Experts outline views on naval capability gapping

Yeah !!!!! Sorry Jim, I beat you to it.

Anyway, “Jam Tomorrow” is the way forward until we are all “Toast!”.

And we are all bitter about that, but at least your not selling a from home business worth £300 dollars a day..

let’s buy ocean back from them. she’ll go for a good few years yet. shouldn’t have sold her in the first place.

Of course we don’t have the ability to do that. If we had enough military to deter our enemies, Russia would not have invaded Ukraine when we asked them not to. Admittedly we sent Liz Truss to do the asking, so communication and credibility also weren’t of the highest order. But we kept pushing and they are still not deterred.
We are supposed to be part of an alliance, but the fact that we can do nothing without US help makes us irrelevant until we can step up alongside other allied countries. Until then, it’s not an alliance. It’s a crutch.

NATO is always weaker & less credible when we cut & gap forces & basic capabilities, whatever spin is put on it. Our enemies note it & are emboldened. We need these or their direct replacements to project & retrive forces deployed. It is our own throat we are cutting.

no we arent poor, we used to spend 5% on defence, our goverment have just prioritised other things to win votes
UK is one of the richest countries in the world and a G7 member, stop running the country down

Only if it is spread on top of the cream me ansum !

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“We have never really been in a position to buy whatever we need without getting into serious debt !”

False. The people “educated” by the political-journalist-cultural complex do not care for defence. UK is a very rich country, it just choose to spend its vast sums of money in other things.

Will end up with one carrier store robbed and the other overworked

More like you can’t make an omlette if you’ve given all your eggs away.

How many eggs, it is related to size of uk economy we are a middling western economy. Military expectations should be in line with that. We should get best value out of what we spend absolutely. Gaps occur when there’s too much expectation and not enough resources. Secondly we are probably very good at some stuff and mediocre at other stuff. We don’t have to do it all, we can’t.

A bird in the hand ….etc.

Treason. We allow our enemies a far freer hand the weaker we make ourselves.

In the particular instance of the cancellation of T45 7 & 8, it was nothing whatsoever to do with gapping. It was a bit of a Political Shell game, engineered by G Browne and executed by Bob Ainsworth. In 2008 UORs and supporting the forces in Afghanistan was really stretching the defence budget and at the same time the 2 new carriers were in build at Rosyth (next constituency to G Browne’s). The latter were sacrosanct and the SNP vote was increasing so the cancellation was spun as defending the Scottish Shipbuilding industry by protecting the QE build and cancelling the 2 T45’s so that the building of 13 T26 Frigates on the Clyde could be “accelerated”.

Please resit the temptation to roll on the floor laughing about the latter bit ! The worst bit was that the T45 build was going extremely well, BAecand their block par tenders were on a real roll with the production schedule and costs per hull were falling. Other than the 5 River B2s shipbuilding pretty well stopped on the Clyde.

“the UK government has decided to immediately end the UK’s ability to undertake serious amphibious warfare operations”. ( where serious means opposed beach landings). This is the nub of the matter. This decision has ben taken either because we can’t afford it, and/or because the assessment of risk is that it is very unlikely we will need to do it, and/or because circumstances or technology have enabled an alternative way of handling the risk with or without partners. We are still waiting for the MRSS design, so presumably the powers that be are still figuring out what capability we will need !

Whilst many people in the U.K. find it difficult to take the criticism from the Trump team it is fair to say strong partners do require more than 140 MBTs, 7 Fast jet squadrons, 14 Escorts and 5 SSNs. They also need to be able to train all their own fighter pilots (you don’t actually need that many) and have an AEW capability.
Gapping important capabilities whilst simultaneously reducing your entire military to a very small number of high quality platforms with matching personnel numbers means you loss the ability to significantly effect matters in any domain ; air, sea or land for any sustained period if at all. The incoherent cuts in the 2010 SDR sealed our fate in the matter and it would tale at least the same timescale to reverse the decline even if sufficient funds were made available.
I am doubtful if the U.K. has the political will or understanding to recognise the damage done to our credibility as a strong ally and to rectify the problem in full. If that’s the case then we need to agree what we need to do and shape a defence policy that reflects it rather than continuing the pretence we can deliver a full spectrum of capabilities, which we haven’t been able to do for at least 15 years.
For me that means we focus first on increasing the mass of our air and maritime assets whilst modernising the Army without any increase in its size until the RAF/RAF are of sufficient size to provide a credible deterrent with the ability to strike an enemy hard.
I fear SDR 2025 will continue the mantra of silly phrases such as ‘punching above our weight’, which is the mindset that has got us into this mess in the first place.

Gapping is almost always down to the fact that the services don’t have the money to pay for the equipment they want
The RN budget is only enough to build one T26 frigate per 18 months or so, the T31 probably.one per 9-12 months. There is no money to fund a chunk of the RN’s wishlist, including the second MROS, anything beyond 3 or possibly 4 new Stirling Castle MCMVs and probably some part of the MRSS order.

Ship building is slowed down to fit within the budget and everything that can be retired early or sold off is promptly removed from active service. This is done to create some operating and manpower savings, in order to channel some money into the budget.

All the services face the same problem, that the money available for procurement is, on 2% of GDP, insufficient to even replace what’s in service. Hence the premature retirement of the Typhoon F2, the Hercules fleet, Stormer, AS-90 etc, etc. There is no interest in storing reserve and retired equipment, the sole focus at MOD is turning the kit into money, even if it’s only scrap value. We would need to be spending 3% or 3.5% of GDP just to, at best, stop the number of equipments reducing a little more every year.

That is why talk of laahing out on a class of T32 frigates or whatever, is pie in the sky. If the RN evet gets them, they will be at the expense of some other class of ships, aircraft or army AFVs being discarded and flogged off or melted down.

This has been a common bind for three or 4 decades now. Things will not improve until a lot more money is pumped into the procurement budget.

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Slightly tongue in cheek, maybe the UK can lease the “Garibaldi” from Italy before Indonesia buys it?

Err because buying requires £ allocation, whereas selling doesn’t 🤷🏻‍♂️

Good point.

Tend to agree; Argus + 3 Bays = 4 support ships ( LPD / LSD hybrid?). That said, opinions suggest 6 MRSS now that SS = strike ship…hybrid frigate / LPD?