New Royal Navy Wildcat helicopters can't transmit vital data Britain's latest military helicopter fleet has still not had a tactical data link capability fitted, two years after the aircraft entered service. Although the new Leonardo Wildcat helicopters have already been deployed operationally aboard Royal Navy warships, including deployments as the sole helicopter aboard frigates …
'I mean it's not like "Over the Horizon Targeting" and "Battle Damage Assessment" is a real thing is it? oh wait......'
Don't I still wake in a cold sweat trying to remember all the paragraphs for voice reporting OTHT. I always felt BDA was best conducted at a distance though, in case all you'd done was really annoy them.
The ARSSE article on the 'Future Lynx' seems relevant here.
It's talking about the Army version but it's the same aircraft. The article is 10 years old.
'The crew just can't actually tell anyone about the results before they land.'
Oh you can but the baud rate is worse than dial-up.
Calculating the baud rate for human speech is left as an exercise for the reader. On account of me starting Friday evening.
"you couldn't make this up"
Reminds me of John Fortune being interviewd about his work with John Bird on the "George Parr" interviews in the Bremner, Bird and Fortune series. When asked how you go about satirising topics he gave some explanation but then added that it the topic was governement policy then simply repeating it verbatim was normally better than anything you could write yourself!
Remember one where "General Sir George Parr" was explaining the preparations for the Gulf War and with great excitement went through a series of items saying how amazingly well the army was equiped only to add, when interviewer said that that would clearly help in Iraq, that "of course, we always expected to fight a war in nothern Europe so the uniform was too hot, camoflage was wrong colour, tanks broke down in sand" before at end of interview offering suggestion that the UK and US wrote to Sadaam Hussein and asked him that as he clearly wanted a war then would he mind coming over to northern Europe to fight it!
What do you expect - the ACOS in charge of IT is Dan Cheesman is a Royal Marine. They Andrew is so busy with hacks trying to get promoted its all short term great ideas like Artificial Intelligence and Cyber instead of getting the basics like radios and data links right. They can't even get a ship to sea without it breaking down.
"Prudence" Brown was quite happily borrowing £1100 per man, woman, and child in the UK per annum *before* the sub-prime bubble exploded as well as selling off government property and gold at rock-bottom prices. His ability to spend far in excess of tax receipts has nothing to do with sub-prime nor the credit crunch, the crunch just exposed it as the unsustainable "economics" that it was ...
As I understand it the poor people who took out mortgages mostly paid them back. It was the "real estate developers" whose speculative dodgy condos were classified AAA that caused the real meltdown, according to Gillian Tett and others. (But I agree with you in general terms - if Brown had told Blair that bank deregulation was a bad idea, he'd have been out.)
Clearly someone is doing it wrong.
Obviously, the Israelis as they have not followed the US and UK model of procurement. Or maybe it's not "procurement" per se, but departmental empire building and job security?
I do admire some of the stuff the Israelis do such as this as it's just a lot more efficient and cost effective. Other countries (US? UK?) could learn a lot from them. I'll stay out of the politics, etc. for this discussion.
I do believe that if the procurement departments were cut down, the savings would be reflected in budgets and hopefully, the cost per unit would drop since Joe Contractor/Builder would have less people to deal with.
"How did so many idiots get into positions of power?"
It's really difficult to get fired in most UK government departments, unless they are cost-cutting.
Instead of going through the months of HR quagmire to sack someone, it's easier to get them promoted out of your department into another. Hence the cream stays put and the shite rises. And certainly in the UK, the 'old boys network' means it doesn't matter what you know, only whom you know.
It also seems to help if your golf handicap is in single figures.
I think technically it's now Leonardo Helicopters to differentiate it from Leonardo the parent company, which used to be Finmeccanica. But the UK bit of Finmeccanica is now known as Leonardo Marconi Westlands and parents the UK bit of Leonardo Helicopters.
Because branding is so important for weapons systems.
Most air to air and surface to air Missiles are just that, they are designed to "miss" the target by a close proximity and then explode. lots of stuff flying about at high velocity hitting sensitive bits (lots of these on an aircraft). The only Hitile [sic] that I am aware of is the Rapier surface to air one.
Defence procurement has been an ongoing disaster for decades. Lots of smart and honest people have tried to fix it during that time and none have succeeded because it is institutionally incapable of being fixed.
Fortunately the British haven't needed to fight any serious wars unaided against a competent and well-equipped enemy for very long time. We should just accept that the purpose of defence procurement, and indeed the rest of the MoD, is to enrich defence contractors and prop up small parliamentary majorities, and that the Americans are expected to do any serious fighting for us. Now when is that nice Mr Trump coming to have tea with Her Majesty?
none have succeeded because it is institutionally incapable of being fixed.
I agree nobody's fixed it, and that the culture is deeply entrenched. But there is a simple solution - kick out the incompetent wasters of the civil service, make the whole MoD military personnel, reporting as an extra "service" to the chief of the defence staff.
Then the military have only themselves to blame. The military command structure is very good at shouting at people until they do what is needed (or court martialling them if they don't). Give them a finite total budget, with some forward visibility to stop the dogfuckers at the Treasury messing things up, and then they have to control specification and out-turn cost, they can balance projects against revenue costs. fight amongst themselves until they realise that is a zero-sum game. From a national perspective we'd know what we're spending, the military can never complain that they were "given the wrong kit", and the budget for toys wouldn't bloat since they'd have to choose what gets cut if they overspend on a particular project. The defence industry would suddenly find that the buyer didn't give a hoot about their lobbying, and that said buyer just wanted a product that worked, at the agreed cost and time. Equally, the military would be accountable for any spec changes or errata, with the certainty that they'd have to cut spending on another toy.
Simples. And if they really fuck up, we'd still be better off than today, because even with a load of inappropriate and broken kit, that's what we've got now, but we'd have the concept of a set defence budget.
The Army, Navy and the Air force are all permanently at war... with each other. Why do you think the harriers were scrapped? Kill strike from the Air force.
The MoD is there to try to keep them apart. Their basic tactic is to say 33% each. So actual needs are not considered. If the army wants a budget increase to buy, say, new guns, its going to cost the MoD 3 times the price to keep the other 2 happy.
So if the military were in charge, it would have to have 3 co-chiefs that sign of on every expenditure. War by meetings. With meetings.
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