HMS Queen Elizabeth to ‘cover whole deck with aircraft’ for exercise

I see.
Talking of F35B, here’s something of a different input touching on it’s utility for maritime operators, above and beyond the usual assumptions, alongside other considerations:
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2020/05/27/the_f-35b_guarantees_allied_naval_dominance_over_china_115321.html.
Haven’t previously come across the author (an erstwhile Intel Officer, evidently) or the Lexington Institute think tank before, though it was set up in 98.
Suppose any ultimate outcome over China would depend on how long you relied on the status quo at they’re current rate of advance.
Cheers

Thx for this link. I think the author is spot on. F-35B is a strategic asset for the defence and projection of western values. As was the Harrier of course.

It depends what backs it up.

If EW is deployed to alter reality a bit for the opposition then things might not be so easy for them.

A conflict is not one missile against on ship and it is a mistake to analyse a single element in a reductionism manner.

That was the Falklands where EW and missiles were in their toddler stages compared to now. A lot was learned fast at horrendous cost. There is a lot going on in a state of the art missile other than guidance and targeting.

Whole heartedly agree mate, shame others don’t understand that common sense approach. ?

ha ? yeah, probably ?‍♂️

We have had this cooperation with the USMC for a long time now. I was on -board HMS Illustrious back in 2007, we had 14 USMC Harrier AV8B’s on-board for 4 weeks. And a single V22 for a days deck familiarisation. Great Deployment

Great, but just wish we could at least try and grab some relic Sea Harriers from the Arizona desert for emergency close-in defence for when the Chinese and Rooskies start buzzing the thing. Maybe borrow some USMC ones and pilots? Painful but the carriers need protection, let alone actual long-range offensive capability to overcome the in-coming hypersonics if it gets nasty.

The old GR7/9s would really be much use as they can only carry Sidewinder, not sure if they were cleared for ASRAAM before they got binned. The certainly wouldn’t be able to self-designate targets for AMRAAM. The aircraft that should not have been binned is the Sea Harrier 2 as it had the Blue Vixen radar and AMRRAM combination. It would still make a potent close in defence aircraft.

Yep DaveyB. that’s exactly what i meant for close-in stuff. The long-range comment was just a general whine about the Uk having no 1,ooomile+ combat radius capability stuff.

Yup, Blue Vixen was a great system.

I’m not so sure that the the SHAR2 would be that relevant now unless it was upgraded a lot.

And when you start upgrading that to modern standards you get modern upgrade costs and then think of the utility of a mixed fleet……

SHAR 1 & 2 were fantastic aircraft and stretched the available tech to the limits. F35 is at a totally different level and brings so many facets to the party.

I may be a bit controversial, and I am in now way doing down the bravery of the SHAR crews, but I also don’t think that the SHAR would have been as effective as it was in Corporate without the level of intel that was fed into ops. It now seems pretty certain, from publicly available information in the USA, that the cypher system that the Argentine high command used could be read at will – it was supplied by a CIA/German Intel owned Swiss front company. So it is likely that vectors and timings were known in advance. I doubt aircrew would have know this they would just have been given a job to do and assumed that they had been tasked off of ELINT or radar – to this extent having Nimrod around in a semi secretive way gave the code breaking some plausible deniability.

There was also an SSN parked off the Argentinian Coast under one of the flightpaths to one of the main Airbases giving warning as each wave was en route.

Yes, I’d read of this too Paul.

A fascinating part of Corporate.

From someone there at the time working in comms, yes the fleet got info but most of the time after the fact. One of the issues with intel is time delivery, by the time it is decoded and then transmitted in a don’t let anyone know I have the info a supersonis jet sqn has got in for the attack. For aircraft you need to know at take of and then heading then you can workout the defence. The ship I was on in 82 had no idea what was coming, we were not prepared for the vectors and in the end we went down. I still to this day have nightmares about fire coming at me.

So info is good only when you have the time to react to it otherwise what is the point.

Ron. Much respect to you, and we should always remember that loss and the need for quick identification of a threat.

Seconded.

Thanks but it was my job, it gave me a trade and I saw the world and had some fun, but as I said also the at night the bad times.

As for seeing the threat, government does not seem to understand a warship. Everytime she goes to sea she must be ready for war. She is not able to go back to base and get ammo, she might be a thousand miles away.Thats almost two days flat out. A carrier cannot go without aircraft or escorts, we tried that in WW2 and we lost them.
What I want to see for our QE carriers is three sqns of F35s, carrier tankers, AEW and possibly Tarnris type STOVL for unmanned anti radar/deep strike, enough escorts for a strike group or amphib group.

Possibly it is time to rebuild the UK armed forces to be the same as the US Marine Corp?

That is very interesting – Sharky Ward made a similar comment in my earshot many moons ago about speed of dissemination of information in the Task Group.

I was not there but I did spend some time on Glamorgan post Corporate and just seeing the welded over gash in the side of the mess deck was sobering. You felt you needed to pause for a moment when you walked in there.

I have great respect for what was achieved on Corporate with some absolutely awful guided missile systems which even then belonged in a museum. Dart and Wolf were the only systems that should have been there and even they were immature as the rapid development/enhancement post Coporate showed.

My point about Nimrod, and I know they were based in Chile, was that it gave effective cover for ‘knowing things’ from the code breaking. It only has to illuminate the incoming briefly with active radar and the Argentinians would assume they had been painted by something somewhere. As with Enigma it could only be used where there was another plausible way of knowing the decrypted information. That also pulled the focus away from looking for an SSN…..not that the Argentinians really has the tech to find one.

Supportive Bloke- The SSN parked off the Argentinian Coast nearly came a cropper without the Argentinians actually looking for it,a Fighter ( not sure which ) had to jettison its Bomb load due to a problem,it just so happened that they fell and exploded pretty much where the SSN was.

I’ve not heard of this Paul T. What is your source for that? Anything readable?

Daniele – From memory it was on one of Mark Feltons youtube videos.

Apologies Daniele – ive trawled some videos to no avail,but found the Submarine in question was HMS Valiant,i’ll have to look further into this.

Understood. Thanks Paul. I also see my comment earlier was removed by the mods so still sensitivity around all this. We’ll leave it for now. 🙂

Mine stayed up but had some holes up fwd from cannons.That said in latter years I was on the same class but lengthened and fitted with Outboard amongst other stuff .
With all the sneaky secret squirrel stuff onboard be could here the interplane/control tower radio of jets prior to take off at a substantial distance away. We knew planes where coming before they had even taken off. That info was fed in real time to the other units we where in concert with.

That is impressive capability for the Batch 2’s.

Shaman on the T45’s now should be magnitudes better.
I believe the SSN fleet also has a similar system.

The Sea Harrier was scrapped in 2006 by Blair/Brown. A year later they ordered two carriers.

Madness! …and binning the crews.

Crews went onto Harrier GR7/9 or US or French exchange posts.

I always thought that the sea harrier was scrapped in the 2010 defence review, by the conservative/ liberal govt.

That was the GR7/9 that was the RAF ground attack version that did much the same job as the Apache does now.

Although strangely it did not have an A->A radar.

No. As said JFH lost its Sea Harrier FAS2s earlier.
800, 801, 899 NAS. 2005/6 ish I think?

In 2009 Labour announced RAF Cottesemore would close ( now Kendrew Bks ) and cut 3 and 4 squadrons of GR9s. ( while vowing 22 chinooks as recompense, which never occurred)

SDSR 2010 Tories finished the job with the remaining squadrons of Harriers and Ark Royal. ( 1 and 20R )

No. The incoming govt chose to keep the Tornados as it was deemed better suited to Iraq and Afghanistan. The Invincible class had already lost the Sea Harriers that were air superiority, so what was the point of keeping the GRs ??

Sea Harrier FA2 retired in 2006, Harrier GR9, December 2010.

We should also do an article on Hypersonic weapons as there are too many myths floating around about how invincible these weapons are!

The first hurdle someone using an hypersonic anti-ship missile will face, is first finding the target. If you have an aircraft like a Tu95 (Tu142) Bear, It carries a very powerful surface search radar. However, it has two things against it the aircraft being contra-rotating propeller driven has a unique radar signature and is very easy to detect. Secondly its radar will always be detect long before it can actually detect anything. So for a T45 for example, it can either detect from a long way off using the S1850 radar, or passively when the Bear transmits. Either way the ship will know there’s a Bear out there that may be carrying 3M-54 Kalibr, Kh-41 Sunburn, but possibly the BrahMos-A. All of these weapons are high supersonic, with Brahmos possibly being hypersonic. So the ship will have procedures in place on how to counteract them, if launched.

All hypersonic weapons will initially follow a high altitude ballistic path. This is because at altitude the air is less dense, so less fuel is burned, but also means the airframe heats up much less. It will be next to impossible for a missile to fly at hypersonic speeds at low level for any distance, i.e. sea skimming height, due to how thick the air is. For starters unless you want it to have only a short range, the size will need to be increased just to house the extra fuel. Then there’s the problem of aerodynamic heating to contend with. Are manufactures going to spend mega bucks on a missile’s airframe, that is a one shot deal? When the weapon is flying at altitude and hypersonic speeds, it will be following a pretty straight path. At these speeds it will be limited to wide arcing manoeuvres as radical manoeuvres will overstress the airframe due to the g limitations.

Depending on how the nose and engine intakes are designed, it is highly likely that a plasma will be generated around these areas. Plasma can be a fantastic radar/RF absorber and can be tuned. However, to be tuneable it requires certain gases to be electrically stimulated, so that they can then be tuned to certain frequencies. Therefore, to be truly stealthy the missile will need to carry these gases then be able extrude them and excite them in a controlled method, whilst travelling at Mach 4.5+. The tuneable plasma can be done in a lab, but on a missile in flight, I doubt very much! The other case is that the air around the missile at these speeds will be converted to a plasma, especially by any sharp edges. This plasma will absorb all RF and also block the visual parts of the spectrum. Furthermore, the plasma will prevent the missile from using its own active radar or optical sensors. Therefore, to find the target the missile will have to slow down to below Mach 5.

The UK and other NATO countries have had to contend with very high speed supersonic anti-ship missiles since the early 60’s. One of the main threats was the Kh22 (AS-4) Kitchen missile. This had a top speed around Mach 4.6. This missile in particular was a major reason behind the development of Sea Dart. If we look at Brahmos 1, it has a top speed of Mach 2.8 and can fly at sea skimming height. At these speeds, a ship would have around 30 seconds, to not only detect the missile but then to counter it. A hypersonic missile will likely fall on the target at a speed of around Mach 4.5, possibly slower, so that its active radar and other sensors can search a wider area. By slowing the missile down, means that it can also do evasive manoeuvres to try and throw of the radar track and intercepting missile. However, as soon as the missile goes active, the ship’s electronic surveillance gear will detect it, thus further the cueing the ship’s defences against it.

The last time I was at sea with the RN was back in 2010. HMS Illustrious took part in a joint warrior exercise out of Faslane. The ship remained undetected for 5 whole days. Whilst also deploying our own aircraft against red air. And this was just operating in and around the west coast of Scotland against a threat made up of F15E’s and C’s, Rafales, Hawks and various surveillance ISTAR aircraft. My point being, even a large un-stealthy vessels, can be very difficult to find, when it doesn’t want to be found, even against a very sophisticated simulated enemy. Anti ship operations are always underestimated in it’s difficulty and complexity.

Fascinating Robert.

It is real experience like this that I appreciate here.

Thanks mate, appreciate it. I don’t down play the threats we face, but I do read a lot of fantasy wars on these pages, that are often far removed from reality.

Thanks for the comment. I have a feeling that we compare the size of carriers against ourselves or at best tied up in port (where they’re bloody massive), as opposed to on the ocean (where they’re bloody miniscule)!

Exactly mate, ships are big, but the ocean is vast. Have a good one ?

Fascinating input DaveyB. I suppose my concerns are multiple-warhead in-coming hypersonics, and the general ultra-short reaction times needed to identify and counter or destroy. If a UK task force were facing such a threat it needs some pretty hot bang-bangs/lasers at one end, and/or a long-range (1,000+ miles) detection/destroy capability at the other to stop it in the first place.

The best defence against any type of anti-ship missile is airborne early warning. This is why it is critical that Crowsnest is made to work. Admittedly it won’t have the range of an E2D Hawkeye. By placing the radar high up extends you radar horizon. But it also means that the radar is further away from the fleet, therefore the fleet’s situational awareness is much better. By pushing out Crowsnest its 250km range is still pretty good and gives the fleet options, i.e. time to work out a counter.

You also go for the missile shooters and surveillance aircraft/ships . So an F35 with Meteor can keep the shooters at arms length making there job a lot harder and giving them a far larger area to search for a target.

The USN did this to great effect with Tomcats and phoenix missiles. With their current fit of Hornets and AMRAMM they have lost this ability to keep aggressors at arms length.

Its always easier to shoot down a Badger, Bear or Backfire than a swarm of ASMs

DaveyB, very much of what you say is correct, I also think someone should write an article on hypersonic weapon possibilities.

Here goes some food for thought, at the moment you get the speed but targeting no, the speed possibly for five minutes. So its a threat but not a weapon.

However I was speaking to a friend who is a young woman masters degree in aerodynamics and we spoke about this. She explained to me that there is a few possibilities the first is to pre cool the incoming air. As far as I know we are doing that in the UK. The second is to take the hot air output feed it forward and create a type of bubble for the missle to pass through. Then you take cold air from the after part of the missile, or suck it in, pass it forward and use it in small burts for guidance. Or combine the two.

Something tells me we are not ready yet for Mach 5+ missiles as the radar, guidance etc would not be able to manage a dedicted strike.
However the Perseus concept at Mach 3 and possibly multi warheads is not only realistic but a defence nightmare.

Yes, I think for practicality and purely on cost grounds a high supersonic speed missile, such Perseus is more than adequate.

With hypersonics comes massive costs. It needs more advanced heat resistant materials and novel engines such as scramjets or aerospike, as these are the only ones that can cope with the pressures and temperatures of hypersonic air flow. Unless you have a good method of slowing that air down then cooling it, ala Reaction Engine pre-cooler.

I read about using laminar air flows for airframe cooling a while back, the tricky part is the engineering. The major hurdle is overcoming the air pressure density, as the density behind hypersonic shockwaves significantly increases due to compression. Because the hottest parts of the airframe will be any leading edge, you will either need to exhaust cooling air from these leading edges or as a number of prototypes have done and feed a cooling medium to the areas behind the leading edges/airframe to control the heat. The next issue is once you’ve overcome the pressure and pumped out cooling air, you need to make sure it sticks to the airframe thereby acting as a barrier. At these speeds shock waves operate differently to supersonic shock waves due to entropic action. In some bizarre cases you can even get a reversal of flow. Therefore, you would need to have a series of exhausts down the body of the missile to make sure you have a boundary layer. The other option would be to use ablative coatings. These would make more sense on a missile, as its a one trick pony. However, it will add a lot of weight, especially if its a long range missile. I’m not sure on the engineering practicality of being able to exhaust an air shield around the airframe could be done, within the constraints of a relatively small airframe.

The best method for controlling such a missile would be some form of aerodynamic flap used in combination with vectored exhaust thrust. But also as you say puffer jets like those used on the Harrier would be a useful option. The missile will be flying high to begin with, thus vectored thrust comes into its own. When it gets lower and slows down control surfaces can be used. It would be interesting to see how the anti-ship ballistic missiles such as the Chinese DF21D control their warhead so it can hit a moving ship. From the last exercise the Chinese did they targeted a static barge.

The Pershing 2 missile used control surfaces along with radar matching to make it highly accurate. Pershing 2 , not Tomahawk, was the system that had the Soviets worrried in the 80s. It was fast and could hit anything it was aimed at.
A similar system could be in use on DF21s but how good it would be against a carrier doing 30+ knots balls out and manoeuvring hard a port and stbd, chucking out chaff and decoys all over as well as having the escorts putting a lot of metal into the air is debatable.

All of the above and a lot more I have tried to highlight previously. From my time on a T42 I knew the detection envelop for 966/1022 and the missiles that the Red Banner Fleet would launch at us, Kitchen and AS6 Kingfish. Kingfish being a top diver would be open for a Sea Dart intercept for literally only a few seconds. Latterly time on T22s and T23s and the odd LPD made me a lot happier with the threat response from systems other than Sea Cat, Slug and Dart!
But as you say finding the target is the issue. Surveillance search aircraft, missile carriers, Air refuelling, data links , ROSSATS command and control, the actual missiles themselves…Its a huge kill chain and very few people are capable of getting it right.

Aerodynamic heating of the airframe and the contents are a huge issue. The US Standard missiles have a lot of shrouding and heat protection inside of them . Its a waste of time shooting a missile at M5+ if you heat the warhead up to over its cook off temperature of say 1000deg C so it goes band during its flight to the target. All that shrouding adds weight which has a cost in range.

Ablation and errosion of radar and optical transparent surfaces are another issue. Dust , debris and even rain and ice particles in clouds can damage a radome/optical window enough to render it inoperable. If this happens you are shooting the equivalent of a bullet into the sea with the hope of hitting something.

If push came to shove there is no need to go to the Arizona Desert for the SHAR 2’s,they are still at RNAS Culdrose or Yeovil.

Oooooowh! Did not realise that. Thought that they were all sold off to stateside. Well, if the B-52s can still serve….

I thought just 8 of them, mind?

…better than nowt Danielle. We are desperate.

The GR9s were sold, not the Sea Harriers. A handful remain with School of Flightdeck Operations. ( SFDO )

Daniele -Just had a browse,there are many SHAR’s scattered around the country as Museum exhibits,plus one still flying in the US,enough to fill the QE’s deck id say haha.

I imagine if one scoured all museums and privately owned warbird groups we could scrape together quite a few squadrons!

Though if I had to choose SHAR or Buccanear, I take the Bucc!

Daniele and Rob, I was in some blokes barn several years ago who had a personal SHAR.
Don’t get me going on why the carriers need Buccanears (or similar) now and their long range radars…

The ultimate man cave. Wow.

It’s going to be interesting to see what they mean by whole deck. When a US carrier wants to show its strength it has something like 60 jets on the deck (no idea the actual number, but a lot).

We shouldn’t compare ourselves to the Americans. This exercise could see up to 25 aircraft on-board the QE, maybe more. This is by know means an easy task. That very few countries can achieve. And 24 F35’s is a very serious capability to take around the world at our choosing. You would have to go all the way back to OpTelic 2003, when we last deployed a greater number then 24 of a single type of fast jet (32 Tornado GR4’s) ?

Steve, from my understanding the USN and RN carrier battlegroups are diffrent. The RN is more like fleet/area defence with strike capability whilst the USN is strike with a defence capability.

The RN carriers would work well in a Falklands situation to defend the fleet and get air superiority over a limited area. The US carriers are more multi purpose, I’m not sure but I would use the abreviation CVB (large aircraft carrier) or a new one CVF (fleet carrier fighter)

In real thinking the US Carriers and RN carriers could work as a pair really well with the RN taking the fleet derfence role and the US the strike role.

That makes very little sense.

Ron5, where does it not make sense and I will try to explain it in more detail.

I just feel for Marham village crawling with marines! great bunch of people, not sure the camp bars will cope!

Cracking explanation mate. Mk2 is going to be a very impressive bit it of kit. RAF Typhoon/F35 is going to be a deadly fighter combination.

Great explanation DaveyB