The problem isn’t the politians it is both them and the senior officers. The budget and what is possible is both agreed at an sdsr. The problem is the service chiefs add equipment they know they cannot afford based on hopeful accounting, the politians don’t over question it as it make them look good in the papers and can help industry in there constitutance. The service chiefs will be gone by the time cost actually hits so there not that fussed. The services and MoD base a lot of this on making efficency saving they have no idea how to achieve and so the budget quickly starts to run away compounding the issue. If we did a defence review with considering efficiencies in the budget and on worse case financial planning it would likely look much more like sdsr2010 than sdsr2015.Jake1992 wrote:I agree with everything you've just said but the problem is the politians, they set budget then expect the RN and other services to do a lot more than the budget allows.
Just look at what they expect on top of CSG and CASD they want the RN to up its ASW in the North Sea and N.A + increase presence in the Arctic + increase presence in the far east ( working with Aus and Japan a lot more ) whilst still maintaining the gulf,the med, the Caribbean and S.A.
Yeah CASD is North Atlantic asw and artic as that’s were Russian ssbns will be hiding and we’re ares are likely going. I take a leaf out of the USN deploying destroy squadron 60 to rota. We assign 4 type 23 plus supply/tanker to asw tasks in the North Atlantic, this along with mpa and ssn assets covers the CASD and asw in the high north.
You then have your carrier group it will deploy every year where it goes is up to the navy and government but if it deploys east then if it’s made up of 2 ff 2 dd a tanker, stores and a carrier then it can undertake defence engagement if the Far East or gulf. Like a US task group they spread out and under take different engagements coming together for exercises or passage thru areas of higher threat. Should this group be tasked to an operation then it won’t be doing defence engagement with allies at the same time.
A similar group is in refit back in the uk to stand up the following year.
Mcmv and hydrographic can continue to carry out there vitals tasks both at home abroad and in the south Atlantic.
The Caribbean and south Atlantic have assets over and above that discussed and need nothing more adding systems to the bays using other RFAs to provide support or the opv vessels for engagement and support , neither of these regions require high end military capability.