buying an F-35 costs a billion dollars. And it's only going to be a sane lifetime cost if you start playing creative accountant. You can buy an F-35A for $75m - I haven't seen a figure for the B and C models recently, but they're closer to $100m I think, and the C was more expensive than the B - probably because the US Navy are trying to avoid buying them as hard as they can. Plus all these figures are unreliable, but at least the US GAO publish what they pay for stuff - without all the sustainment and training costs added in. And in the cast of the F-35 the joint project office are buying for everyone and foreign clients aren't paying a premium above the US, as they do with some other programs.

Drones can already do pretty much everything an F-35 can do

Another ludicrous statement. There are zero drones that can do anything like the things that a top-end 4th or 5th gen figher jet can do. And it's not even close.

Actually we're back to power here. You need a full-fat jet engine to run a full-fat radar. There's some drones like Grey Eagle that can power a small surface search radar, but there's no drone yet that can power a decent air search radar for the AEW role that a carrier needs. That's the thing the RN wants, because they want to replace Crowsnest and get their nice Merlin helicopters back. But the long-endurance recon drones all use small engines, that can't power a decent modern radar with a decently long range.

To make a drone to replace a fighter aircraft, it's going to have to be the size and weight (and cost) of a fighter aircraft. This is also just physics. It's got to have the fuel capacity and the power to carry around lots of weapons and power lots of sensors. Drones on land are easy, you don't have to go too far. When you're talking blue water navies - they have carriers because nothing else gets you power projection in the middle of an ocean.

[Jellied Eel]

Re: Again why beancouters

The most upgrade that's going to happen soon-ish is small catapults for medium-sized drones. Those smaller catapults, needing much less power, and only operating a small portion of the airgroup

Depends on the drone(s) I guess. So F-35C's job is to haul its 15,000 lb (6,800 kg) payload into the sky and deliver to target. So then what would be needed to launch drones that can deliver an equivalent payload. But there are also non-cat possibilities, ie do what Russia does for some of their carrier aircraft and shove a rocket up the drones posterior. Especially if the drones are semi-disposable and can tolerate the stresses of a JATO launch better.

There is no sane interpretation of anything that says buying an F-35 costs a billion dollars. And it's only going to be a sane lifetime cost if you start playing creative accountant.

Did you read the article?

As a result, whole-life cost estimates have tripled to £57 billion ($75 billion), excluding personnel, fuel, and infrastructure — which push the National Audit Office's estimate to £71 billion ($93 billion).

I haven't read the NAOs report yet, but if we have 48 F-35s, and that's costing us £57bn..

Another ludicrous statement. There are zero drones that can do anything like the things that a top-end 4th or 5th gen figher jet can do. And it's not even close.

Another ignorant statement. There are drones that can do things an F-35 can't do. Like this one-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAE_Systems_PHASA-35

Designed as a cheaper alternative to satellites, the aircraft can be used for surveillance, border control, communications and disaster relief with a potential ability to stay airborne for up to 12 months.

So potential to provide AEW to a carrier group. Bit fragile to try and launch from a carrier, but other drones are availabe(ish), eg-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_X-47B

That launched & landed from a carrier over a decade ago, with a 2,000kg payload, a longer range and the ability to perform inflight refueling from another drone. But there's plenty of research ongoing to produce large drones, either as strike aircraft or ISR. Which has some interesting potential, ie can't launch a PHASA-35 from a carrier, but if it can stay airborne for months, you could have a constellation of PHASA-35s just following a carrier group. AFAIK the US has already done this using their RQ-4 Global Hawk, which can stay aloft for >24hrs. But then the US has the advantage of bases everywhere making it easier to maintain continuous sensor coverage.

To make a drone to replace a fighter aircraft, it's going to have to be the size and weight (and cost) of a fighter aircraft. This is also just physics.

No, it does not, and this should be obvious to anyone with some basic engineering knowledge. Remove the cockpit and you remove the mass of pilot, ejection seat(s), controls, displays, life support etc etc. That means you can shrink the size of the aircraft, make it more stealthy, cheaper or just use the mass saved to increase range or payload. Those savings also extend to power because all the pilot support stuff consumes that, and is apparently an issue with the F-35 which is struggling to generate enough power for all the new features that are being crammed into it. But it should be obvious that theres a considerable mass saving by replacing just a pilot+seat with say, 3 compute elements and radios for datalinking.

But find clue here-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manned-unmanned_teaming

The loyal wingman is a military drone with an onboard AI control system and the capability to carry and deliver a significant military weapons load. The AI system is envisaged as being significantly lighter and lower-cost than a human pilot with their associated life support systems, but to offer comparable capability in flying the aircraft and in mission execution.

And the long list of countries and developments in this area. The logical progression of this is to have the loyal wingmen controlled by pilots on the ground (or sea) rather than a 6th Gen fighter in the air. Which is also back to 'why F-35?' and if the UK should cancel the next tranche and put the money into the BAE Tempest/FCAS instead.

[I ain't Spartacus]

Re: Again why beancouters

The assessment (by BAE, who built the carriers)

MyffyW,

The carriers were built by a consortium of Babcock, Thales and BAE.

They'd already started building them, when it was looked at changing them to CATOBAR - having previously rejected that idea. Which at that point would not be economic. A study by BAE said that to get the same sortie-generation a CATOBAR carrier needs to be 10,000 tonnes larger, so we can convert the QEs, but we'd lose a bit of capacity. I'm not sure how much topweight is available in the design to make the flight deck wider, I'm sure it could be done a bit, as margin is usually left for upgrades.

The options were then, wait for F-35C (as long as for B) or get F-18, which are getting a tad old - though still good aircraft.

To refit the carriers for CATOBAR would require a re-design of the deck and a major refit, which they might do in 2040 - if they decide not to carry on with F-35B - that's what Project Ark Royal is about. Can we do extra stuff with drones, or should we shift course at the mid-life refit and change them to CATOBAR?

But in 2010, with the carriers already half built, and planning to use Electro-magnetic catapults, which are still having teething troubles now, that was too expensive and too big a risk.

[I ain't Spartacus]

Re: Again why beancouters

ParlezVousFranglais,

Not installing the Cats was purely a cost decision - it could still be done at a future time. (of course, the UK will never find the money though...)

Not totally true. See my post above, linky

Or for the short version, BAE calculated that to get the same capability (i.e. number of sorties a day) a CATOBAR carrier would need to be 10,000 tonnes heavier. <a href="https://www.navylookout.com/development-of-the-queen-elizabeth-class-aircraft-carrier-a-design-history/>Navy Lookout article</a>

Also the experience from the Falklands War where there were days that CATOBAR aviation was impossible. I think the Argentine Navy were unable to launch aircraft at the RN for the couple of days before Belgrano was sunk - otherwise they were planning to kick the naval war off themselves. Although might have got torpedoed first. Although that was lack of wind, a nuclear powered carrier is faster, so it's only bad weather that stops them operating, but the RN expect to work in the Norwegian and far North and South Atlantic, so there's a lot of bad weather about.

Finally the problem of pilot training. You'd have to have dedicated pilots trained for and aircraft for two air groups, or never be able to use both carriers at once - and even though two exist to mean one is almost always available, it's a bit sad to only be able to fill one if both are available when something happens. So why not have F-35B that can be used by both RAF and Navy? VSTOL operations from ship are way safer than CATOBAR. And knacker the aircraft less as well.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Again why beancouters

The Vought F7U Cutlass was designed for boarding carriers, at speed.

[Zolko]

Re: Again why beancouters

F-35 was specifically designed by the US to be a way to ...

... destroy the European military aircraft industry. Worked for the UK, but is UK in Europe ?

[EnviableOne]

Re: Again why beancouters

The whole Elizabeth class CVF project was an exercise in vanity; the previous Invincible class size carriers are cheaper and easier to operate and crew, they are more effective in littoral combat, and an effective platform individually or support larger deployments in a group. They were considerably faster and had better propulsion.

As for the flying rust, BAE offered a Mach 2 capable VSTOL aircraft to replace the Harrier, but the US of A had to find someone to share the cost of the pork barrel known as F35, and the little lapdogs in Whitehall were taken in tow, so we had to build a pair of white elephants, that we cant afford to crew and fuel, to put the pork barrel upon.

There were bad decisions all around in the 4G/5G aircraft capability

[I ain't Spartacus]

Re: Again why beancouters

The whole Elizabeth class CVF project was an exercise in vanity; the previous Invincible class size carriers are cheaper and easier to operate and crew

HMS Invincible had a crew of about 650, compared to HMS Queen Elizabeth's crew of about 650. Except Invincible carried about 22 aircraft (normally 12 Harrier and 10 helicopters) and QE can carry 48 aircraft. Probably more.

More importantly a larger flight deck gives you the ability to generate more sorties. 110 is the design daily sortie-rate for the QE class, with the ability to generate more for a short period of time. That's double what an Invincible class could generate and is the reason they decided to go for a much larger carrier.

[Jellied Eel]

Re: Again why beancouters

More importantly a larger flight deck gives you the ability to generate more sorties. 110 is the design daily sortie-rate for the QE class

Even more importantly, QE could probably generate double that or more, if converted into a drone carrier. Plus extra deck space along the edges to install a NATO version of the Pantsir-M to deal with enemies that have their own drones. And it could then carry far more than 48 aircraft because drones don't mind being stacked vertically, and F-35s.. do.

[EnviableOne]

Re: Again why beancouters

The QE Class are a joke. There is no way we needed fleet carriers. After the mid-life upgrade, which expanded the flight deck, they were more than capable of operating enough sorties for the types of missions they were deployed on.

The proof can be seen in the numerous navies, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, etc., that are building/have built carriers similar in size and aircraft complement to the Invincible class.

using the same techniques used to keep the crew count down on the new carriers and using the lessons learned from deploying the Invincible class, for all likely operations, the carrier strike capability is not something the UK is going to need to employ alone, and by combining with partners, we can mount that volume of sorties as happened in Libya.

The FAA(Fleet Air Arm) was never likely to have the funding to provide 96 aircraft for both carriers, and keeping them operational was always going to be an issue.

The optional EMALS upgrade, at a highly restrictive cost and with the technology unproven.

The only option is VSTOL; no time should have been spent considering the F-35C, as the A and C are thoroughly compromised to have commonality with the B.

The loss of resilience on the third vessel, the loss of speed, the cut corners going CODLOG rather than CODLAG, invincible steaming from the Caribbean to the Gulf of Aiden in less than a week was a feat that the QE or PoW could never achieve

Basically, the QE class were an overambitious plan to provide a capability that we did not need, at a cost we couldn't afford. something similar to what we had, with a new Mach 2 capable V/Stol from BAe detailed designs were created, never made it to prototype, would have carried considerably less risk, and provided capability considerably quicker, at a reduced cost, and be able to use the current facilities and maybe delivered before the previous lot were retired.

[David Hicklin]

Re: Again why beancouters

> Blighty hasn't had the need nor the ability to do this since the end of the empire in the 1960s

I think the Falkland Islands might disagree with you

[Headley_Grange]

Re: Again why beancouters

The problem is that the beancounters are given the beans piecemeal by politicians who work in 5-year chunks.

[Like a badger]

Re: Again why beancouters

The problem is that the beancounters are given the beans piecemeal by politicians who work in 5-year chunks.

Not even five years, I'm afraid. Occasionally government have made a three year spending settlement and that's worked well up to a point, but that's not the case currently, and even during multi-year spending allocations, the departmental spending levers are yanked between full ahead and full stop on an annual basis. Those departments where spending is dominated by large treasury funded projects such as MoD, MoJ, or DFT suffer particularly because their appalling project forecasting and management means that when project A incurs some huge unforeseen costs, project B is stopped, delayed, rescoped or otherwise slashed in the hope that the total department spending remains with the treasury spending limit. The same applies to a more modest extent in other government departments who are busy mis-managing projects they aren't capable of, such as the Home Office.

The one department that doesn't have this problem is DESNZ, and that's because their major projects are almost entirely energy sector, and are funded not by treasury but by private companies who then recover those costs from energy bill payers - as anybody paying an energy bill will be aware.

[I ain't Spartacus]

Re: Again why beancouters

Beancounters do have a clue. Even when it's wrong. The government has a thing called the discount rate. So when you're talking about spending now, to save money later - they basically say that if some spending now is going to save a billion in ten years time - then you can't spend more than about £650m to do so. So, for example, we deliberately slow-built Type 26 ASW frigates, over 10 years for the first 3 in the class - because that kept the annual payments Treasury had to make lower. Which means that the first 3 in class are probably going to cost £200m each more than they should have. Also meaning we've had to expensively do life-extension work on Type 23, to keep them from falling apart.

But on a billion pound warship that saving of £200m over ten years is actually less than the discount rate, so given that they were ordered during a time of high government debt - there's an argument that it actually made sense.

Of course, that argument is wrong, because we also had to pay to keep Type 23 going and we're now suffereing capability gaps because some of those couldn't be Life-extended because they were so knackered. Also, because we only ordered the first 3, with the next order for 5 to follow, that meant that BAe were unable to justify building their "frigate factory", which they might have done with an order for 8 (and certainly would have done with the original order for 13). And now we've got an order from Norway, both ours and theirs are going to be later than we wanted. And only the last ordered will be cheap, which means Norway will probably end up paying less than we have for the same ships.

On the other hand, because we've ordered 5 Type 31 from Babcock, to do the cheaper patrol frigate role, we've now got another shipyard going, and they're also looking to get exports. Plus it keeps BAe honest, and persuaded them that they needed to build the frigate-hall even just to complete the order of the second tranche of 5 - which they might not otherwise have done.

As for the F-35 mess, half of this stuff isn't the MoD's fault. They've gone for the cheaper option of ordering our aircraft late, because Lockheed Martin have so badly fucked up the tech refresh 3 and block 4 upgrades. This means that the we'll have fewer of the early aircraft that can't be upgraded to the complete standard - when it finally happens. This also means that we're not going to end up buying anything like the 160 aircraft originally talked about - because hopefully Tempest is going to work out, and then that can fulfill the RAF's needs and the Navy can keep hold of the 72 we've actually budgetted to buy. But the MoD have refused to buy the second tranche of 25 (24+1 for the crashed plane) until the Block 4 software is complete and we can actually get our weapons integrated.

Meanwhile we're still getting something like 15-18% of the work-share. Having only ordered less than 5% of what's currently been delivered. So if LM don't sort their shit out, then I think a move to Tempest, instead of more orders for F-35 is going to be the way to go.

Final 2 points. In a wartime emergency, we may be able to qualify Spear 4 on F-35 as an emergency measure - that's something that's happened a lot. And that figure of £57 billion is pure clickbait. And by that I mean from the Committee, not just El Reg. That's a project lifetime figure, going out to 2060 and I bet it includes for us buying all 150, which I strongly suspect ain't happening now. Because Tempest will be better than F-35 for the RAF, and should be coming in the mid-2030s, which is the same timescale as getting more F-35 with the Block 4 upgrades anyway.

[ComicalEngineer]

Re: Again why beancouters

From grim 20+ year experience of working on a variety of MOD projects:

Their purchase and supply department (Abbey Wood) is dysfunctional and would be bankrupt in any commercial environment.

Part of the issue is the MOD itself who will push for the absolute top spec Gucci kit - even if it's not actually working yet and then get miffed when costs spiral.

Then there is the fact that MOD will want something with hundred differences to the original specification.

That said the bean counters have a lot to answer for.

Go back some years to the SA80 debacle - a weapon built down to a price. Introduced to service in 1987, we finally got a half decent weapon in 1994 after Heckler & Koch upgraded it at great expense to HKA2 standard. The A3 upgrade has improved the weapon further but it's due to be replaced in 2030. And with all the modifications you still can't fire the thing left handed without getting your teeth knocked out by the cocking handle as the weapon cycles!

As for the F-35 --- UK would have been better investing in Saab Gripens or more Typhoons. The F-35s only USP is stealth and the cost of keeping it stealthy is astronomical. The aircraft is over-complicated, even a small paint fault or panel gap screws up the stealth aspect.

Another example of MOD purchasing cock-ups is the Ajax project to replace a number of smaller AFVs. Currently 8 years behind schedule.

[graemep]

Re: Again why beancouters

> Then there is the fact that MOD will want something with hundred differences to the original specification.

That sounds very like a lot of software projects, and not just in the state sector either.

[Charlie Clark]

Re: Again why beancouters

The tendencies exist in all organisations, but companies tend to have to have something working at some point or go bankrupt. They're also more likely to have people involved who have some idea of what they're doing. Successive governments have replaced less-or-more competent civil servants with less-or-less competent "advisers" so that, in many respects, things are worse now than they were in the days of Yes, Minister.

[Headley_Grange]

Re: Again why beancouters

There's a story that many years ago Charlie was out pretending to be a soldier with one of his regiments for a photo-op. He noticed that lots of them used Karrimor bergens instead of issue kit because it was better. Charlie raised this with the Army and they wrote to Karrimor and told them that if they sent a few hundred bergens free of charge then the Army would put them through their tests and if they passed they'd be added to the standard issue list. Karrimor told them to sod off.

[rg287]

Re: Again why beancouters

Their purchase and supply department (Abbey Wood) is dysfunctional and would be bankrupt in any commercial environment.

Without wishing to defend any actual incompetence, they're also kind of underfunded and understaffed. There was a case a while back when some numpty ordered a load of face/hand towels and ordered polyester instead of cotton because it saved a few quid. This was a problem because polyester is rubbish and just moves water around instead of absorbing it. Also, these are the same towels that chefs get issued extra of, which are used to hold hot pan handles. Polyester melts.

One ranking officer at Abbey Wood was asked how this was allowed to happen, and basically said "How much do you think towels like this cost? We're dealing with billions in procurement each year, including complex projects like T45/F35/etc. It was a million quids worth of towels. Something has to be going wrong to the tune of at least 8 figures before I can spare someone to go out and see what's going on".

And he has a fair point. In the scheme of government or even MoD spending, some spod at Donnington thinking they can save a few quid and putting in an order for the wrong towels is small beer and below what Abbey Wood can reasonably vet - they have to trust that base chefs are ordering food appropriately and the "day to day" stuff is turning over whilst they worry about strategic procurement. They can't micromanage all that. But it does make some great headlines when it goes wrong because £1m is a lot to you or me, even though the MoD can casually write it off.

[EnviableOne]

Re: more Typhoons

The whole point of the F-35 was cominality, have you seen the Sea Typhoon, it's so heavy its max take-off loadout is pitiful.

The Typhoon is half the aircraft it replaced.

The MOD can't purchase anything without changing the scope every few weeks, it's what bankrupted Marconi

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Again why beancouters

Mentally retarded decision to hobble the Navy by buying the F35B’s with their VSTOL capability that makes the largely useless and overweight fighters.

The 2 new aircraft carriers should have had traditional ‘Top Gun’ style catapults-God knows tbey are big enough - and the same F35C capability planes as US Navy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Again why beancouters

Bean-counters can at least count. Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown is an MP, and apart from a brief stint as a surveyor, he's only ever been an MP. The closest he has to relevant experience in defence procurement, is filling out expenses forms.

[ColonelClaw]

Re: Again why beancouters

The whole F-35 programme has to be some kind of massive 419 scam, right?

Surely?

[cookiecutter]

99.5% of projects fail

is stunning that the figure for failed projects across country, industry, time on at least one of

1) cost,

2) delivery

3) actual benefit

is 99.5% !!!

it's almost like all those management frameworks, project managers & incredibly expensive consultants are totally pointless.

look at EVERY failure here.... all of them could have been mitigated at protect start if soldering had said...

"WHAT do we ACTUALLY want you do? WHY do we want to do it, WHAT could hold us back? WHAT is the final end state we want and WHY can't we hold off starting spending money until everything is properly lined up?"

THEN go to each supplier and force them to demonstrate to you that THEY have asked the same questions and that THEIR suppliers have asked the questions until you have a FULLY FUNCTIONING plan.

THEN you put shovels in the ground.

[werdsmith]

Re: 99.5% of projects fail

A shovel? Even metaphorically this sounds a bit awkward. Why would you put shovel in the ground?

[cookiecutter]

Re: 99.5% of projects fail

since the 99.5% include road, rail , bridges, dams, IT projects, etc etc etc the shovel in the ground is a perfectly good metaphor.

protect gets signed off & self important management want to start doing stuff before they've even thought out the basics or even know what the end game would be.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: 99.5% of projects fail

"the shovel in the ground is a perfectly good metaphor."

Says a man who's never tried to dig with a shovel. And if you don't know the difference between a spade and a shovel, then I don't trust your other assertions.

[cookiecutter]

Re: 99.5% of projects fail

ive dug with both because i'm not a whining bitch who uses any excuse not to do the job at hand & know the difference but ALSO it's a metaphor got those at the back meaning......

the project work is started before anyone knows WHAT they're doing. great example is the sydney opera house, a fuck up of enormous proportions.

[werdsmith]

Re: 99.5% of projects fail

Shovels are built for shovelling loose material. a typical shovel won't last long being used for digging in earth. If you are going to lecture about the process for preparing a project, then you should include selecting the correct tools. Otherwise, you should ignore all your other whiney bitch requirements for preparing a project and just get on with it.

Spades for digging.

A stomach is a digestive organ inside your abdomen. Not the entire front of your abdomen below your ribcage.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: 99.5% of projects fail

"99.5% of projects fail"

And your source for this statistic is?

[cookiecutter]

Re: 99.5% of projects fail

how big things get done - Bent Flyvbjerg & Dan Gardener

"the iron law of megaproject management " the the Oxford Handbook of Megaproject Management 2017

"the empirical reality of It project cost over runs: discovering a power law distribution"

what went wrong with californias high speed rail

do you want me to go on? i mean i COULD come to your house & type the searches in for you or even post you crayon drawings of you struggle with academic posters

[nobody who matters]

Re: 99.5% of projects fail

Source: other people's educated guesswork, by the look of it ;)

[RockBurner]

Wut??

"... has only recently begun talks with partner nations about capabikity requirments the new capabilities, ..."

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Wut??

"capabikity" sounds like a nice word. I summons up images of biscuits, kittens and superheroes withoug actually meaning anything at all.

[Anonymous Coward]

Rather regularly now I encouter situation in a business that seem completely counter intuitive and counter productive.

Invariably if I get an answer to why things look so insane the answer is related to accounts, or some MBA madness about how it does accounting or some beancounting nonsens in councting things related to shareholder value.

This idea of spending £5 this year rather than £50 and it being a better option even if that means it costs you £5000 extra over the next 3yr I cannot rationalise.

[Pascal Monett]

You said the evil word : MBA. That in itself explains the problem.

That said, the MoD doesn't have shareholders, so MBAs are not the problem. IPMs (Incompetent Project Managers) are. That and the various budgetary issues that change on the political weathervane.

[graemep]

I hate the term used in a derogatory. An MBA is a qualification that teaches you certain things. The problem is how apply that knowledge - what your aims are. That depends on decisions made by the people in charge. Directors and shareholders in the private sector, senior civil servants and politicians in the state sector.

> the MoD doesn't have shareholders, so MBAs are not the problem

MBA is a qualification for managers, not shareholders. Investment managers (the people who control the shares in most companies) are not particularly likely to have MBAs.

[Anonymous Coward]

the utter futility of MBAs

"An MBA is a qualification that teaches you certain things."

Indeed. How to be a useless and clueless oxygen thief.

[Phil O'Sophical]

In my experience people don't get MBAs to learn something, they get them because it looks like an easy way to put some extra letters after your name on a CV. As a result it's become so devalued that seeing MBA on a CV is now a negative indicator, except to other MBAs.

[rg287]

This idea of spending £5 this year rather than £50 and it being a better option even if that means it costs you £5000 extra over the next 3yr I cannot rationalise.

* Move to rented premises

* Sell the existing premises

* Pay out the profit to shareholders

* Exit the business, which you were never actually interested in, just the assets they held.

They don't care about the long-run costs because they'll have ditched the company by then. It's a carpet-bagging, asset-stripping mentality.

And in private business... well to an extent, caveat emptor. But for some reason we elected these charlatans to public office, and now they've saddled all our public services with the fantastically good value concept of "renting in perpetuity", even though it's far more expensive than investing and owning outright.

[Anonymous Coward]

I totally agree that one of the main advantages dictatorships (evil or otherwise) have over us is long term thinking and planning.

If you are planning on handing over your ill gotten country to your offspring you will likely consider the state of the country in 5,10 maybe 50yr.

Vs our vapid politicians who plan on the basis of tomorrows newpaper columns or who might be bringing a thick brown envolpe to the party conference next month.

Rather than suggest that our very own idiots in charge should be given the opportunity to hang on forever until we line them up in the against a wall maybe we should instigate some sort of enduring resposibility so that should a politician be shown to have sold us down the river say for £35B worth of jets that don't work or a £100B train that doesn't connect to anything or a £2M garden bridge that was never started they can be hauled out of the non-exec meeting or speaking event they attend once a month for £250k a year and get dragged to court for past negligence.

[I ain't Spartacus]

Dictatorships are often terrible at long-term planning. Because often dictators don't want to have a designated successor, because that means someone who is more likely to shoot you in the back of the head one day. Plus short-term corruption is often required in order to stay in power, which totally fucks up any long-term project.

[nobody who matters]

"......dictatorships (evil or otherwise)......"

I am really struggling to think of any dictatorships which I would place in the second category. Can anyone else think of any?

[jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid]

"This idea of spending £5 this year rather than £50 and it being a better option even if that means it costs you £5000 extra over the next 3yr I cannot rationalise"

If you had a stable, known future income and you had control over your own saving and future purchasing ability, then yes I agree, that sort of decision making is irrational*. But that's not how MOD or government budgeting operates.

For MOD budgeting, spending £5 instead of £50 purely means that you've saved £45 today - and that's the good news headline that your budget holder has been ordering you to come up with because that £45 is needed right now for some immediate other thing. An analogy is if in your own household, you spend £5 instead of £50, that means you now have £45 to spend on food for the week so you can stay alive. (a better analogy might be that you £45 to pay for the £40 worth of food you got on credit last week to live on. This week's food is a different crisis).

The idea that by doing so (ie staying alive) you've committed to additional spending in future years is a problem kicked down the road, kicked out of sight and out of mind. The thing that you might have to spend £5000 on now might be scrapped, or made cheaper by some magic creative accounting or it's just one of many things you want but can't afford anyway. And all the while you are living hand to mouth anyway, as you go cap in hand every few months to the keeper of the magic money tree (which is neither a tree, magic, nor actually containing any money).

That's how MOD "budgeting" seems to operate.

*Imagine if you said to your boss that you were putting aside £100/month to save up for a new car in three years, and their reaction was to dock your pay by £100/month because you are clearly don't need that £100. Or, you told your boss you were putting aside £100/month for a rainy day, and your boss instead fired you for financial rule breaking and sued you for all your rainy savings to be returned. That's government budgeting!

[rg287]

That's how MOD "budgeting" seems to operate.

Not just MoD budgeting either - it's just Treasury brain.

We need a good dose of neo-Keynesian injecting into the heart of Government and Treasury (neo- because Keynes still operated in a time of the gold standard, so some of his thoughts are no longer relevant, and indeed being on a fiat currency gives us more flexibility to adopt his strategies and policies than even he would have dreamed of).

[Terry 6]

and their reaction was to dock your pay by £100/month because you are clearly don't need that £100.

Which is precisely how my teaching budget was treated, as noted above. Because I hadn't spent all my budget yet I clearly didn't need it. And of course carrying over budget from this year into the next to allow a major purchase in May was so forbidden it was practically a hanging offence.

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet we're constantly told that we no choice but to cut welfare spending, plunging the country's poorest and most vulnerable people into poverty.

[Charlie Clark]

Actually, that's not really the case. It's very difficult to cut welfare spending, but it is possible to target it better: disability payments have ballooned as a way for some of avoiding "unemployment"; winter fuel allowances could be means-tested; special needs support has become a bonanza for private schools. And, yes, putting up asylum seekers in hotels is economic nonsense. Fixing this would allow reallocation without cutting the budget.

But there are always other boondoggles to look at, especially in the tax system.

[graemep]

> It's very difficult to cut welfare spending, but it is possible to target it better: disability payments have ballooned as a way for some of avoiding "unemployment"; winter fuel allowances could be means-tested;

Attempts to target better have not really worked.The things you suggest have been tried and failed.

It also creates a lot of extra work and bureaucracy.

Far better to get rid of means testing and simplify the system and recover the money elsewhere. Introduce UBI and reduce tax thresholds to match for example.

> But there are always other boondoggles to look at, especially in the tax system.

Definitely agree with that. The tax system is a mess.

[Anonymous Coward]

So easy to do ... I wonder why it has never been done by ANY Govt of ANY Party !!!

"Fixing this would allow reallocation without cutting the budget."

Such a small and simply sentence for such a difficult set of tasks.

Easy to say if you come up with a simplistic solution to each 'problem' and even better if 'you' don't have to suffer the consequences of the sudden and draconian change.

I WANT change but I can see that any knee-jerk change will simply generate a 'positive' headline today and chaos tomorrow.

All the people who are 'bumped' off benefits etc will not disappear, they will appear somewhere else requiring emergency support probably from the local govt level.

This would make the cost switch from the country level to the local level and instigate yet more drama as your local taxes go up.

These problems need to be solved in a different way ... the causes need to be dealt with, which is slower and needs some deep thought & understanding of the issues. [This is something that Govt are NOT good at, including the Civil Service ... hence why we are where we are !!!]

The answer is obvious until it comes to actually doing the deed(s) and then usually a new set of problems appear due to lack of thought & planning ... the thing that Govt IS good at doing year after year after year !!!

I don't have a solution BUT can at least see that a quick solution that is 'obvious' will not work and only make things worse as the problem is compounded and made even more convoluted !!!

To get back to the article, short term quick fixes DON'T work, we have decades of proof that this is true, the MOD et al have proved this is true in this instance.

Yet ... once again the concept is raised that we can fix all our problems easily ... you 'just' need to do xxxxx ... which is obvious !!!

If it is so easy to do ... I wonder why it has never been done by ANY Govt of ANY Party !!!

:)

[rg287]

Fixing this would allow reallocation without cutting the budget.

The problem is that actually fixing this generally relies on capital expenditure - investing in the services and infrastructure to save money overall. And that isn't something we do in the land of Milton Friedman - Friedman demands that we add more layers of bureaucracy to ensure the wrong sort of people aren't claiming benefits, which in turn costs more than just doing the thing properly in the first place.

For instance, an easy way to cut unemployment would be to fix our railways and properly fettle public transport across the country. This would mean that low income workers and people with conditions like epilepsy (who could hold down a job but aren't legally allowed to drive) can access employment, instead of struggling to find work because they're restricted to sites either within walking distance or accessible on public transport. The same applies to 16-year-old apprentices who must either be driven by a parent or rely on public transport. All those out-of-town business and industrial sites? Nope, sorry. Out of reach. If you want to cut disability support allowances, fettle public transport. Transport is probbaly the most important point of UK domestic policy now - not because it's inherently more important than hospitals or schools, but because it's basically been ignored, run down and sidelined for 40 years to the point it's now blocking access to health, education, employment and actively holding back the economy.

Means-testing winter fuel allowance would cost more than it would save. But if you invested in electrical interconnects so that we stop paying wind farms to not generate electricity, and get energy prices down so they're basically too cheap to meter, then you don't need a fuel allowance because people won't be in fuel poverty to start with. And the cost of goods can level out if business is not facing ever-rising energy bills. It's been well documented that Scotland could basically be getting free electric right now except for the way our energy markets are structured.

Meanwhile, eliminating SEN expenditure on private schools requires that we invest in quality SEN support in state schools and - more generally - improve the state system and reduce class sizes. Because there will be a propotion of SEN students who are kind of marginal, and could get by without so much SEN support if they were working in a class of 20 instead of 30 and the regular teachers could offer more time and support to them. At which point they might just need a weekly check-in and support/tutor session to keep up instead of a whole special SEN track. Of course there are those who will always need more intensive support, but the crisis in frontline SEN is indicative of the crisis in teaching. Much the same as 999 gets a lot of calls when councils have their social care budgets slashed - what might have been a timely call to a social worker now festers until it becomes a mental health crisis and requires the attendance of Police or ambulance because there's noone else to call. Half the NHS's problems are the fact they're the last line of resort in areas where social care is on it's knees and people turn there when they have nowhere else to go, even though they ought to have been sorted out at home by a council social care bod.

The funny thing about all those policies is that they would also benefit the rest of society. Lots of non-drivers and people who prefer not to drive would benefit from better transit. The remaining drivers benefit from less congestion if more people use the bus/tram/train. Individuals and businesses alike benefit from lower energy prices (and stable prices - insulated from the capricious whims of OPEC or Putin). Want growth in the economy? There's your growth. All the other kids benefit from smaller class sizes, not just SEN kids. All of us would benefit from an NHS which wasn't snowed under with geriatrics who ought to be released to council social care but can't be because there are no beds available.

Incredibly weird we don't implement these very straightforward and well-defined policies. But that would involve government taxing billionaires, giving councils revenue powers to invest in infrastructure, and for polticians to stop pretending that all the economic problems we have in the midlands and North of England stem from some boats on a beach 200miles away in Kent, which are a wonderful distraction from all the other structural political failings, but ultimately irrelevant in the scheme of things.

[Outski]

Bloody hell, that sounds dangerously like well-thought out, comprehensive joined up strategic thinking. What the hell's it doing out in public?

[Terry 6]

See icon

[Anonymous Coward]

Smoke and mirrors

According to wikipedia the chair is a Conservative MP. So if they wanted this to change, rather than just shout about it, one would expect they'd object (to be fair, I did not check their voting record, so can be very wrong here) when the budget went through parliament (I'd expect these decisions to have been mostly under their party), instead of loudly aclaiming the consequences of government policy. I am not claiming other parties are any better, I suspect this is mostly systemic.

I'm not sure anybody at MoD will care much, they have to balance their budgets, and they're not elected, so apart from being annoyed at being a target for a committee, it wouldn't change their decision making. So shouting loudly in this context helps nothing. To put this in context, when was anyone promoted in a government agency because they did something a committee did not complain about?

Yes, the waste and efficiency is appalling, but did anybody expect any different in the context of the F35 program, where, realistically, only the US is really able to afford these?

I don't think any partner nation can even afford to risk deploying these, irrespective of their qualities.

[I ain't Spartacus]

Re: Smoke and mirrors

VA22,

It doesn't hugely matter if the committee chairman is of any particular party. I mean there are MPs who use committees to launch their own personal public image, but in many cases they're actually more interested in scrutinising government because they've already missed the boat of promotion to minister (or didn't even want it). The committee system works on a kind of unanimity. In that if one party goes too far in attacking the government, the committee can split, and produce a minority report. At which time however much criticism is made by the majority, now has much less impact, because it's seen to be more party political in nature. Plus F-35 was originally ordered by a Labour government, and then the program cotinued under a Conservative one for over a decade - so there's plenty of blame to pass around.

In this case I'd say the problem is much more that F-35 is such a complex project, and Lockheed Martin have failed to manage it well, the software in particular, but at the moment loads of NATO countries are buying it because it's the only game in town. The only other stealth aircraft currently available to buy is the B21 - if the US were willing to sell.

And although Tempest has been launched as the replacement for Typhoon, it can also replace F-35 in RAF service - which is the only incentive we can manage to get Lockheed Martin to sor their shit out. Everyone's shouting at them, and it's done little good. It's not like the US don't also have the problem of getting their weapons qualified. So all the MoD can do, is invest in Tempest and delay our next F-35 purchase in order to put pressure on LM to get Meteor and Spear qualified.

Everyone in NATO is having the same problems with F-35. Only the US, UK and Italy are expecting to have a different 5th or 6th gen aircraft within the next ten years. So the trick is not to fuck up Tempest - and if that means diverting budget from F-35 - I'd argue that's almost certainly the right decision. Typhoon (and a few F-35) is enough to deal with the Russians in the meantime. Although ordering 12-24 new Typhoon would be nice - and we should certainly do it if the Turkey order falls through, in order to keep the UK production line open until Tempest.

[Terry 6]

Bureaucrats and targets rather than just bean counters

A kind of version of Goodheart's law

When the politicians want to reduce government spending and the bureaucrats are tasked with reducing the annual spend they'll cut anything they see dangling. If it increases spending demands for next year or decade that's of no relevance to the target now.

And it's not a new thing. My first year of running a teaching team I planned a proper budget, month by month. And in month 8 I got told that I obviously didn't need all that money and it was being clawed back to give to another team who'd overspent.

That's when I realised why we had cupboards stuffed full of envelopes. Previous occupants of the role had learnt that you had to shift your budget by the end of January. And we always needed envelopes so.....

When I retired, decades later, the service still had the same bloody envelopes going dry in the same rickety old cupboards. I heard that eventually they all got dumped. Lots of other schemes were also in place to try to squirrel budget away for when it was needed.

[ricardian]

Re: Bureaucrats and targets rather than just bean counters

My cousin was employed in what used to be Inland Revenue. In 1970 he was promoted and moved into a new office. There was a locked cupboard in the office and the key could not be found. He broke into the cupboard and found it stuffed with envelopes marked "On His Majesty's Service" and thousands of the Economy Return Labels similarly mared.

Note - he discovered that the Economy Return Label system was flawed because the gummed labels cost far more to produce than any envelope because of the difficulty of printing on gummed paper or adding gum to already printed paper.

[Kevin Johnston]

Not directly me but...

I worked for a while on flight simulators including units for various military and some of the tales I got told about bean counters were legendary.

The best two examples included one from the RAF where the egress shop had to bin multiple million pounds of batteries for emergency radios as someone had noticed they were being purchased at low volume on a regular basis which they decided was not cost effective so they changed it to bulk purchasing. Sadly this meant that when kit was serviced and the batteries changed the new ones had a shorter and shorter life until it fell below the 'service interval plus a bit' level at which point all the remaining batteries had to be dumped.

The other example was from the sim maker where the IC sockets being purchased were changed by someone in Purchasing Dept to save 1p per socket. Unfortunately the new sockets could not cope with the test equipment probes being plugged in as it spread the contacts too far apart so they no longer made contact on the programmed chips when they were fitted. Three complete systems worth of boards had to be scrapped at a cost of rather more than 1p per socket.

[Anonymous Coward]

Bean Counters Might Be Getting A Bad Name Here!!

The F35 (jump jet variant) has other problems:

(1) Does not work near India

(2) Does not work near Japan

(3) Sometimes falls off aircraft carriers into the Indian Ocean

Item #3 has to do with staff training (venturi plugs not removed before aircraft deployment).

The article also mentions "procurement". Well....Main Building has a rep for unfortunate procurement decisions:

(4) Six F45 destoyers are spending all their time (till 2031) in dry dock getting NOT FIT FOR PURPOSE cooling systems replaced

(5) Five billion pound aircraft carriers are found to be defective when their propellers fall off

So......even if "bean counters" may sometimes cause problems, it looks like there are bigger problems in the areas of "specification" and "procurement"!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Bean Counters Might Be Getting A Bad Name Here!!

It's total overreach. Procuring complex systems without sufficient knowledge based on the contractor's snake oil salesmen say so. All the super tech probably sounds great on Powerpoints. Probably contribution in politics and corruption in the mix too. Shares in defence & revolving doors. This would be less of an issue were we able to build our own with British companies because if they lie or don't meet contracts it is much easier to hold their feet to the fire. But we let so much capability go and now we are paying for those decisions. We produced a broad range of high performance military systems & weapons, now it is a few niches. No money they say, yet they can spaff it away on destroying our energy systems to virtue signal about a non-existent problem or binding us all to a digital control grid to "keep us safe". They can constantly increase bureaucratic departments and waste money on diversity officers in areas that are already more diverse than the population. Why would you want to stop representing the people?

[Anonymous Coward]

About The Procurement Geniuses In Main Building.....

.....more of the same genius which got you defective destroyers and non-functioning F-35 aircraft:

- Link: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/nov/06/british-military-announces-first-delivery-of-ajax-armoured-vehicles-eight-years-late

[Blue Screen of Bleurgh]

Not to worry. Those responsible will never be held to account because it never works like that.

Instead the good old Tax Payer will be there to fill those gaping financial black holes that incompetent governments of all colours seem to dig themselves into.

[Tron]

There is no extra cost to the taxpayer.

Trump has ordered the UK to contribute much more to NATO and the extra cost for the F35s will just be part of that. So the money would be allocated to the MOD anyway.

Besides: £1m spent on a migrant hotel = end of the world. £57bn extra on US weaponry, no probs. Doesn't even make the evening news.

The UK's next/next but one plane isn't American, but a UK, Italy, Japan venture, plus any other partners volunteering cash.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Combat_Air_Programme

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: There is no extra cost to the taxpayer.

You are right about political and self interest decisions. But it is not just £1m spent on a migrant hotel. If you look at the total benefit drain it is massive and compounding. Also, how much of those F35s do we make? Seems we make less and less in general. We were supposed to be creating a next gen fighter; Project Tempest. Why didn't that get the money it's NATO spending?

[Mostly Irrelevant]

I think everything to do with the F-35 is overbudget.

[Boris the Cockroach]

Nothing new

if the MoD beancounters got involved.

As our unit found out when the beancounters cut the ordered tooling in 1/2 to 'save money' on tooling.

Of course we couldn't complete the project and you had our boss going upto the beancounters office with Admiral Lord Toff of Toffingly on the phone and the beancounters were asked to explain to him why his 2 million pound project was sitting incomplete on the floor awaiting the other 1/2 of the bits we were making/fitting.

Our boss came back and said he never knew the upper classes know howto swear like that.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Nothing new

"Our boss came back and said he never knew the upper classes know howto swear like that."

Oh they certainly do, especially military toffs. In fact I always thought but for the accident of birth and some manners there is more in common with your blue collar tradesman and the aristocracy than with middle-classes.

[nobody who matters]

Re: Nothing new

"I always thought but for the accident of birth and some manners there is more in common with your blue collar tradesman and the aristocracy than with middle-classes."

Possibly because most of those at the top or bottom of the class system are what they are, whereas a great many who reside in the middle class seem to be trying to be something that they are not ;)

[G.Y.]

Re: Nothing new

I recall seeing 4 generals rebuke a newspaper for saying "kick ass"; the said it should say "kick arse", ended "for shame, sir!:

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a Stinking Mess

ALL such problems go back centuries, and to how HM Treasury handles money.

It's HM Treasury that annualises money allocation and revenue counting. This has been a bad idea for at least the past 80 years, if not longer. Their way of financing government assumes that all of government is Business as Usual. The consequence is that it's practically guaranteed that if just one project suffers a bad shock, the ripple out effect to all other projects within a Gov Department is severe and the impact grows exponentially year on year. It also generates an environment which drives out anyone who wants to get things done and - if unfettered - would be able to do so.

If HM Treasury are not going to pay for continued, BAU building of things like submarines, planes, hospitals, schools, ships, etc, it's illogical to presume that when such projects are commenced that the people doing so will get it right first time, even if they've done good work in other fields before. The rate at which Gov buys major projects is so low that it's practically guaranteed that all those working on a new project have zero experience.

There have been some attempts within some Gov departments to de-annualise money within projects. However, because the gov departments themselves were still funded annually, it's never worked out.

British Government finances will continue to be ruinous until HM Treasury funds projects, not years / departments. They've also got to get rid of all the people who get in the way of spending money. Most departments have vast armies of staff whose only contirbution is to get in the way of projects. These people cost money and contribute nothing.

The worst of it is that the cost of not doing a project (lost opportunity cost) is never, ever a factor in how government finance works.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: It's a Stinking Mess

It was financing that made the British Empire and it is financing that is now destroying the nation.

[Oh No, Not Again]

Enough

The F-35Bs are total waste of money as we don't have control over them.

Just sell the bloody things on, hand them back or if it comes to it mothball them.

Software? Under US control.

Arms? No integration.

F-35As why are we paying for them?

[Anonymous Coward]

Cut the silk to suit the purse?

So the government / MoD has no projections on inflation that they create and try to buy systems they can't afford? It's about time they dealt with reality; they have turned the country into a 3rd world nation. We've been heading for bankruptcy for a long time. They need to stop pretending we're a world power and cut spending on their ridiculous globalist projects, psychological manipulation and buying votes and bloody well LEAD. Our leaders and bureaucrats are the worst possible people to lead a nation. They have no allegience and no sense of duty to the people. I worked with the MoD once, a complete shower incapable of taking responsibility requiring a cast of thousands to make the simplest decisions, always using security as hurdle when they wanted to slow things. The boys in uniform were equally frustrated. Contractors were happy to take forever being paid. Overspending, again because of security was rife. Not that things shouldn't be secure but it was often clearly an excuse to sit on hands.

[Adrastus]

East of Suez??

I haven't read through all the contributions. I applogize if I return to an issue others have raised.

In the sixties the British Gov sought to curb all committments east of Suez. Despite a tax base more widely distributed and more progressive than today, and a significantly less expensive welfare system, the UK was thought to be unable to sustain the military establishment required by a military presence in the East.

We have recently participated in the hopeless endevors in Afghanistan

We have made committments to defend Australia and Taiwan against the Chinese.

We are saddled with carriers we can't or won't equip to enable these committments against the chinese.

Yes, both the MOD and the Treasury are repleat with the inadequate: but the bulk of the abuse should be born by their political masters who lack the will to finance the committments they thoughtlessly acquire.

For clarity........I'm hostile to the committments not merely to the lack of seriousness.

[Wirdy]

It never seems to change.....

3 decades in the Air Force operating with what used to be called Mod Procurement executive, or MODPE & this sort of budget debacle was rife.....saving pennies & wasting millions, despite what those at the front line would push back up the chain of command. I'm convinced it's the civil servant bean-counters making these awful decisions & if only the CS could get a huge kick up the arse to deliver VFM, rather than on-budget, the whole system would work better.

The icing on the cake was usually about February, when your Integrated Project Team leader put out an email that an underspend was looming by April & needed urgent suggestions on bollocks purchases of anything that could be done by the end of the FY, to keep the budget for next year.

[minsheff]

Through life costing

Its called through life engineering where you consider the cost impact of any design decision of project against the total lifecycle cost. Unfortunately it seems the MOD is not up to date or considering the systems as a whole. This is an evovling discipline and one that engineers and business students need to start embracing it can also be termed the Digital twin of the asset. Its not the price to buy the asset or design it that matters but how effective it is at delivering its objective for a given cost that needs to be considered

[KevinBush]

Through-life engineering looks at total cost and performance over an asset’s life, not just upfront price, using tools like digital twins to optimize value.