It has been claimed that the Royal Navy’s effectiveness will be improved thanks to the Strategic Defence and Security Review.
The comments come after concerns were raised the £178bn plan would not address the Royal Navy’s ongoing manpower and equipment shortages.
Defence Procurement minister Philip Dunne said the SDSR would help ‘deliver the most modern navy in the world’ and stressed that manpower would grow.
MP Philip Dunne…my MP…and and an utterly ignorant and arrogant man…must be loved by the Tory elite as he seems to revel in towing the party line
His comment makes me more concerned than usual – when a Tory says it will all be rosy
Sorry to bring your Leftie self down to earth but can I remind you the bankruptcy our country was in when the ‘Tory elite’ came into Coalition with the LDs in 2010? SDSR2010 had to make very difficult choices given the total lack of money available. Keep Tornado or Harriers and ships? Keep the money pit called Nimrod? Remember the “There is no money” note left my Mr Byrne? And the £35 Billion (or whatever) black hole in the Defence budget?
6 years on people like you are moaning about the lack of everything when we now have the biggest re-equipment of our Forces in decades thanks to a complete rebuild of our economy. We have now funded with REAL money: 2 Carriers, 138 F35s, 14 A330 MRTTVoyager tankers, 22 A400ms, 9 c_17s, 9 P-8 Poseidons, 8 Type 26s, 5 Class 31s, 7 Astutes, forward work on Trident Successor, and so much more. Even Challengers and Tranche 1 Typhoons are coming out of mothballs!
And here is a thought: The budgeted cost of staying in the EU for 2016 / 17 is some £10 Billion (nett). That is another 3 carriers …
utter tit i wrote to him once about the cost and prolonged building time of the new carriers, i asked if the m.o.d knew the american supercarrier was on hold in reserve, for donation or as a museum ship.with a full reactivation schedule of just 3 months, the reply was the expected party political pamphlet i’d expected,not only are the mod incompetant, butlacking in intelligent thought.
When the SDR was published, there was a minority report questioning how rapidly the armed forces numbers could be increased. I suspect that the RN will get more hulls in the water as a response to this. A lot of hardwear is being bought, and I would suggest that this is one of the reasons why. Even the most optimistic politician must see that numbers are below those needed to maintain a service
I think it’s fair to say that the last defence review stopped the decline in terms of numbers of sailors and ships, and we will see an increase in both for the first time since the end of the cold war.
By the end of the decade and looking forward we will be back in the carrier game in a serious way.
until the next(god forbid)labour governmentd ecomissions them or scraps them
Cosmetic.
I agree with albert everything is now going into trident
I am more curious what happened to the focus on more helicopters, that they stated before the review.
should have kept the harrier and upgraded it like the us marines have done. we’d have got more of them onto the new carriers or, kept illustrious operational, while the dithering idiots at the m.o.d decide once and for all oceans fate.
I think things are looking better for the Royal Navy, will take time though to increase the potency of the navy.. would like to see the navy up to 24 Destroyers and Frigates plus the 6 ocean going patrol vessels in the future. I think the Royal Navy could manage on a figure of 30 patrol and escort ships plus with the two new carriers will carry on being a potent western European navy.
£178Billion over ten years is £17.8Billion per year.
Is this additional military funding? Or is this it???
As I’ve read articles and reports of uk spending at 40+Billion per yer from 2.3% of gdp to 2% of gdp as of 2015/16
Seems a helluva drop?
I think the £178bn is just for capital spend on new equipment whereas that £40bn-ish per year is/was total defense spend including personnel, buildings and other costs.
Great that it’s happening, but the numbers still need to be higher then even the projected increase. 400 new sailors is better then none, or even 400 less, but if you take into account that they are not deployable 24/7 365 days a year, other work commitments, holiday’s, injuries, family commitments and more, it doesn’t leave the navy with allot more. Maybe enough to crew another frigate, but not much more then that. A better way of it would be to increase the navy by 400 sailors every year, for the next 4 or 5 years, giving the navy the few thousands sailors that it needs and wants!
As for increased frigate numbers, absolutely great, and it has hopefully opened up a turning point away from the 2010 SDSR reduction ideas. But again, the only problem is, it may not be until into the 2030’s that more frigate numbers come about, and with the Type 45 production line ended, it only gives them one way to increase hull numbers, and that is to extend the life of at least the oldest Type 23’s, and keep them all in service pushing towards 2030, whilst at the same time at least 2 or 3 new Type 26’s will be active.
the navy would be in far better shape if the proposed origional order of 8 type 45’shad been kept to. if we’ve so much funding available for the type26, why did we sell off th type21’s 22’s and keept the fleet numbers up.
What total bullshit. Government mouth piece.
Steven, the 178 figure is the equipment budget, not the entire defence budget.
30 Merlin HM2s are not enough.
Just putting some things back, which were taken away in SDSR 2010
@Toby Parr
Planned out of service dates for T23s (courtesy of Thinnk Defence)
http://www.thinkdefence.co.uk/2016/03/28004-type-23-frigates-answered/
Every single Review has taken away from the Armed Forces. The Review in 2010 said there was too many people. Redundancies followed. Now there aren’t enough people. A big push to get recent leavers to return was a dismal failure. I suspect that a large chunk of the ‘increased funding’ will go towards propulsion for the T45 Destroyers. Unfortunately, I feel that this is all spin, and the actual benefits will be minimal.
To me the R in SDR seems to stand for REDUCTION in recent years. The Armed Forces are chronically short of machinery and manpower. IMHO the youngsters of today will not put up with the privations of living onboard a warship.
I am not entirely sure why we are investing so much in the navy. Now we have the carriers half built we don’t have much choice I guess, but I don’t really get why we built them in the first place, considering that we have managed just fine without carriers for a while now.
There are no realistic high level wars in the foreseeable future where a navy would be needed, however the Falkland’s demonstrated that a old sub could get past one of the most advanced anti-sub nets in the world. Bring that forward present day and to us vs any decently geared other country (no idea who but lets for arguments sake say russia or china, unlikely but possible) and our carriers are toast (and probably the frigates and destroyers), considering that they would have far more advanced subs that Argentina and we have a fraction of the hulls that we had during the Falkland’s war to be able to put up a decent anti-sub net.
What we do know is that our ground forces will be used again against lower geared rogue states/organisations in the realistic future, and we saw in Iraq/Afgan that they are considerably under manned and under geared for the role. We should be investing more in the land forces (plus transport helicopters) and less in the navy.
Yes its annoying to read that France has sent its carrier to Syria but on the flip side we are doing just fine using ground bases.
The one side of the navy i would like to see more invested in, is ships that can undertake humanitarian activities. They don’t need to be overly armed or armored, but they need room to bed large numbers of people and carry helicopters.
“Yes its annoying to read that France has sent its carrier to Syria but on the flip side we are doing just fine using ground bases”
The whole world isn’t within striking distance of RAF Akrotiri, just for future reference.
i was on ms antrim during the falklands and believe me a carrier providing a full air capability would i believe have kept the enemy at a distance far enough for us not to have suffered the losses of ardent, antelope and coventry, and may, if they’d been close enough to intercept, and prevent the firing of the exocet that sunk the sheffield, the hermes and invincible showed clearly the lack of a capital shipwas more expensive than the money saved when ark royal and eagle were decomissioned in the 1970’s
The whole world is not within striking distance of a carrier group either.
However, realistically we are not in a position to go to war on our own anymore and so need friendly nations nearby to support us, at which point we can use their airbases.
No one suggests we are about to go to war on our own, so that is an utterly worthless point.
That is why NATO exists (you might have heard of it) to which we have to make a valid contribution and having a carrier available will allow to play a greater role than we can without one.
It is very naive to assume we will always have friendly air bases handy to accommodate our every wish.