I think this statement says it best

https://x.com/shashj/status/17100557405 ... q02bHexwZA

Always make me wonder. Over spec’d things you can’t afford seem endemic. Talk of corvettes I assume due to historical ideas of cheapness, then proceed to stuff if full of all the expensive bits to turn it into a frigate they first thought off but didn’t want to say because they assume the original a...

RFA Argus is a primary casualty reception vessel that’s what it has been doing for decades. It is not an aviation platform for combat operations the last time they tried that it was deemed unacceptable. Indeed Argus is severely less capable for that role than the last time she was used as such. Hav...

So what you are wanting is an aviation ships that isn’t an aviation ship like say HMS ocean but can use multiple helicopters to do low level operations. I’d say what you want doesn’t exist or at the very least will look exactly like the ships you say you don’t want. The afloat role 3 hospital is no...

Why must Argus be replaced? Simple - because it is the cost of a lite frigate and without it we will we will be either not able to do the small things (e.g. supporting the fight against Ebola in Sierra Leone) which we should be able to do, or worse we will be wasting money that we need ships just t...

Why must Argus be replaced? Simple - because it is the cost of a lite frigate and without it we will we will be either not able to do the small things (e.g. supporting the fight against Ebola in Sierra Leone) which we should be able to do, or worse we will be wasting money that we need ships just t...

Why must Argus be replaced? Simple - because it is the cost of a lite frigate and without it we will we will be either not able to do the small things (e.g. supporting the fight against Ebola in Sierra Leone) which we should be able to do, or worse we will be wasting money that we need ships just t...

I’d be happy with another LPH, if we can afford it, but as had been said before only if more is spent on the helicopters etc to make it worthwhile. My view is pessimistic, which is we need to buy more for the two (plus Argus) we have. And it's not just helicopters. There are so many failing that ne...

I think largely the problem is you are assuming that removing equipment is because the budget has been cut it is not. The defence budget is so much more than that. To make things stable and much less hollowed out you could probably increase defence by 1/2 a percentage point of gdp and still need to...

That must be unbelievably difficult for that poor girls family to read.

The point I am making is, if the politicians of the day are really so superficial and clueless that the main decision on reducing the fleet is dramatically influenced by whether the French have 4 flattops and the UK only have two, three or four then who cares if they are 200m or 240m or 260m or car...

If we went down the route of LHDs…. Not sure they would, I don’t think either politicians or the media would even know what they were. Its time to start considering this in a more outward looking way. How many of the worlds top 10 navies only have 2x flattops? RN is the outlier. Outward looking whe...

If we went down the route of LHDs I can’t see us license building any design, rightly or wrongly these vessels would be seen second only to the carriers in importance to the RN by both the media and politicians. With that in mind it’d be a media nightmare for any government not to design our own to...

If we went down the route of LHDs I can’t see us license building any design, rightly or wrongly these vessels would be seen second only to the carriers in importance to the RN by both the media and politicians. With that in mind it’d be a media nightmare for any government not to design our own to...

Thank you. Very interesting. It is a widely held view that virtually everything is unaffordable apart from current planning which is in itself extremely expensive, both to procure and to operate. Could the funding be used differently to achieve more? That’s the interesting part IMO. Current plannin...

Thank you. Very interesting. It is a widely held view that virtually everything is unaffordable apart from current planning which is in itself extremely expensive, both to procure and to operate. Could the funding be used differently to achieve more? That’s the interesting part IMO. Current plannin...

I don’t know what we are currently spending on surface vessels but type 32 probably will follow type 31 but I think it will be a type 31 batch 2 if it does. Very simply, if Govan, Rosyth and Belfast are building concurrently the three programs combined will be costing around £1.2bn per year. All I ...

Hard to push back out of service dates when reactor life’s are finite and they won’t be refuelled.

It’s not 2% of 55 billion for new equipment if you use 2022 accounts it’ 8.5 billion for equipment per year so 2% of that is a lot less. The total equipment budget is over £20bn per year and is due to stay at that level until at least 2025. It can be spent on whatever the MoD/RN chooses to spend it...

While I like the look of these where do you see you money coming from for them and the ARG made up of an LHD plus MRSS you prosed ? I do not see these are a viable replacement for the whole amphib set up on there own. You mention these for LSG-N so what do you propose for LSG-S and again where to y...

first boat starting 2028 So unless Barrow speed up the drumbeat SSN numbers will not increase before the mid to late 2040’s unless Astute extends the OSD beyond 2035. Otherwise it will be decades before AUKUS starts making a material difference for RN. If you wanted to increase the submarine fleet ...

Therefore the kit required by RM would be very different to what is proposed above. Make a proposal then - I completely agree traditional thinking for this region has gone out of the window. The clearest way to illustrate the radically altered strategic landscape is to look at a map of the region. ...

first boat starting 2028 So unless Barrow speed up the drumbeat SSN numbers will not increase before the mid to late 2040’s unless Astute extends the OSD beyond 2035. Otherwise it will be decades before AUKUS starts making a material difference for RN. If you wanted to increase the submarine fleet ...

Maybe more with blowing the budget by a factor of 4. But the budget was there (stated as being nearly £13b at one point) until Cameron pulled just enough out of it to make 13 frigates impossible The estimate of what it would cost for 13 was there, there was no budget to support it hence why numbers...

https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/bae-awarded-4bn-for-next-phase-of-nuclear-submarine-project/ The Ministry of Defence has awarded £3.95 billion of funding to BAE Systems for the next phase of the UK’s next-generation nuclear-powered attack submarine programme, known as SSN-AUKUS. SSN-AUKUS will be th...