Who's escorting the escorts?

One of the knock ons of the great aircraft carrier saga, has been the decimation of the RN's surface fleet to pay for them.  A succession of First Sea Lords have been forced down the gruel today for jam tomorrow route, justifying ever greater cuts to capability on the basis that it will free up the funds to ensure that in the future we will have enormous great toys with nice planes to fly from them.

In the words of Blackadder, there was one small flaw with this plan.....

Let's consider the fleet as it was when I joined a decade ago:

3 x Invincible Class CVS

9 x T42 destroyers

4 x T22 frigates

and the finishing touches being put to 16 T23 frigates.  I'm pretty sure that there were actually a couple more T22s knocking around, although of the earlier Batch 2 so gunless (my guess would be SHEFFIELD and COVENTRY).  Regardless, this in itself was a massive drawdown from the fleet of 1992, and even more so from that of 1982 - and we should all be aware of what happened in 1982....

Now, it's more like:

1 x Invincible CVS in an LPH role

2 (as of Yesterday with the paying off of LIVERPOOL) Type 42 destroyers

2 (ish) Type 45 destroyers, with another 4 in various stages of completion

13 Type 23 frigates

The surface fleet has been pared to the bone.  Of course, there are bright spots amidst the gloom - for example, the arrival of Type 45.  However, even here, what was supposed to be an order for 12 ships has been reduced to 6.  The staff argument is of course that these new ships are so much more "capable" thn their predecessors that you don't need so many of them.  This is fine (and true, up to a point), but doesn't do much to challenge the fact that, unless DE&S has got some sort of multi-dimensional transporter in development, each one can only be in one place at a time....

However, whatever the shortcomings in terms of hull numbers, and weaponry (the hydra of fitted-for-but-not-with raises one of its many heads again - or rather it doesn't), the Type 45 does represent a quantum leap forward over the kit it replaces.

A certain hard core within the fleet will tell you that there is nothing to beat a batch 1 Type 42 to serve in, and in many ways I'd be minded to go along with that.  My first ship out of Dartmouth was a "stumpy," and frankly we had a whale of a time.  I'd happily go back tomorrow.  The advantage of the Type 42s were that they were pretty "agricultural," in that you could see a lot of what made them tick, and a lot of essential equipment could be maintained with the judicious application of a spanner.  However, there was no denying that by the first half of the last decade they were well and truly obsolescent.  It was just that they were forced to soldier on because MOD procurement was making its usual ham fisted job of getting their successor into service - notice a theme developing here?

Lewis Page would have us believe that there is no rationale for the RN's escorts.  They are expensive ways of showing the flag, and giving aspirant admirals nice shiny toys to play with.  In as much as fast attack craft seem to work well for the Germans and Swedes, I'd go along with us buying some; and there's something to be said for the sort of cheap and cheerful corvettes the French have forward based to protect their overseas territories; but the fact remains that places like the Falklands are a long way away from the home base.  I know the defensive posture down there is based on preventing an attack in the first place, rather than trying to retake them once an invasion has occured, but to properly defend them we do need organic air cover, so we need aircraft carriers.  If we're going to have carriers then they need to be escorted, so we need a good balanced force of frigates and destroyers that will allow us to do that while also maintaining our responsibilities elsewhere in the globe.

What we don't need, but what we could well be about to get, is the world's largest and most expensive LPH (QE), accompanied by a botched CVF (POW) with an airgroup of about 12, and enough escorts to be sure of nothing nasty happening to them while they're all in the Solent.  Which is certainly an interesting definition of "balanced and capable."

Aircraft Carriers - The Madness Continues

A month or two ago, I suggested here that the MOD might like to take another look at what aircraft it chooses to put on the new carriers.  If you believe the rumours currently swirling around in the national press, then they're not only doing just that, but the conclusion arrived at is not quite what I hoped for....

As someone in the comments thread pointed out, we're pretty much getting the F35 whether we want it or not, despite the compelling case that can be made for buying greater quantities of something a good bit cheaper.  However, one of the few gleams of common sense in the SDSR was the abandonment of the STOVL version in favour of the cat and trap version.  The conventional variant at least offers a greater payload, and enhanced interoperability with potential coalition partners.

What now seems to be mooted, thanks to cost overruns with the catapult technology, is a switch back to the JSF model the MOD had originally planned for, the short take-off variant.  So, it's back to the ghetto of ski-ramps, and very heavy aircraft that can't carry much in the way of weapons load. All this at a time when the international situation everywhere from Libya to the South Atlantic has been underlining for our unfortunately sea-blind government and public the importance of aircraft carriers and why they're a useful thing to have in the back pocket.

I'm not sure any government of recent years has got defence right, particularly, but this one certainly seems to have a special talent for getting it wrong.  I await the official announcement with bated breath.

The hiatus stumbles to a conclusion

What we see here is actual words in an actual blogpost - the shock!  The general craziness of life has subsided, but it's been a good time to take stock, reassess, and all the rest of it (to say nothing of note just how many ways the Chancellor has developed to extract my assets....).

When I first started this blog, last year, there was a manifesto of sorts to go poking around in the sort of places that people overlook - to say that actually there are wonderful places right here under our nose, and that to pass them up for a safari holiday, for example, is nothing so much as an abject failure of imagination.  However, it quickly developed into much more of a meditation on Englishness, rather than England per se, and I wonder if that doesn't need to take more of a back seat in the future - I'm pretty sure that my just about three figures readership has worked out where I stand and it doesn't do to become a one trick pony.  I think it's going to be a more rich seam to mine for the growing short story output to be honest - watch this space; there's a novel coming in the next year or so too!  It's only taken me seven years - now just got to find a publisher....

However, in the hope that the audience haven't quietly drifted away, seduced by shinier things in the slightly-longer-than-expected pause; coming in the next week:

What we need from the next Archbishop of Canterbury

Carrier Aircraft U-Turn?

and

The Biggest Bang you've never heard of (or heard)......

Matt

The Wooden World

I suppose I was always going to join the navy, or do something equally silly in that vein at the very least.  Having been brought up on a diet of Rider Haggard and GA Henty it seemed the most natural thing in the world to go and take the shilling when the time came.  The taste for adventure stories has never really left me, but I keep returning to the sea in fiction, even though I no longer spend my life on it.

I still think that Arthur Ransome has a lot to answer for - how else does one explain this desire to go to sea when being brought up about as far from it as you can be in the UK?  Peter Duck was good, but I was always a big fan of Missee Lee personally.  Hornblower has always left me cold - the battles are good but the whole thing is a little too one-dimensional; Hornblower himself just a little too perfect.  As a child you can identify with his courage and devotion, but at the same time the action never really rises above what the BBFC would no doubt these days classsify as "mild peril.."

Captain Marryatt made a big impression on me when I was ten or so - I could never quite get to grips with The Children of the New Forest, but Mr Midshipman Easy was another story entirely.  Here at last was Hornblower action with character development, and I remember being heartily sorry that it is a standalone book, and that I wasn't going to discover the further adventures of Mr Easy in due course.

Which, of course, leads naturally enough to Patrick O'Brian.  I came to him incredibly late, just a couple of years ago via the second hand bookshop in Burnham Market, but managed to read the whole canon in 2 years.  O'Brian tends to split people down the middle a little bit like Marmite; between those who can't see past the first bit of nautical slang and those for whom he represents near perfection in a writer.  Personally, I think there is a strong case to be made that he is the finest British writer of the 20th century - if the terribly snobbish end of the critical spectrum hadn't ghettoised him for the heinous crime of writing "historical fiction," then he probably would have been recognised as such in his own lifetime.

Indeed, even if we take the literary world's estimation of historical fiction at its face value, then O'Brian is clearly the leader of the field.  One someimes pulls up short when buried deep in the early nineteenth century with the realisation that O'Brian is a contemporary of the 20th century world, not Jane Austen, such is the perfect pitch he reaches in recreating/creating his vanished world.  Anachronisms are conspicuous by their absence, and the whole strata of the eighteenth and nineteen century Royal Navy, and the social round ashore, is perfectly delineated.

Quite apart from anything else, the sequence is a study of a friendship, in some ways an unlikely one, between a seafaring man and a government agent with a sideline in botany.  Over the course of the the novels we see what are initially lightly drawn characters become fully realised, until a point is reached at which it is genuinely difficult to believe that all of this is the product of one man's mind, and we have to remind ourselves that O'Brian is a novelist and not a particularly lucky Boswell who has stumbled upon the cached letters of two real gentlemen.

Aside from achieving a fully realised picture of the Georgian navy, O'Brian frequently employs certain narrative devices which set him apart from his genre near rivals.  Action is described sparingly, and frequently not at all - and is rendered all the more powerful for it.  My favourite novel, Treason's Harbour, describes perfectly the claustrophobic enclosed world of the senior officers waiting in Malta for news, rather than great fleet actions.  Similarly, O'Brian spends a good portion of Desolation Island setting up a pursuit between HMS Leopard and the Dutch Waakzaamheid, only for the incident to be over in a sentence - real blink and you'll miss it stuff which is all the more devastating for it.

The Aubrey-Maturin saga is one of the greatest achievements of British fiction, and deserves a little more respect than that grudgingly granted to other tellers of superior sea tales.  Many have tried to emulate O'Brian since, but Sharpe didn't really work at sea.  The only one to have come really close is Alan Mallinson, whose Hervey novels are perhaps best viewed as sub-Aubrey on land, but who did send him to sea in Man of War, with pretty decent results.  Ultimately though, I don't think that we need another O'Brian - there are more than enough books in the sequence to repay re-reading over a long period, and Jack Aubrey does make a fine shipmate.

Gratuitous Friday Photo

Sea Harrier in the hover over INVINCIBLE during 2003.  Would be quite handy to have a few of these in the back pocket.
Happy Friday

Aircraft Carriers - it's what's on the flightdeck that counts....

Just occasionally it's nice to get out of the shires, at least that's what I thought a few years ago when I ran away to sea.  To a navy with three whole aircraft carriers, all of its very own - I left before they did as it turns out....

The Royal Navy has been in and out of the news ever since the Strategic Defence Review of 2010, one of the main points of which was the aircraft carrier debacle, which suggests that of the two carriers currently in build, the first will be mothballed pretty much at launch, while only the second will ever embark a fixed wing air-group.  Cue Daily Mail self-writing headlines along the lines of "Aircraft Carriers Without Planes - Shock!!!"

The problem however is not with the carriers themselves; steel is cheap and air is free; so much as the planes.  Britain is supposed to be buying the Joint Strike Fighter, which it is developing in conjunction with the USA.  However, it is here that the procurement fun really starts.

Because the RN has been operating Harrier jump jets for 30 odd years we decided, against all logic, that that is what we should carry on doing, and committed to buying the jump jet variant of the JSF rather than the conventional variant (which would require catapult assistance for take-off, and arrestor wires on the deck for landing).  The SDR changed that decision and committed the UK to the conventional variant - meaning that the carriers need to be redesigned.  Then last week we learned that there have been problems with the design of the arrestor hook, meaning that the plane itself is going to have to be redesigned.

Defence procurement is a licence to print money in so many ways - you're dealing with cutting edge technology, long lead times, and defence manufacturers who know that they are the only people governments can go to, and thus have them over a barrel.  Maybe it's time for a pragmatic rethink?

UKIP were first out of the traps last week with the suggestion that now was the time to pull out of the JSF programme and, as far as it goes, I'd be minded to agree with them.  However, they then suggested that the answer to Britain's problem was to "navalise" the Eurofighter, citing a BAe feasibility study from early in the last decade.  Their argument essentially runs along the lines that this would be good for British manufacturing.  Fine, but the Eurofighter is just another in a long line of UK procurement disasters; late and over budget. 

The plane would have to be completely redesigned, and the UKIP plan does nothing to address the old truism that whilst it is easy to make a very good land based plane from a naval design, it's much harder to go the other way and turn a normal jet into something suitable for carrier operations (apart from anything else the sea is a particularly unforgiving operating environment which demands different materials to be used in construction, hence naval jets are typically heavier than their land based brethren and will handle differently and carry a different payload).

If we are going to have carriers at all, then we need to ask what we are going to realistically use them for, and cut our cloth accordingly.  If we're going to fight a major power, then we're probably going to do that as part of an alliance, and so do we really need the best planes in the world, when the sky is likely to be full of them?  Quite apart from this, things are likely to have got pretty serious geo-politically, and we're probably getting into wars-of-national-survival territory.

If we're going it alone against a second rank power, then surely all that matters is that our planes are better, rather than that they are the best in the world?  The best is after all the enemy of the good.  I think it might be time to start thinking about buying off the shelf  - especially if the rumours are true that we're unlikely to put a carrier to sea with more than 12 JSF on-board, when it has been built to hold more than 30.

For the price of JSF we can afford to buy something designed for the job, that's combat proven, in greater numbers, and better than anything we're likely to come up against from potential enemies - unless we're going to unlaterally declare war on a superpower.  Therefore, the UK realistically has a choice, we either buy Rafale off the French for the most modern carrier jets, or F18s off the USA.  Both would be fine for our realistic needs for a couple of decades until being superceded by UAVs, and either would be cheaper.

 JSF is a nice to have, not the be all and end all.  Given that we seem to lack a workable defence industrial strategy, I don't think a large number of defence jobs AND decent kit are achievable across the full spectrum of defence equipment needs.  Perhaps it's time to retreat from some of them and recognise that the needs of our forces ought to come first, and we should aim to give them something that is good enough, rather than world beating.

I'm not sure I'm totally right, and willing to be convinced of the merits of any aircraft type, but I think the option ought to be on the table that the solution to our carrier needs already exists, and is flying from a navy very nearby - whether it's to our east or west.

Finally, for the nostalgists, a picture I took back in the days when we could embark a fixed wing carrier air group.....

Summer in Stanley

In the post on I Know Where I'm Going, I described it as portraying an utterly vanished way of life. That's not quite true - if you want to really get back to the England of the past, then you could always try the Falklands. You would also be visiting the Falklands of the 21st century, which is somewhere you really shouldn't miss....



One of the benefits of spending a bit of time in the navy is the opportunity to see a few places that are further off the beaten track than many people get to go, and not having to pay for it! I'd always wanted to get down to these remote islands at the bottom of the world, and when I finally got there they more than lived up to expectations.



In many ways, it's more like the Western Isles than the Western Isles are - similar latitude, geology, weather (and in many ways people); but with a distinctive history and character like nowhere else on earth.

We might as well get the war out of the way early on. You ought to visit the battlefields, particularly Tunbledown, to get an idea of the conditions and terrain of that bleak little conflict in 1982 in which so many on both sides died. There's a good little museum in Stanley, with some heartbreaking artefacts from the conflict, including notes passed from Argentinean conscripts to the curfewed islanders asking for food.



But there's much more to the islands than a war that occupied only a few months in one year. Penguins, obviously, which give their name to the excellent local newspaper, the Penguin News, as well as a large number of highly picturesque shipwrecks in the harbour.



We’ll gloss over the massive military complex at Mount Pleasant, because, except for landing there, you won’t be allowed to spend much time at it.  The drive down the road to Stanley is pretty crazy – built on a causeway and unmade, it winds through the boulder strewn countryside down to the coast and is about the only place in the islands where you’ll get your Land Rover out of second gear.  After passing Sapper Hill, you round a bend and the little capital is laid out before you. 



Stanley is an extraordinary place, with a row of terraced houses that wouldn’t look out of place in Coronation Street, and the most southerly Anglican cathedral in the world, complete with whalebone arch.  As there’s a bit of a dearth of natural roofing materials, the north west England look is slightly tempered by the fact that almost every building sports a roof of brightly painted corrugated iron.



The post-war development has seen a suburb growing up towards the racecourse, with flatpack houses shipped down from Scandinavia, lending a slightly surreal touch to the landscape.



Then there are the pubs.  It’s possible to go on a decent crawl around Stanley, from the Upland Goose to the Globe via points in between, finishing up at the Trough nightclub (which was BYO when I went!).  The house band, the Fighting Pigs, weren’t half bad either….

But it’s not all about the “urban” areas.  Outside Stanley, in camp, you’ve got fine upland scenery, scattered settlements, sheep, and some of the best beaches you’ll ever see (Calgary Bay has got nothing on this). The weather is, er, changeable – you can go from sunbathing to putting on the fifth layer in the course of the afternoon, but once you’re down there, you wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.  I’d go back tomorrow.



So, the Falklands – it’ll take you 24 hours to get there, but they’re worth the effort.

BAS Port Lockroy - forgotten gems

Given the short time this blog has been running, I'm going to apologise for cheating slightly already and going out of England (and indeed the shires) for this post.  Without wanting to get into the rights, wrongs or do-you-mind-if-we-dont's of the Antarctic Treaty, this place is technically in the British Antarctic Territory, and so is as British as Kent dammit...

When I was a young naval officer, I was lucky enough to spend six months in HMS ENDURANCE, our ice-breaker, resupply vessel and general White Ensign flier in the Antarctic.  While we were down in the ice, we were tasked to resupply the British Antarctic Survey station at Port Lockroy.  We were a bit blase about things like that, as we went to almost one station a day at some points (covering a wide variety of nationalities), and one laboratory is very much like another.  This one, however, was different - Port Lockroy is a museum.

Originally built as part of the Len Deighton style Operation_Tabarin, it later functioned as a BAS scientific base until the mid 1960s.  These days, it's run as a small museum of the way Britain used to do Antarctic science missions. 

Inside, the building is a gem, with each room fitted out with 1950s furniture and accessories.  The current staff during the Antarctic summer months numbers just three, all of whom live in a single bunkroom at the back of the building, maintaining the fabric of the building, and stamping the passports of the small number of tourists and adventurers who are lucky enough to find themselves knocking on the door.

Although extremely remote, Port Lockroy is now a popular fixture on the itenerary of the growing number of Antarctic tourist vessels, so the staff do have the opportunity to see some friendly faces reasonably regularly.  Situated on an island less than the size of a football pitch, with no boat or helicopter, it can get quite lonely when there are no tourists about.

I'm not sure what I think about Antarctic tourism if I'm totally honest.  Certainly, were it not for the traffic down there it is likely that Port Lockroy would have gone the way of Port Foster at Deception Island and fallen into ruin, but at the same time Antarctica is still pretty untouched, and the numbers visiting have gone through the roof in the past decade. There is a place for responsible tourism, but not if it harms the delicate balance of the ecosystem.  The growth of adventure tourism, and the unsuitability of some of the vessels used, particularly at the luxury travel end of the market, means that it is probably only a matter of time before there is a serious incident.

Actually, Port Lockroy has provided BAS with the opportunity to study the effect of human presence on the local residents, because the island is home to a large breeding colony of Gentoo Penguins.  Through the simple expedient of placing half of the island off limits to humans (a triumph of self-denial if you are one of the three spending half your year on the aforementioned football pitch), they are able to study what results interaction (or lack of it) has on the wildlife.  There are still plenty of penguins to go around for the curious though!