It appears that the defence procurement stories we’ve been tracking are coming to a head. Recently, it emerged that the Astute SSN, Nimrod MRA4, and T-45 destroyer projects are going significantly overbudget again; the first two of these are, of course, the ones that were already £800 million over budget and several years later. The…
Read More The Defence Crisis; BAE Are Still HopelessFT: the AirTanker bond issue has, not surprisingly, gone pear-shaped as the monoline insurers fall apart. The story includes some vital detail on precisely what the Defence Procurement PFI team and the consortium have been doing all this time; essentially, trying to finance the deal at an acceptable rate of interest in the middle of…
Read More Can haz air-to-air refuelling? Oh noes…It hasn’t been in the papers much since the summer, but did you know that the Russian air force has been around the North Sea a hell of a lot lately? Between October and December, I’m aware of at least five visits to the UK or Norwegian ADIZ (Air Defence Identification Zone). Not just that,…
Read More We get it almost every nightI’ve been reading old House of Commons Defence Committee reports – I was ill, forgive me. This one, from February, is likely to spin up to relevance any time now. It covers the Army’s FRES (Future Rapid Effects System) project, which was intended to provide a new armoured vehicle that would be light and handy…
Read More Unclear on the ConceptI don’t think this means what Thomas Barnett thinks it does. He argues that the demand for armoured patrol vehicles in Iraq is an example of conflict between the objectives of his “SysAdmin” force, and the Washington-cented, tech-heavy “Leviathan”. Of course, it’s an example of conflict between the centre and the front line, but that’s…
Read More Built-In StupidityCharlie Stross is apparently thinking of using the huge GEC Marconi/BAE cost overruns as a plot device for one of his books – the idea being that some sort of really cool (and evil) skunkworks project was being funded off the books through the vast sums of money wasted on NimWACS, Astute, Eurofighter, Nimrod MRA4,…
Read More UniqueBecause, on top of one of ’em, there’s a great big phased-array radar, pointing right down to Saudi Arabia. Check out this paper by Pavel Podvig of RussianForces, and scroll right to the bottom for the radar coverage map. Alternatively, there’s this Globalsecurity.org page, which is rather out of date. But the key point is…
Read More Show me all those snowpeaked mountains way down southTony Blair doesn’t deserve to be allowed aboard one of HM Ships, let alone use one of them to speechify. Some of the press amused themselves by labelling photographs of Devonport Dockyard with the ships awaiting disposal. This wasn’t, perhaps, fair – the two biggest are Fearless and Intrepid, the two assault ships (LPDs) built…
Read More Blair: just an embarrassmentWell, who else saw Sean Langan’s film from the mission down to Garmser last year? Still can’t stop thinking about it. A small advisory/training team and a company or so of Afghan police were sent down from Camp Bastion to Garmser in the far south to establish a government presence on roads leading in from…
Read More to all of those men..Yet more stupid giant floating radar news. Not only can’t it keep the sea if the weather turns bad, not only is there no sea boat, and no security – but its support vessel won’t be able to go alongside it most of the time, according to the US Coast Guard. This really is one…
Read More I see a ship in the harbour