US Coast Guard: We're rather chuffed with our new Boeing spy drone The US Coast Guard is well chuffed with its new Scaneagle drone – the same drone that the Royal Navy is ditching later this year, seemingly for lack of funds. The coastal force, which, because of chronic manpower shortages, is lending engineering personnel to the RN for keeping frontline warships at sea, deployed the USCGC …
The endurance, capability and near-all weather performance of the Scaneagle is well beyond off-the-shelf kit, but the unfortunate reality for the Navy is that any form of drone doesn't help it, because it doesn't have enough ships to do anything about the information that might be collected. Knowing there's a Russian sub, or an armed drug smuggler is not much use when your inshore patrol ships are painfully slow and armed with a single pop gun, and you've got about one frigate per 1,000 miles of coastline. They could call the RAF, but they've got no credible maritime capability, either surveillance or attack. Even when/if the RAF gets American P8-As in 2020, it'll have the grand total of nine, so with luck perhaps six operational at any one time, prioritising protection of our nuclear subs and our podged-up carriers, followed by whatever remote hobby war the British government happen to be fighting that day.
I sadly think that the joint incompetence of MPs, the MoD and the Treasury has cost this country hundreds of billions of quid for a rag-bag collection of inadequate assets that don't meet our needs, whether in self defence, in long range military interventions, or even in humanitarian work. We might as well follow the Swiss, and have a very small standing army, navy and air force, use national service to create a huge reservist army, avoid foreign military engagements and provocations, and then we're not worth invading. I don't think there's a queue to invade us anyway, but I really can't see that we get value for money for £50-60bn a year, with the hardware being more and more US manufactured. The populations of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya probably wish we'd taken such a view before 2000.
"That's because the bulk of your budget goes to pay for the NHS."
Ahem*bullshit*ahem*
62% of the treasury tax take goes on state pensions, with another 5-7% or so (it's hard to get straight answers from anyone) going on pensioner voting bribes like fuel allowances, pensioner housing allowances and free travel (the latter 2 going to councils for disbursement).
This figure is only going to get bigger. The majority of the Boomer cohort have yet to hit retirement age and the pensioner population will only start to peak around 2029. Meantime the number of working taxpayers continues to decline primarily due to reduced birthrates since the introduction of the pill in the early 1960s.
Everything else is paid for from what's left over. NHS costs are rising rapidly primarily due to an aging population, not because of advances in medicine(*), however the cost related to paying for pensioner medical care isn't broken out separately from the general budget and as such is nearly impossible to quantiify.
(*) The longer people live, the more likely they are to get cancer (which is expensive to treat) or other age-related diseases (which also tend to be expensive to treat) and spend more time in old folks homes (which are expensive to run). The problem is that budgetary assumptions were made for a long time based on a return to 1950s birthrates (which never happened) and people retiring at 60 then living to 68, instead of the 80-85 which was normal even in the 1970s and the 85-90 which is normal now.
A pity really. It sounds to me like the days of "Rule Britannia! Britannia rule the waves" are over except in the minds of some political types who perpetuate that belief when what has become a sad state of affairs. I'm saddened by this even though I'm American.
The Americans screwed the British in WW1 with inflated prices then shafted us with the Washington naval treaty (because we owed them so much cash), then repeated the exercise in ww2 (here, we will take all your gold, all your companies all your foreign bases, saddle you with a huge debt, then stir up trouble in your empire because we are jealous so you and the Russians can fight the Germans until we can walk in at the end and make sure we mp up the whole of europe for free).
Since then the Americans have forced us to abandon the Suez with financial threats, involved us as lapdogs in multiple small wars, forced again with economic force to abandon successful British planes, missiles and technology and replace it with expensive American junk (like the F35).
With friends like this who needs enemies? And as for the state of the British military - apart from our own governments entirely antiBritish stance the meddling of the Americans has cost us a huge amount
I have said it before, once the armed forces are cut below a level at which they are actually useful you might as well forget it and scrap them totally. We passed that threshold probably 30 years back. The current situation is stupid and pointless. Take the whole of the armed services and they couldn't successfully defend the Isle of White from a bunch of paintballers far less anyone with a real gun.
Its not the fault of the front line soldier or airman but equipment such as a huge aircraft carrier with only half a dozen aircraft that fall out of the sky in rough weather or run out of fuel 20 seconds after take off and present a radar footprint the size of an Americans backside on the way back to top up the petrol tanks is pointless - even more so when they are in bits all over europe for upgrades and repairs we aren't allowed to carry out. The airforce is so small it is pointless, tied to airfields because the one plane capable of not using an airfield is now sitting in a desert in USA in bits just means it will be wiped out in a single bombing raid by any intelligent enemy (in ww2 the Germans nearly succeeded before mistakenly turning to bombing London and the airforce in those days was actually big enough to call a force), and as for the army, a few tanks from Spain with German engines so they cant be replaced when they get shot up, not enough bullets to fight for more than 24 hours and not enough body armour for the less than Wembley stadium sized army.... for heavens sake the whole British army is less than a football crowd.
Pointless, a waste of money.
If I were PM I would be building 10 large nuclear carriers with catapults and arrester wires, 20 smaller Hermes size also equipped the same (including nuclear propulsion) because ALL of them can fly either Harrier or conventional planes (Hermes DID fly conventional jets before the addition of te ski jump), this would make 10 carrier groups for deployment around the world each group would need a selection of probably around 10 or so anti aircraft, anti sub and anti surface destroyer/frigate/cruisers. There would then be another 20 resupply fleets capable of dragging food, planes, fuel and consisting of supply ships and support/protection vessels. Resupply submarines and attack subs. All to be made and equipped in the UK with UK equipment including UK planes. Similar would add a few hundred heavy and light tanks , helicopter gunships and harrier squadrons to the Army along with upping its front line strength to 250k kitting all with British made uniforms (not the chinese shit they have at the moment) along with British guns and British bullets. The airforce would need new Harriers possibly extra speed, tsr2 reinvigorated and completed, a low radar tsr3, fuel tankers, large bombers (new vulcans/victors/valients), transport planes, drones and helicopters.
Yup total package would cost a lot, but it would mean we could actually defend ourselves and if we buy British it would provide us with short term jobs and then a longer term future as a nation able to produce and sell arms. I know its not to everyones taste to sell guns etc but we are happy to sell cars that polute and kill along with other dubious practices so why not sell something we have historically been very good at making?
It's standard practice to have interchange officers from allied armed forces embedded on anything other than nationally-sensitive operations, so I wouldn't be surprised if USCG, USN, and indeed Australian, Canadian, Kiwi, and other navies were lending personnel to the Royal Navy. Of course, we'd probably be lending as many in the other direction, so I'm not convinced that discovering that exchange officer programs exist represents a massive exposé.
a measure to fill a shortage in personnel with the required skills and from reports none of the Coast Guard personnel are officers
The way the military have been treated over the past twenty years, it's hardly surprising they can't get UK recruits even for their much reduced establishment. Inadequate, insufficient, and sometimes downright dangerous equipment, endless tales of procurement failure. And even as an RN or RAF member (and indeed even as a reservist), you could find yourself on detachment to some land-locked war-without-end, and regularly be on dangerous, ill equipped patrol outside the camp in crapholes like 'stan or Iraq. Sailors join the Navy to fight and if need be die on ships, not die as second rank infantrymen on some shit-and dust stained patch of mis-governed central Asia, whilst the tossers of the MoD tie their hands behind their back with ridiculous "rules of engagement" to please cowardly civil rights lawyers. And if the brown stuff hits the fan, you can rely on the evil twats of the MoD to hang you out to dry, even funding law firms to go and make up evidence against its own soldiers.
I come from a long tradition of military service, but I wouldn't encourage my kids to consider a career in the armed forces. Would you?
Now that I think about it, the loan of U.S. personnel to actually keep British ships running is an amusing example of changes in the U.S./British relationship, and how the more things change, the more they stay the same.
So, in 1812 the U.S. declared war on the British Empire, in large part because the Royal Navy had been so enlarged to fight the Napoleonic Wars that it didn't have enough men to man all its ships. So the RN took to stopping U.S. ships and pressed 10,000+ sailors off of them during the wars. So here we are 205 years later and we are freely giving sailors to the RN to keep their ships at sea.
Let us know if you guys want New Jersey back as well. We're not doing much with that place. Just leave us the Turnpike--we use that to get from New York to Philadelphia. :)
All Americans ought to go and find out how the Canadians describe the war of 1812.
My favorite from that fracas was the use of the Hucleberry Hound Ploy to make a few hundred troops and indian levies look like thousands by marching them in front of a wood, then having them double-time it back to the start behind it for another go round.
Fort Detroit surrendered with nary a shot fired.
You guys can have Detroit back if you want. We're not doing much with that either, and it sounds like you worked really hard to take it in the first place. In fact, I think that it America doesn't show Canada enough love, and a gift of the city of Detroit would be just the thing to set things right.
(And we can throw in the Redwings if you want!)
No I wouldn't, in fact I would advise them to steer well clear. Even if you do get deployed you daren't shoot the enemy in case you get locked up for life, even though if you don't shoot them they will surely kill you either in the street outside your barracks or on patrol. Your personal equipment will be inadequate, your training is how to clean and disassemble your gun to the point you can do it blindfold ... not that it actually needs cleaning because you won't get to fire it even on a range... apart from the SAS a soldier gets to fire a gun on training no more than 3 times a year because the accountants worry about the cost... lives are cheap but bullets aren't). Then you will notice every government (including Thatcher and Blair) send the forces to war only to make half the survivors redundant, my suspicion is they realise that letting an enemy shoot our guys is cheaper than a redundancy package.
Its common practice to exchange officers within NATO as a cross-training and international coordination tool, but not to keep up mechanical systems because one side is running out of sailors.
Plus the U.S. Coast Guard is not part of the armed forces of the United States, except in wartime. (Though perhaps our perpetual whack-a-mole against cavedwelling jihadi bastards du jour counts!)
@kain preacher
Perhaps, but still, I would rather have USCG personnel relieving Navy personnel, and then have the USN engineering personnel on British ships. Obviously, USCG personnel on a U.S. ship that comes under fire then qualifies as a hostile action against the U.S. I'd rather not have USCG personnel in the middle of a potential incident between a British ship and somebody, which does not count as an attack against the U.S.
>>Plus the U.S. Coast Guard is not part of the armed forces of the United States, except in wartime
I think you're a little confused.
They're DHS, and formerly DOT, but they're still an armed force that exists under Title 10. They are also one of the seven uniformed services alongside the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, Public Health Service, and NOAA Commissioned Corps, though honestly the National Disaster Medical Service should be considered by the law to be a uniformed service on its own, they do have a lot of USPHS people who work for them such as the first Disaster Medical Assistance Teams (as well as the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Teams [or DMORT] for dead folks) and what not but not everyone in the NDMS is a PHS employee. For example, I used to be a member of an NDMS DMAT when I was an undergraduate but I've never worked for the USPHS.
What I think you mean is that they're not part of the DoD unless there's a declared war and the Secretary of the Navy requests that the USCG be transferred to the US Navy. Otherwise their chain of command flows from their Enlistedmen to their Officers to the Commandant of the Coast Guard to the Secretary of Homeland Security.
"the RN seemed keen to keep Scaneagle in service, using it during the Unmanned Warrior roboat exercise last year"
Is a "roboat" an unmanned boat?
Anyway, the RN seems keen on paying admirals to sit behind desks whilst the fleet shrinks to nothing; they'll be lucky to have row-boats, never mind robots...
'Anyway, the RN seems keen on paying admirals to sit behind desks whilst the fleet shrinks to nothing'
A common trope but it's not true. There's a requirement for a number of roles that are filled by Admirals, to some extent this is set by the Government and their desire to be big players in various multi-national headquarters, the structure of the MoD etc. Meanwhile the fleet shrinks to nothing because the same Government isn't actually very keen on ordering any ships, but is surprised that on the rare occasion they do it's as if the UK has forgotten how to build them and baulks at the consequent increase in price.
it's as if the UK has forgotten how to build them and baulks at the consequent increase in price
The high cost is rarely the basic manufacture, more often than not it is vast design cost over-runs and the initial production units that seem to be built to an ever-changing specification, and the fact that those development and change costs are not spread across any credible number of production units. Look at the RN type 26 - supposed to replace the 16 type 23s, but that clown Cameron canned the production numbers at 8. So not only are the design and development costs per vessel doubled, the RN will be having to maintain a tiny batch of vessels, so spares and maintenance costs will be higher, and interoperability limited. They even wasted money redesigning the main gun, when in modern warfare the admittedly ancient and inaccurate Kryten does everything that is needed. And as is usual with MoD procurement, they're building the type 26 with only a vague idea about its main missile systems, so costs will rise further.
Even at 16 vessels, that's still too small a production run - the RN would have been better off buying something like flight IIA Arleigh Burke units, where they'd get a lot more capability and a larger vessel for at least 25% less than the type 26 will end up costing. And if we'd gone down that route, we wouldn't have needed to develop the under-armed and unreliable type 45.
Absolutely central to this problem is MoD and to an extent the Navy themselves. I suspect that if BAe were told to sod off, design and cost a ship for purpose "x", they'd come back with something readily buildable, and at a reasonable cost. Instead, MoD fart about creating overly-detailed requirements, issue contracts with incomplete specifications, then can't stop micro-managing the design and spec, dither over the important choices, change their mind, change order quantities, fail to plan production volumes etc etc. And then we end up with expensive, complex vessels that nobody else wants, other than in second hand fire-sales (type 23, for example). Meanwhile, the French are able to build modern navy vessels that other countries are qeueing up to buy, proving that it can be done.
NO NO NO
Do NOT buy foreign
You forget that if you buy local a huge chunk of the 'cost' comes back as tax, unemployment and benefit savings and the savings in policing because people in work need less watching
What you need to do is buy sufficient of the ships to make it worth while (so instead of 8 buy 80... there is one hell of a lot of sea and if we ever did end up in a war again we need to protect our food supplies). When we are building that number we can build them cheaper and fix the problems then manage to sell them to others... the French manage to sell to the Russians, the Chinese and Indian navies are often buying not to mention the Australians... a great opportunity awaits
so once you stop paying they go back to Boeing.
Really? Even with an endurance of 24 hours, 80 knots cruising speed means their range is about 1800nm (a little over 24000 brontosauri, or close to 11500 Chinese aircraft carriers). It'll suffer the same fate as SPEARS' first Playmonaut, somewhere south of Greenland, roughly, and without accounting for headwind. Also, can RN afford a full tank of fuel?
I find it interesting that someone would blame NHS costs for a shortage of funding for the military. Would the shortage of available money not be more directly related to how multi-nationals and the wealthy have bought tax evasions? Sure there are often large and inexcusable cluster f*$%s that should be easily avoidable, but those go hand in hand with THE reason there is a shortage of governmental funds in the first(?) world and I would suggest much of what was once the first world either isn't or won't be first for much longer.
Why do you Brits insist on duplicating USN's more ridiculous screwups? Scan Eagle was a lovely bit of gear: 20 plus hour endurance. Highly modular so you could customize easily. Very smooth so you get decent imagery from even small optics. Near zero visual or acoustic signature. If I stay downwind from you I can close in, sneak n peek, and keep an eye out for hours and hours... and you'd never know.
Scan Eagle was developed for the fishing industry, so DoD was unable to fsckup the development from the get go.
USN solution? Get rid of it and replace with a robotic helo (MQ-9)! Why not? Its as reliable as a crack addict. As a weapons and optics platform? It shakes like a drunk going through DT's. Its louder than a trainload of hormonal harpies on speed. Shorter combat radius than my todger .... on a really cold day.
And the Royal Navy wants to follow suit and replace Scan Eagle with a robotic Lynx? Hmm.
I havent any idea how the RN or USCG pays for it's Scan Eagles, but for at least a little while the USN used an interesting approach akin to an IT SLA. Basically one didn't buy the aircraft, catapults, ground control system, etc. These remained Insitu property. What one did was contract for a certain number of hours of ISR time distributed over some nominal duration (1 deployment), with an understanding that weather gets a vote
From a users perspective that is outstanding... If fifty airplanes lawn dart I could care less as long as I get my imagery. The planes at that point are on the contractor, so they have a strong performance incentive. So rather than merely consuming oxygen, food, and berthing space the contractors would do really weird stuff such as preventative maintenance.
I have no clue if that model held after Boeing snapped them up. Its one thing to bully a small contractor, another thing entirely to grow a pair and confront a giant. But it was good while it lasted.
From a users perspective that is outstanding
That depends on how good the SLA is for the customer, and how well adhered it is by the provider. Here in the UK, "private finance initiative" has been a gloriously costly failure in the civilian sector, lining the pockets of bankers, ripping off the taxpayer, and providing absurdly costly schools, hospitals and roads. Unfortunately, we've seen MoD take to it with great enthusiasm, as in the RAF's Voyager tanker aircraft, where the PFI deal came in at three times the cost of buying them outright. Even in simple lease deals, the MoD get fleeced, as in their leasing deal for C-17s, where the Heroes of Whitehall (tm) paid as much to lease the aircraft as they could have bought them outright for.
The only explanation for the enduring incompetence of MoD (and Westminster, and the Treasury) is that all these bodies work for the interests of Britain's enemies.
' the RAF's Voyager tanker aircraft, where the PFI deal came in at three times the cost of buying them outright'
Although that's true, it does also include the cost of the infrastructure, operations etc. So there are lots of nice shiny new buildings at Brize Norton that wouldn't have been there if the MoD had just brought the aircraft. I think it also includes the cost of routine maintenance but I'd have to do some research to confirm that.
That's not to say the MoD couldn't have written a better contract, there's no provision to refuel helicopters or aircraft that us the boom and receptacle method of refuelling such as C-17 or P-8. And adding that would be a contract change aka a licence to print money.
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