Royal Navy gets too close for missiles, switches to guns.

[Kingmaker]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/11 ... with-guns/

Royal Navy warships will be left without anti-ship missiles and be forced to rely on naval guns because of cost-cutting, the Ministry of Defence has admitted.

The Navy’s Harpoon missiles will retire from the fleet’s frigates and destroyers in 2018 without a replacement, while there will also be a two year gap without helicopter-launched anti-shipping missiles.

Naval sources said the decision was “like Nelson deciding to get rid of his cannons and go back to muskets” and one senior former officer said warships would "no longer be able to go toe-to-toe with the Chinese or Russians".

Harpoon missiles are unlikely to be replaced for up to a decade, naval sources said, leaving warships armed only with their 4.5in Mk 8 guns for anti-ship warfare. Helicopter-launched Sea Skua missiles are also going out of service next year and the replacement Sea Venom missile to be carried by Wildcat helicopters will not arrive until late 2020.

One Naval source said: “We will be losing our missile capability in total for two years. We will still have the gun, but the range of that is about 17 miles, compared to Harpoon, which is about 80 miles”.

The source said the new helicopter-launched Sea Venom missile will have a shorter range than the Harpoon and helicopters are also vulnerable to bad weather and being shot down.

“The moment you put it up against a frigate or a destroyer, you will be inside their weapons range,” the source added.

Rear-Adml Chris Parry, said: "It's a significant capability gap and the Government is being irresponsible. It just shows that our warships are for the shop window and not for fighting."

Lord West of Spithead, a former First Sea Lord, said: “This is just another example of where the lack of money is squeezing and making the nation less safe.

“We will have this gap of several years without missiles. Well, that’s fine if you don’t have to fight anybody in the meantime.”

The Royal Air Force has long axed its own anti-ship missiles.

Nick Childs, a naval expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said Britain was cutting its anti-ship missiles just as America had decided they were becoming more critical to maritime fighting.

“It must be a great concern that this capability is going to be removed without immediate or direct replacement because we are moving into an era of concern about a more contested maritime environment,” he said.

A spokesman for the Navy said: “All Royal Navy ships carry a range of offensive and defensive weapons systems. Backed by a rising defence budget and a £178 billion equipment plan, upgrade options to all our weapons are kept under constant review.”

But hey, at least they've got a new aircraft carrier!

[Dominus Atheos]

That doesn't have planes yet because it can only launch F-35Bs, the extra-clusterfuck version.

[Tribble]

But hey, at least they've got a new aircraft carrier!

... Are they going to have aircraft though? Last time I checked the replacements for the Sea Harriers are nowhere near ready. Oh, and due to cutbacks Portsmouth might not be able to handle the carriers when launched:

Britain's £6billion new aircraft carriers 'at risk' because of Tory government defence spending cuts

The National Audit Office (NAO) says the Ministry of Defence has failed to carry out the dockside work at the £6.2billion warships’ Portsmouth base

The deployment of the Navy ’s two new aircraft carriers has been put at risk by defence cuts, the spending watchdog has warned.

The National Audit Office (NAO) says the Ministry of Defence has failed to carry out the dockside work at the £6.2billion warships’ Portsmouth base.

“This may jeopardise the carriers’ ability to operate,” the watchdog says.

In a scathing report, the NAO says the MoD faces a £8.5billion backlog of repairs to its military sites and bases over the next 30 years.

It says the cuts to funding mean the Portsmouth naval base is not ready to receive HMS Queen Elizabeth, the first of the two aircraft carriers, when she comes into service next year.

“The Department has been working to provide the estate assets necessary to enable the carriers to operate.

“This includes building a new jetty and dredging a channel deep enough to enable the carriers to sail into the port.

"However, because of funding pressures, the Department has not invested in ageing estate assets.

“This may jeopardise the carriers’ ability to operate.

For example, the cables that supply power to the base and carriers are more than 80 years old.

They need replacing but there is no funding available to do this,” the report says.

The Royal Navy dismissed the NAO’s assertion that the carriers would not be able to operate out of Portsmouth.

A Royal Navy spokesman said: “Portsmouth Naval base will be ready for the arrival of HMS Queen Elizabeth in 2017.The power delivery infrastructure required to support the arrival of the Aircraft Carrier has been fully assessed and, where necessary, upgraded.”

The aircraft carriers, the Queen Elizabeth and the Prince of Wales, have been dogged by delays and cost overruns and at one point faced going to sea without any fighter planes.

Dredging Portsmouth harbour to accommodate the two ships has cost £100million.

The NAO says the failure to maintain the country’s military sites is putting our defence capability at risk.

It records that the Army’s main vehicle support and storage site at Ashworth in Gloucestershire lacks the capability to keep vehicles “at very high levels of readiness for deployments.”

And it said RAF Brize Norton had to be temporarily shut down for safety reasons because the fuelling system had fallen into disrepair.

“As the estate’s condition deteriorates, some parts may wholly or partially close. This will exacerbate other risks and could reduce operational readiness.

“Furthermore, poor accommodation for service families is affecting the morale and the recruitment and retention of service personnel,” the report says.

The MoD is accused of acting “only where the health and safety of those using the estate is at risk.

“As a result, there has been a steady decline in the overall condition of the estate. Increasingly, assets have needed to be replaced rather than repaired.”

The watchdog is scathing about the 2011 decision by the Coalition government to outsource its maintenance arm, the Defence Infrastructure Organisation (DIO), to the private firm Capita.

“This overall model has not worked. Roles and responsibilities are unclear, governance arrangements are confused and DIO still does not have the skills and capabilities it needs.

“DIO faces a number of challenges to improve its performance, including high levels of sickness and poor morale,” the report says.

Amyas Morse, head of the National Audit Office, said: “The Department has started to improve its management of the defence estate, however the strategy and current funding levels only allow for a partial reversal of the decline in the condition of the estate.

“The Department has not yet set out how it will fully address the significant challenges it faces sustaining the whole of the estate and resultant risks to military capability.”

Lib Dem shadow Defence Minister Judith Jolly said: “Our troops are dealing with the chronic under-investment in defence infrastructure and vital facilities like forces housing.

"They have threatened to turn carriers worth £6billion into white elephants due their incompetence.

“The condition of much of the Department’s estate is poor and deteriorating. How can we, in 2016, be in a situation that we might have to close buildings and facilities because they are falling apart

“How can we expect the best soldiers in the world to live and work like this? It’s unacceptable and it is high time the government stop looking the other way and properly invest in our troops and defence of the realm.”

Shadow Defence Secretary Nia Griffiths said: “This report paints a shocking picture of mismanagement and underinvestment by the MoD which has left much of the defence estate in a deteriorating condition.

"The NAO is clear that the state of the MoD’s bases and depots represents a risk to military capability and a failure to guarantee value for money to British taxpayers.

“But amongst the most alarming findings is that a failure to invest in the estate may jeopardise the ability of the UK’s two new aircraft carriers to operate.

"This represents an outrageous failure to plan for the future and the Government must urgently ensure that it makes funds available so that these carriers can enter service without delay.”

An MoD spokesman said: “This is an important report and we are determined to deliver a better defence estate.

"That’s why we’ve outlined a long-term, military-led strategy, to invest £4 billion in training facilities fit for our strong and modern armed forces and better accommodation to deliver more stability for military families.”

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/br ... rs-9259482

[Adam Reynolds]

Most of the US Navy's Burke class don't have Harpoons either. The Harpoon is basically useless against most enemies anyway.

Their anti-aircraft missiles should at least theoretically have anti-ship capability, as all US missiles do, but it is likely they haven't bothered with the software upgrades necessary for this, given all of their other problems.

[Sea Skimmer]

Harpoon was taken off most Burkes but only for top weight reasons. Tico's also often don't have Harpoon, but top weight removal on those ships already cost the SPS-49 array. No margin designs at work.

I don't believe the Aster 15/30 ever had an anti surface mode tested, it's possible the software exists, since it's the live fire test that consumes the real money and that program has existed a long time with active if slow funding. Two new versions are now coming, one basically an all updated Aster 30 with a new seeker, and the other a dedicated ABM interceptor mod with a much faster upper stage. Wouldn't be surprising if an anti ship mode comes out of this, given the sudden partial ability of Europe to notice Russia exists. However these projects also won't be in service until long after 2020.

CAMM does have a requirement for anti surface targets IIRC, but it's so small the effectiveness and range would be low to the point you might actually be worried about enemy gunfire, and for that matter if Russian ships are involved, a possible surface torpedo attack of wtf.

As far as air launched weapons though that should be rather less a future problem, as while the British Spear 3 program is aimed at land targets it's still a turbojet powered missile with active radar guidance from Brimestone and a 50lb scale shaped charge. Meaning it should have no problem attacking a moving ship and significantly damaging it. Importantly an F-35B could takeoff with sixteen of the things, so even if the enemy is not sunk you could certainly set it on fire. Also it would provide an anti battleship capability, vital for future forum debates.

The semi active Sea Skua on helicopters is really only a weapon against worthless enemies who can't fight back in the first place, it was a little more high intensity combat relevant when it was new. That capability gap is more likely to be missed then Harpoon though, but whatever, the whole idea of designing a dedicated replacement for Skua seems to me fairly silly, compared to just mounting an heavyweight anti tank weapon as the ROK is doing on it's own Wildcats.

[Elheru Aran]

Also it would provide an anti battleship capability, vital for future forum debates.

...was the RN really expecting to run into some opponent rebuilding the Yamato or something?

[Eternal_Freedom]

Also it would provide an anti battleship capability, vital for future forum debates.

...was the RN really expecting to run into some opponent rebuilding the Yamato or something?

Contingency planning is everything, and a way to keep Admirals occupied and still thinking. There's a reason your DoD has contingency plans to invade Canada after all.

Plus I'm fairly certain Sea Skimmer was joking with that line, at least partially.

[Elheru Aran]

Also it would provide an anti battleship capability, vital for future forum debates.

...was the RN really expecting to run into some opponent rebuilding the Yamato or something?

Contingency planning is everything, and a way to keep Admirals occupied and still thinking. There's a reason your DoD has contingency plans to invade Canada after all.

Plus I'm fairly certain Sea Skimmer was joking with that line, at least partially.

Well I got the 'joking' bit but it's simply a ludicrous notion.

Though I suppose that if anybody *still* has heavy-duty coastal artillery... perhaps such missiles could multi-task against those? Who knows.

I'm just mildly appalled that the British government, in so many ways, seems to be trying energetically to put their pants on over their heads...

[Sea Skimmer]

Keep in mind that a 50lb bomb going slow enough....probably won't even penetrate the hull of a major vessel. Once you've gotten to a destroyer and bigger the hull and deck plates plus stringers can actually repel it to a point. In that respect a shaped charge is fairly important to doing any serious damage at all. But it'd also just mean as a practical matter being a shaped charge that siz it won't just blow through a hull or superstructure block, it'd also blow through 12 inches of steel with no greater effort, if much less behind armor effect. So you could blow the turrets off a battleship easily at that point.

Spear 3 isn't meant to go through much of anything before it detonates, unlike the US SDB-1 design, but that weapon isn't powered and can only attack ships from a high glide trajectory. SDB-2, a completely different weapon that's also being scaled to fit the F-35B bay, unlike SDB-1, has similar warhead concept to Spear 3. A shaped charge with a fragmentation bomb grafted onto the back of it. Either way, it should work out to be a rather expensive little missile, but it will let British fighters attack moving anything from outside the range of all but the heaviest SAM systems with a single common weapon, and that's pretty damn potent as a thing coming. Assuming any money exists to produce it when its ready.

The US uses almost the same TJ-150 engine in its MALD decoy/jammer/SEAD drone so said powerplant already has a considerable economy of scale. That's what makes the idea of a turbojet anti tank missile now be remotely sane. Another great leap in the science of making typical sci fi armies look pathetic.

[Sea Skimmer]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hkfRWnhZdI
Okay found this in decent quality. Anti boat test of Brimestone from several years ago. One of the targets is circling, other two stationary, the real importance of the test being that the fire control actually got the missiles to hit all three, and not all striking on the moving one, which would have a much higher radar return due to dopplar effect.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ub9IL9fflU
This is official corporate propaganda video of how Spear 3 plus the F-35's sensor fusion will with the insertion of money will convert warfare into something even more unfair, and with impunity even against medium range SAM systems.

[Raj Ahten]

It's threads like this that keep me coming back to SD.net. Sea Skimmer thanks for being free with your analysis and opinions your posts on military matters are almost always worth reading. Are there any online or print periodical resources you'd recommend for keeping abreast of military matters? It seems most military themed message boards are pits of nationalistic nonsense and superficiality. Most popular nonfiction and magazines I've seen are also quite shallow.

[Sea Skimmer]

Defense Industry Daily is a good place to keep an eye on. It will give a much better idea of how money actually flows through the defense industrial shredder of doom and into the hands of bored soldiers then anywhere else I know of. And since it goes manly off actual budget releases and the like, it tries to give actual cost information whenever possible.

That's kind of a big deal when you see something another site reports as 'bold radical gamechanging super idea' and then you look and see that this site also reports that, and that said bold radical idea soon to change all combat also only has 2.5 million dollars of R&D funding for the year.

[Starglider]

Sea Skimmer could write for a pop military blog e.g. Foxtrot Alpha and do a better job than all their previous writers.

[Raj Ahten]

Defense Industry Daily is a good place to keep an eye on. It will give a much better idea of how money actually flows through the defense industrial shredder of doom and into the hands of bored soldiers then anywhere else I know of. And since it goes manly off actual budget releases and the like, it tries to give actual cost information whenever possible.

That's kind of a big deal when you see something another site reports as 'bold radical gamechanging super idea' and then you look and see that this site also reports that, and that said bold radical idea soon to change all combat also only has 2.5 million dollars of R&D funding for the year.

Thanks for the advice.

[Sidewinder]

Sea Skimmer could write for a pop military blog e.g. Foxtrot Alpha and do a better job than all their previous writers.

The saddest thing about this proposal, is that Sea Skimmer could do a better job than PROFESSIONALS who are PAID to DO THIS JOB- see Pierre Sprey, who falsely claims to have designed the F-16 fighter and the A-10 ground-attack aircraft, when he merely wrote the specifications that served as guidelines for the actual designers.

[Sidewinder]

Another example that Sea Skimmer can do better than: Reuben F. Johnson, a writer for The Weekly Standard, whose article was torn to pieces in this Sino Defence Forum thread.

[Sea Skimmer]

I'd point out that back in the day the Fighter Mafia folk actually generated a large amount of detailed valid mathematical data to back up their ideas, involving a lot more people then just the well known Sprey and Boyd that varied in time and place. I am generally not one to generate that kind of RAND style analysis past a bit of multiplication to show some basic relative facts if it seems useful. Certainly I'm not going to do that for free.

The problem was this paper analysis stuff they did was only valid within a very limited set of assumptions, one of which was that BVR combat would simply not work to an operationally relevant degree as had often been the problem in Vietnam. Also that the ~1965 era problems of digital and ANALOG weapon systems reliability would never be solved at all (they did pretty correctly predict that aircraft with 'state of the art' avionics would only get more and more expensive by all measures). Also they assumed that fuel costs would not skyrocket for the US military... making vast numbers of aircraft with cheap engines and all the pilot training needed for them unaffordable for a new reason. 1969 vs 1974 is a pretty key difference.

Problem is all that crap changed completely by the end of the 1980s, leading to as Ian Hogg called it, the Gulf Life Fire Exercise, and lots of other people fully predicted THAT and got it right. But Sprey just keeps trying to get paid to act like nothing ever did. He is not alone on that but certainly annoying.

[Sea Skimmer]

Another example that Sea Skimmer can do better than: Reuben F. Johnson, a writer for The Weekly Standard, whose article was torn to pieces in this Sino Defence Forum thread.

That's at least more written stupid then actually wrong. China does have an absurdly irrational proliferation of weapons programs producing full up hardware. Some of that is just patronage to its bloated state arms industry, some of it very much is an aggressive, if very self doubting, warfighting strategy. You can kind of tell though which are the systems the PLA would like to bet the farm on if it could.

Thanks for the comments all BTW.

[Simon_Jester]

I'd point out that back in the day the Fighter Mafia folk actually generated a large amount of detailed valid mathematical data to back up their ideas, involving a lot more people then just the well known Sprey and Boyd that varied in time and place. I am generally not one to generate that kind of RAND style analysis past a bit of multiplication to show some basic relative facts if it seems useful. Certainly I'm not going to do that for free.

Well yeah, but everyone else does it for money anyway.

Heck, how about you and me? You can do the informed gut reaction, and I'll crunch the differential equations.

[Zaune]

In all seriousness, we probably have enough academic talent hanging out around here to produce a credible e-zine. We even have someone who could get it onto Amazon for us... possibly.

[Sea Skimmer]

Maybe, I'm open to specific ideas. The trick is identifying something people might actually pay for, in an era of rampant piracy and free blogging nonsense, and the more contributors involved the higher the threshold is for to even be able to split beer money out of it.

The other thing is having a hook to establish some form of credibility. You've all known me long enough to know I'm not actively trying to lead people astray, and I have a lot more sources then I ever post, because that kind of research is in fact worth something, but that's not exactly an overwhelming pull.

I have mused before though trying to take the SDN wiki, and making some actual serious ship system engineering (the box diagram kind of engineering) and armor mechanics papers out of it. But that's work and honestly, I was pretty low activity here for years for a reason. I rather badly hurt my back this year and it's left me inside the house a damn lot more then I'd like healing, but I'm hoping this is not carrying over long term!

[Starglider]

Well, I could make SpringSharp type apps pretty trivially if someone else specified the logic. I recall Shep did one for tanks a while back, albeit as a spreadsheet. I don't know of an equivalent for combat aircraft or missiles.

[Sea Skimmer]

They exist but they suck if your talking about not saying for it.


But hey the real money would be in using an algorithm to estimate costs on stuff, because thats far more actionable a subject for people, which is as you know an ever increasing proportion of which is purely human resources linked for personal coding, or studying coding. Not cutting metal at the end product, though that can still be really fucking ass expensive. As the F-35 program shows, ideas about that, may vary slightly, on the decades and tens of billions of dollars.

So what we should do is you spin together some entirely non defense specific stuff on that, I throw in some guidelines for the materials costs and the required levels of milspeak bullshit at ever level of calculation so it looks like its all defense specific, as opposed to the reality which is specifications for physical items just tell us to be less retarded in this or that point, and then see what that craps out for predictions of program costs. We could probably throw in complete nonsense and it would be 90% as accurate as the best on the market is what reality feels like today.

[Patroklos]

Harpoon was taken off most Burkes but only for top weight reasons. Tico's also often don't have Harpoon, but top weight removal on those ships already cost the SPS-49 array. No margin designs at work.

They were never taken off the DD51s retroactively in the same way the British are doing with their fleet. Rather the Flight IIA was designed without them as their spot on the Flight Is and IIs are now a helohanger. Every Burke that was designed with them still has them. I am guessing this was what you meant.

I had not heard about the CGs, as of a year ago (the last time I was on the waterfront) all of them still had the fantail mounts for canister launchers.

[Starglider]

We could make the cold war version of 'Rule The Waves' where you try to assemble a more effective superpower military than McNamara managed by controlling procurement and recommending when to escalate and when to de-escalate proxy wars.