The UK has announced that it will supply “scores of artillery guns, hundreds of drones” plus 50,000 rounds and more anti-tank weapons to Ukraine in the coming weeks.
“The delivery of the new equipment will significantly step up the UK’s support as the country fights to repel Russia’s brutal and unjustified invasion.”
More than 20 M109 155mm self-propelled guns and 36 L119 105mm artillery guns will soon arrive from the UK, Defence Secretary Ben Wallace announced in an update to Parliament today. Counter-battery radar systems and more than 50,000 rounds of ammunition for Ukraine’s existing Soviet era artillery will also follow, he added.
“This equipment will bolster the Armed Forces of Ukraine’s ability to defend itself against Russia’s indiscriminate use of artillery. The UK will also send more than 1,600 more anti-tank weapons in the coming weeks, along with drones, including hundreds of loitering aerial munitions.”
So far 6,900 NLAW, Javelin, Brimstone and other anti-tank weapons, as well as 16,000 artillery rounds, six Stormer vehicles fitted with Starstreak anti-air missile launchers and hundreds of missiles have been sent to Ukraine.
The UK has also supplied maritime Brimstone missiles, multiple launch rocket systems, 120 armoured fighting vehicles and large quantities of non-lethal aid including more than 82,000 helmets, 8,450 sets of body armour and over 5,000 night vision devices, say the MoD.
Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said:
“The scale and range of equipment we are providing demonstrates the strength of our resolve. Together with our international partners, we will ensure Ukraine has the tools to defend their country from Putin’s illegal invasion.”
It comes after the UK launched a major training operation for Ukrainian forces, with the potential to train up to 10,000 soldiers.
I completely support the response to Ukraine showed by NATO countries, however, I would like to know what the UK Armed Forces are replacing the various systems bound for Ukraine with? The defence budget hasn’t changed and there has never been much put to one side for defence anyway so who pays for replacement artillery, ammunition and missiles? When will it be delivered and in what quantity?
Absolutely. One would like to think the Treasury will be reimbursing the MoD but…..
Even if the Treasury does provide the replacement funding I don’t trust the MoD to actually spend it effectively and not squander it elsewhere. For all the fault of successive governments – on both sides of the isle – in underfunding defence, the MoD have crapped on the blanket way too many times on procurement issues!
Anyway, we have a great Defence Secretary in Ben Wallace, so I trust him to keep the Treasury in check on this issue.
I don’t think the MoD is much different for other departments. I recall some foreign aid was spent on a girl band in Somali for instance. I expect there’s billions wasted in the NHS but its political sensitive to call these out.
That’s an interesting one and at the time annoyed me so I looked into it.
turns out it was money well spent as the girl band were getting some key female health, hygiene and welfare information out to a wider population that would drive key changes in behaviour. From recollection it was well funded and was measuring the effectiveness of the spend.
whilst a bit unusual, getting messaging out there can save lives and cost a lot less than the subsequent treatments. I think this was stopped due to the optics, but actually was probably a good use of funding.
generally thigh. Think a minimum of 80% of uk foreign aid should be provided in British manufactured goods and food, this could for instance be used to purchase the c.50% of root crops that are not lifted in the UK to be turned into nutritious food whilst letting farmers recover their costs. We could also produce containerised homes and medical supplies as really all medical supplies for the NHS should be produced in the UK post covid…. There is lots we could do that would benefit the UK whilst being a good global citizen. Handing money out is not the answer.
I confess I didn’t look into the girl band thing closely but sounds like in that case it was reasonable use of funds. But I’m sure if you went through foreign aid funding you’d fond a lot if wasted money. But I agree that every thing should be done to source from the UK.
one of my ex colleagues (Eastern European ) worked for DFID and said it infuriated them how much they wasted.
they subsequently left, but said DFID could only really spend circa 50% effectively and the rest was handed out to hit targets with little or no oversight or strategy.
There’s something in both halves of that.
DFID were rather notorious for shovelling money out of the door in Q4.
It would seem to be the case, but it should also be acknowledged that they are world leading in many areas.
so from my perspective the dept either wasn’t big enough, or wasn’t empowered enough, which left too much to do in Q4 resulting in a dumping strategy, which is a pity.
Yes.
My guess is that DFID won’t have to worry about that soon; I imagine the bulk of their work will be in Ukraine going forward.
100% of UK overseas aid has to be spent on UK products.
Disagree. It should be spent in a way that makes its recipients self sufficient in food production.
Food aid is extremely rare and a very small component. In terms of ag aid you’re talking about equipment. Tractors new herbicides more resistant crops etc.
If I was blonde i’d call it a blonde moment sorry. That’s what happens but it’s spent in UK except for local staff etc. It gives those defending overseas aid another argument in it’s favour. It doesn’t matter too the Guardian etc because they hate UK but for everyone else it’s a positive.
No worries. Firstly I think we need to distinguish between aid and the foreign aid budget. Secondly, I see at least 3 kinds of aid; humanitarian/DR, security and commercial/economic. On the first 2 we can be proud of what we do, lead by our armed services.
It’s the last one where we need a rethink, especially given the Chinese buying influence ( actually control) using cheap loans to 3rd world countries. While they might need some improved infrastructure, what the people of these countries is self sufficiency in food and the building up of their schools and health systems in a way that does not make them economically dependent on large corporations ( in this context we could think of China as a very large corporation).
Simple things- water for crops, how to rotate and mix crops, how to farm organically, medical aid, co-operatives to share surplus and seeds, legal aid to resist bullies stealing your family land for cash crops. Etc. Cheers
Agreed but don’t believe they will utter gratitude for it. For the global left who’s narrative is as dominant there as it is here we are utterly evil. If you want to know how these countries view us read the Guardian.
Understood, the Grauniad runs on presenting as ‘news’ selected statistics and outlier events, however distant, which support their despairing world view. Abandon hope all who enter there….😉
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I don’t think that that is true.
I think we are more relaxed than most Western countries on that one.
Happy to be proved wrong if it has changed.
Yeah it was changed can’t remember if it was May or Johnson.
Traditionally it has been, largely on Rolls Royce. 😀
And Swiss bank accounts.
The big waste of DOH health money has never been the NHS:
1) The National single electronic record, an impossible task that every told the DOH was impossible, but industry new better, Fujitsu and other pissed 12 billion Of health money into their shareholders Before admitting it could not be done.
2) The national pandemic stocks, held by the office of the civil contingency secretariat and exc office of the cabinet office. Left in warehouses for a decade so it all went passed it expiry date and rotted, billions of pounds of kit that could have been rotated out to the NHS and replaced at no extra cost ( the NHS could have payed as it payed for stock anyway).
3) the Langley reforms of the health system. Destroying the commissioning and management of the health system…making then all redundant and then paying through the nose for management consultant firms either employing the people they made redundant or set up by the people they made redundant. The langsley reforms really hit home in the pandemic as all the public health functions had been removed from the nhs and given to councils who dropped them to a point they no longer did anything even around normal outbreaks….
4) adult social care, poor funding means at present most of our acute hospitals have around 150 people per day in them that should be in adult social care beds or at home with packages. As a hospital bed costs around £250 pounds a day that’s a good £ 40k per hospital per day of nhs money pissed away ( say around 100k per county per day).
£14.5 billion spent on track and trace- which never worked, was developed by Dominic Cummings sister’s company who had zero experience of app development and zero experience of health care or infection control measures.
The real rub is that South Korea offered the UK their 5G enabled app which was proven to work, developed after SARS and would have been handed over plugged in and ready to go for the princely sum of just £25 million.
£25 millions vs £14.5 billion..hhmmmmm let me think about that one. And dont even get me started on the dodgy PPE contracts.
Those as well.scary how much money gets pissed away on Politicians ideas before the health and social care system get a chance spend it.
issue is with the Health and social care was it came under the local councils. who take their budgets and rather invest in their services, invest in Airports or Artwork collections?. yet they have no issues with blowing £100,000 on vanity projects. they have screwed the system and made £ms out of it as soon as it got tough all ran away, but not before they had killed of there customer base.
YEAH RIGHT so a company had a global pandemic app ready to be delivered. UTTER HORSESHITE. track and trace and its spawn is now actually working within its current form. so maybe not such a waste as it’s a 3-year contract. and to add context £14b is a month’s Budget for the NHS. 5G doesn’t that crash Aircraft???? PPE context again every country in the world wanted the same PPE, and we are talking a ship load. not a box of gloves from B & Q. mistakes were made, yes but you like me came out the other side. be thankful and stop Bitching like a child, did you not get a vaccine that didn’t exist before the rest of the world. Or DID RUSSIA inject you with Saltwater, Mr Bellend Would suit you better.
The NHS Test and Trace budget was originally £22 billion in 2020/21 and £15 billion in 2021/22, making a total of £37 billion (though the 2021/22 budget was subsequently revised down to £14 billion).
NHS Test and Trace spent £13.5 billion in 2020/21, while spending in 2021/22 amounted to £16 billion, making a total of £29.5 billion.
A detailed account of how the funding for 2021/2022 was used has not yet been published, but in June 2021 the National Audit Office (NAO) published a breakdown of spending in the first year of the scheme.
The vast majority of the £13.5 billion spent in this period—£10.4 billion—was spent on testing. As we’ve previously written, the next largest expenditures were on local Covid-19 outbreak management and support (£1.8 billion) and national contact tracing (£910 million).
The budget set for the second year of the scheme was similar, with testing by far the largest projected expense.
But I’m sure there’s waste in day to day running. Having experienced other systems myself NHS does not appear comparable I paid 1300 per year for health care the same tests and consultancy I had here which took months was done in 1 day!!! The NHS here cost about 2400 per year person and the service is much slower.
Hi expat to be honest most European health systems run at about £3000 to £4000 per year. We tend to cost a lot as we get older. If we all took a pill to end it all when we started getting long term conditions healthcare would be cheap, the Massive burden of health costs is in the last few years of life. So there is lots of people with healthcare costs a £ 20,000 a year.
from the international studies the NHS is the most cost effective system in the major western economies, with the US private system being the worst by far.
if you just take a hip replacement as an example, NHS tariff for a hip is around £4500-5000 pounds, depending on the part of the country ( the nhs pays some hospitals more if they are in a high cost part of the county. A private hip replacement in a a European hopital is around 12,000 to 15,000. A hip replacement in the US costs $30,000 to $45,000 dollars and in India you can get a hip replacement for around £6000-7000 pounds. So you can see from that one example the British people pay even less than Indians for their health care.
there are efficiencies that we could get in the U.K. system but basically that involves sorting out adult social care and paying the social care sector what it needs,
interestingly they did a tot up of how much the British people should have payed for the NHS if compared to any other western system delivering the same and it turned out for what we have for the first fifty of years of the NHS we had underplayed for our healthcare to the tune of 150-200 billion pounds.
not only is it possible to have an electronic record system but it is implemented in other countries.
The problem with that particular program, and you can extrapolate to others is mainly down to poor governance that resulted in allowing the 2 main vendors being able to implement their win proprietary database software, instead of an open standard. This meant the files could not be shared.
logically this program was set up pretty well, it was poorly governed and executed.
We should have got the people behind Tesco Clubcard behind it, now everything has moved on this would be ripe for a cloud based solution.
The big problem is actual how you allowed your systems of electronic health records to develop. Those nations that went down a free market low regulation route have not really been able to reset to a single electron health record ( US and U.K. etc) where as those nations that always kept high levels of control or only ever had a single option succeeded (Germany and other highly controlled systems). The U.K. electronic health care record landscape is a bit of a Wild West anything goes affair and that was never ever going to work for a single universal electronic record.Also another facet was the U.K. had very ridged data protection and privacy laws with a population that are not amenable to sharing, this was always going to be a problem as the NHS is made up of many thousands of organisations all responsible in law for protecting patients data and not sharing it unless it must be shared to protect the patient.
That’s fine and I understand your point, but as with a national ID card it can be done, even if you start with new borns and take it from there.
my health data has been given to Google and/or Facebook by the NHS so they clearly have it and there are companies that know how to do it.
for me time to have a national ID card linked to everything. Not least to stop the debacle of the uk govt not realising it had 5m+ more Europeans than t thought, despite all evidence pointing to it and it being a major driver for Brexit.
if the govt had funded services to cover these users, would we have had the same anti migration stance – I am not sure.
There is no real data privacy anymore, something that needs addressing, so there s no real civil rights case to be had.
Don’t get me wrong I would love a Universal national patient record, but to get there we would need successive governments to sign up to a process of controlling the U.K. market around electronic patient record systems until we were in a place where all those 1000s of different systems could easily exchange data ( at the moment we have a market full of competitors who have no interest in working together). So first it’s less of a technical project and more of a culture change within a market place.
I’ve worked in the NHS- there are billions and billions squandered- locums, agency staff, terrible staff sickness not being managed. but then there are the literally tens of thousands of fat cat managers who are on very nice salaries whilst delivering absolutely zero improvement to patient care. You could cull 30,000 band 7,8 divisional, deputy divisional and various other grades of managers and the clinical frontline wouldn’t even detrimentally notice they were gone, except for the fact the clinicians weren’t being called to attend continuous pointless meetings anymore, Or being asked to spend their precious time replying to urgent programmes that are rehashes of programmes tried years ago and didn’t work.
Have to say your spot on, I worked in hospitals for years and a lot of people took the piss, every summer loads felt unwell and would be off for three to four weeks at a time then there was over a million spent on a new critical care unit in one hospital I worked in just for us to be moved to another hospital and the unit was never used, there is an attitude in hospitals where people know they will get plenty of money for doing nowt, porters were raking in about £35,000 to £40,000 sitting in the porters area doing jack, and we had two good sized hospitals closed for a new private one costing a lot of millions with half the parking space and half the beds that we had with the older ones, think you could double defence spending if all the bullshit was cut from the NHS.
I’m going to take you to task on the porters earning 35-40k that’s just not true, their pay is rubbish and I don’t know what hospital you worked in but The porters I the trusts I work at work really hard. Almost all staff in acute hospitals work their arses off and those managers you talk about are the people who make sure the services keep working and don’t kill people, something as complex as healthcare does not just happen. It’s the most complex systems ever created and will quickly fall apart if not well led. Most of those managers you would get rid of worked 60-80 hours a week over the pandemic to make sure their departments and teams had what they needed.
I would suggest a visits to a nhs acute hospital in 2022 it’s a brutally different workplace to a hospital even 20 years ago. After all we have had to cut the bed base by 50% in those 20 years to keep costs under control.
Hi Jonathan thanks for the reply, I worked as a porter and I did work my arse off because I always worked the front end and there wer’e a lot of other porters did work hard with clinical waste and other things but there wer’e more that sat in an enclosed area most of the time working the wards which was the easiest job of the lot, they wer’e usually the one’s that wer’e (not well) in summer then put in for lot’s of holidays in winter happened all the time, working four on four off you get all sorts of overtime added I should know I worked it until I was at work in a&e and collapsed with multiple clots in my lungs and ended up not being able to work anymore, I worked three quarters of the year and I was paid £34,000 up until then, as for the management nothing was ever done about things that happened even tho a lot of nurses doctors and porters used to have a little growl about the things people got away with but nothing ever got done about it, the bed manager hated dealing with the porters in ward because they didn’t really have an interest in doing much, I have worked in places where you really worked your arse off for about £12,000 to £15,000 a year outside the NHS they get paid shit not porters I’m afraid, I’m not saying everyone is like that in the NHS that would be a complete lie I still have loads of friends from the hospital who are all good people who want to help people it’s in the blood I think, I loved helping people I enjoyed making them smile if I could but there is a lot that are there to do as little as possible and get paid as much as possible I’m afraid, I do love the NHS but there are people that just don’t care which is a shame because you want people that care and it is a great job to be in when you do, I didn’t mean to offend just explaining my experience thanks.
Hi Cj, don’t worry I know there were always a few who avoided work and a couple of areas that were know to be a bit easier than others ( cough out patients cough) but generally most people always worked their arses off especially the porters I worked with, most nursing assistants and any staff nurse not under the age of 50 ( I’m a firm believer that there was a reason why nurses once had a retirement age of 55, by the time your in your fifties acute Care at staff nurse level is probably not the right place, its just needs to much fast pace thinking and willingness to take risks as well as physically demanding, a 11 hour night shift in a busy ED is a killer)
If you left the acute care sector 6 years ago, you would not believe what they are dealing with now. It makes me sick just getting the updates and chairing the daily “we are buggered meetings“ . Most hospitals now are permanently running at around 105-110% bed capacity ( a hospital only runs well/efficiently at 90% capacity , it’s not unusual to have double figures of patients bedding down in EDs for 24+ hours. Most hospitals have been running internal critical incidents most weeks since Christmas, every hospital has not moved from what was black escalation since last Oct ( like every moment of every day), they will all a have 50 to 80 surge beds ( pretend made up Beds, in places like recovery etc). A+Es are seeing 20% more patients than they ever did before and most hospitals now have around 100-150 people blocking beds due to the adult social care system imploding and most of the workforce moving back to Europe or working in Tesco for more money.
I’m not sure about the 35k for porting mind, you must have been mashing the overtime. when I was an ED charge nurse working most weekends and 70hours of night shifts a month I was probably only making that.
At the university where I work we have quite a few NHS porters coming from the local hospital to work for us as cleaners and porters. Not a chance they were on anywhere near that money; we pay them from £10 an hour so they’re on around £18K a year; no one would cut their pay almost in half like that.
Must be massive amounts of overtime to get that.
Hi Jonathan I know a couple of guys who would argue til they were blue in the face that outpatients is a hard wee shift hahaha, pretty sure porters got better enhancements than nurses because they have a higher base rate so most nurses told me anyway?I worked in aau cau and a&e still remember we were getting hammered there was no beds I had about eight trolleys and beds in corridors at the back of a&e then we had a big rta called in so we had to move nearly all from a&e and resus for it coming in so there was a call to general porters to come help out but we’re told (it’s not my job) and they got union reps in about it which said a lot to me about some people that work in the job and as Johan said very difficult to get rid off.
attractive to the lazy workforce, who can hide in the lower bowls. and once in its very hard to shift the shite as they just won’t flush. Nurse on my Mums ward, tried to put ear drops in her eyes because he couldnt read English and wrote the wrong date on her medical chart and overdosed her.
For all the Great People who work in the NHS there are 3 lazy Bums
I doubt that’s actually the case – the 3 bums to every hard worker. Probably the other way around but even that is unacceptable.
Wow that’s a bit of a shocker and your spot on very hard to get rid off they usually get union involved and tell them they have been wronged and want something done about it!
Sorry I forgot to say I stopped working six years ago now.
i clearly went into the wrong field even now an AE staff nurse only starts on 24k and that’s after 3 years of 2000hours study /2000 hours practice in care, loads of exams and 30k in student loans. The 30k mark takes 5 years to get to and 50k is an end of a very good career got a very senior nurse job ( hospital matron level).
Train Cleaners are earning £33k a year for washing trains. ???? and are on stike for more money. country is doomed
No cleaner in the country is on £33K a year.
Finding young people that are willing to work hard is difficult.
I seem to always be going through the recruitment process to actually get my department to a decent position in terms of manning.
Grinds my gears a bit because I’m in a position at 27 where I manage teams in the UK and abroad but the people that are in their early 20’s now don’t seem to want to work.
With the MoD’s record on waste I don’t think we’re in a position to lecture other Dept’s.
Hi David, I’m kinda new to reading up on defence so I bow to your experience but Ajax seems like a bit of a nightmare to me, it’s a shame we have some of the best people on the planet but seem to dither about at times by what I can see so far, hope it changes soon because what we do build usually looks bloody fantastic when they get it right thanks.
Don’t ever bow to anyone’s experience. You’ve as much right to express an opinion as anyone on here. On particular subjects particular people have personal knowledge I for one don’t for example but that doesn’t mean we can’t contribute. Welcome to the site. 👍
Thanks very much David much appreciated, some of the things I’ve read on here and other sites I don’t quite understand but I love reading the explanations that you all come up with and it give me a better understanding. 👍
Same. Give it 6 months and you’ll surprise yourself.
You always contribute to this site but to that never served railwayman, Daniele, who can debate the Orbat of the British Armed Forces…. for the last 100 years, arn.t we all just newbies? 🙂
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Agree, indeed an opinion is one of those things we get to express for free. Lucky as we are to live in a society that allows it.
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My friend is a hospital porter in Hastings area – he gets nothing like £35-£40k and he certainly does not sit around doing jack – he works hard. He has to augment his pay by an evening job on the side.
Hi Graham, I’m sure your friend is a great worker as I said to Jonathan there are some great people work in the NHS but there are others who play the system and have done for years, I can only say about myself and others that I worked with concerning pay, I worked 4 on 4 off days nights the only one’s who didn’t get great pay wer’e working fixed shift 8 til 4 as far as I can remember and the phrase (it’s not my job) was passed about a lot and I have worked jobs where even with overtime the pay was shit! So I can only compare the money from those jobs where you worked your arse off the same as NHS staff but didn’t get the pay to go with it.
From my experience the MOD isn’t immune from squandering cash and I’m not just talking about Ajax sized feck ups, its all the way down to the small bits and bobs in the supply chain that are vastly overpriced. Its seems if its government money then its there to be spunked.
You can bet your beer money that most of the Kit sent to the Ukraine is the same kit that has been stored in these defunct airfields as it was unfit for use. as i was in Lyneham the other month and a Hanger that used to be crammed full of rejected kit, is now empty.
Good, I’m glad its going to a good home. As a bit of a hoarder myself its good to see stuff that’s kept ‘just in case’ or ‘it’ll come in handy for something’ put to good use.
We know its the largest employer in the UK, and employed people unfit for the roles. and with any large organization its grown on grown. 75% of the NHS operating Budget goes on Cancer test and treatment. and has More people sucking a pension than employed. its to large to turn. but its full of Bellends like you cleaning toilets
That rubbish, the NHS has far more people working active member of the pension scheme than on a pension and the NHS pension scheme it’s totally funded by the membership and even gives the half a billion into the tax base each year. i pay 14.5% of my wages to my pension nhs pension scheme how much do you pay towards your pension ?
75% of the nhs budge doesn’t not go on cancer treatment and diagnosis, where do you get this rubbish. The NHS actually publishes what it spends on what so and has a number of independent bodies reviewing how we spend money so if you want you can actually look it up.
The best way to destroy any industry is sack the most experienced staff who actually understand who things work. Something like the NHS just does not happen, health systems are the most complex systems ever developed by man, they also face an overchanging health need, someone needs to decide how many hips we do vs how much up stream therapy on joint management vs mental health support. The nhs has one of the most lean management structure in any western healthcare system. I’ve worked in jobs from a hospital kitchen, care assistant, staff nurse, running an ED to overseeing The safety of health systems for more than A million people and I can hand on heart tell you if you remove all those band 7-8 jobs the system would collapse within Few months and you level of deaths would be awful.
i don’t disagree on the costs of locums, but again that’s they systems own fault we will not train the right numbers of Drs and Nurses then have to pay out the nose for locums. The NHS does not pay overtime which again falls into the hands of locum agency’s.
yes there can always be improvements, but sweeping statements are not helpful and most of those fat cat managers a utterly dedicates an my work 60-70 hour weeks proving the NHS with 20+ hours of their time a week without getting payed for it ( I do that all the time and I have colleagues who are paid for a 9.00 17.00, Turing up at 6.30 in the morning and leaving 19.00-20.00 As well as doing weekends, just to get the work done ( and the NHS never ever pays overtime).
Well said 👍 can’t but feel that the policy ( with the same old nebulous cover) will be mostly about hoping the Ukraine war will weaken Russia so much we may have a decade of relative freedom from concern. But of course as we know ten years is nothing when you have to improve, replace and finance military equipment and supplies so we need to pull our finger out now to at the very least to restore our stocks to pre war levels and indeed plan for what comes next for the forces. As you say at least Wallace will do his best to solve that political enigma… let’s see if he stays in that role, if not that will be a serious concern and a sign of new smoke and mirrors on that political front.
The money is coming from an “underspend” by the BEIS. The money not spent was to fund 100,000 EV charging points, a new 5GWh wind farm on the Dogger Bank, £25million for a demonstration lliquid air electricity storage system developed by Manchester University and by scrapping the grant system to subsidise new EV purchases
Kwarteng is a climate change denier. He has given the fossil fuel industry £17 billion subsidy over 15 years for new oil and gas developments in the N sea and approved an additional £75 per bill levy to pay for the new Sizewell C nuclear plant. He has also given a huge £7billion subsidy to Shell for their carbon capture and storage scam
That’s exactly what Putin is counting on and is in his game plan.
Yes but US was directly involved and loosing service men daily For the public the objectives werent clear and it was very much a civil war. This is also much closer to home for us, the border of Ukraine is not much further away than Rome. If we give up on Ukraine we send the message that this playbook is valid and can be reused not just by Russia but any country that want to use force to take another. Is that something your comfortable with?
Well I’m sure they wouldn’t mind testing the theory. If the west has no appetite to disrupt our decadent life’s why not just nibble away. Sadly Ukraine could have been prevented if a stronger albeit somewhat more ambiguous message had been sent before it started. Essentially play Putin at his own game.
The country to watch is China – not Russia. They are looking at what is happening in Ukraine – and in particular the response of the US and the West in general. Remember, they have eyes on Taiwan and are watching and learning.
The 1SL of the Royal Navy was spot on in his analysis that China should be our primary focus. Unfortunately, I think a war in the Far East isn’t too far off. Seriously hope I am wrong!!
But the UK has little to offer the US, Australia, and Japan should that conflict occur. The UK still acts and speaks as if it is a Pacific power with substantial resources when, in fact, it hasn’t had those resources since the early years of WW2.
Beg to differ, Carrier battle group would probably be made available in extremis. However, ChiComs would be most concerned w/ multiple Trident IIs landing on their doorstep. 😁 There is reason behind the announced increase in RN warhead inventory; could easily envision more than one Vanguard, or eventually Dreadnought, on station, if the Brits believe the balloon is about to go up. They are generally a peace-loving people, but extremely dangerous when pissed off. Don’t believe me? Consider the cases of Napoleon and Hitler. 🤔
A carrier battle group without a full complement of fighters, no over the horizon radar and insufficient escorts. One submarine. As if the US needed the UK’s Tridents.
Without Prussia the UK doesn’t defeat Napoleon and without the US it doesn’t defeat Hitler. So much good being pissed off does.
So the only Navy in the world with no one put 2 5th gen Carriers, over the Horizon with the T45 and Crowsnest which agreed has a few issues with stressing the airframe and could be covered by a P8. UK tridents’ independent of the USA. digging back you sound like a without Wellington Prussia is wiped out by Napolean, US arrived very late and like every war just chucked disposable men at a conflict. USA has not won a single combat operation on its own. without the UK Europe would be a very different place. no Russia/France/Italy/Spain/ maybe the UK picked the wrong side. and should of allowed Hitler to cleanse Europe. as they are so ungrateful, they needed help
Cuba?
Grenada?
The US have done OK. 🙂
Be nice to our cousins.
Cuba?? Bay of Pigs invasion was a disaster.
Grenada – enemy was lightweight.
Johan, when the Brits sent the carrier group to Asia recently, most of its escorts and most of its fighters weren’t British.
UK has barely the assets to maintain a presence in Atlantic and middle east.
Any force they send to fight China will be tokenistic and limited.
Well that’s not right is it? One American destroyer and a Dutch frigate where the only ones not British of course the odd submarine apart from the astute might have gotten involved. There was one Sqn of USMC aircraft and one British so roughly equal numbers involved!
10 x USMC F-35, 8 x British F-35. That is only 50% of deck space too as QE2 can carry up to 36.
You are right about the escorts. Still clear RN struggles to do a deployment on its own. An note that limited deployment required 20% or all British surface combatants and probably 40% of combat capable ones
The US would welcome UK Tridents to internationalise the confrontation and to complicate China’s response decision making.
Yaaaaaaawn
And without Russia, the US does not defeat Hitler. 😎
?
Or the U.K. actually. Although counter history is hard, it would have been very likely that even without the US the third Reich was doomed just like Napoleon Britain had bottled the Reich in Europe, leading the the invasion of Russia. What would have been different was it would have been a slower end with most of Europe ending up swapping a Fascist for communist masters.
Yes. I recall your long geopolitical theories on here, most enjoyable. 👍
I do love a bit of geopolitical analysis of what drives history and with the third Reich it’s weakness was always lack of access to some of the key raw materials to drive a 20 century war machine. Once the U.K. successfully keep itself in the war, interdicting any imports from the wider world coming from the Atlantic as well as locking in the med. in reality third Reich pretty much needed to go through Russian to get to the rich resources of Asia and the Middle East.
we do tend to forget ( due to US warfilms) that once the UKs position was secure its imperial resources were greater than the Reichs, just more spread out and harder to concentrate.
The third Reich could Probably in the end have focused more military resources and ripped the heart out the British empire, but not at the same time as trying for the resources of Asia or it could have conquered Russia but not while being locked in by the British empire, warn down by air attacks from Britain and with support flowing into Russia from the Empire and others.
Its interesting as there are two constants in 400 years of European history, Britain’s ability to interdict Europe ( even while having generally smaller Armies) and the Eastern European landscapes ability to swallows and spit out armies ( which Russia somehow seems to have forgotten).
I’ve literally seen Americans and British deny any Soviet impact on the war (especially on the Drive’s Warzone). They are really that delusional to think it was Patton’s 3rd army that drove into Berlin, not Red Army under Konev and Zhukov.
Well the western allies could have gone for Berlin if they chose, and they wisely chose not to, considering the casualties that would ensue and that the Soviets were closer.
As I’m well read on the Russian front / Great Patriotic War you won’t find me belittling the Russians contribution! That theatre dwarfed all others in numbers, ferocity, and ideology.
Are you PK Casimir in disguise? That poster used to lurk here and hated Great Britain. He clearly had “issues”
Without the RAF in the Battle of Britain the US remains isolated and probably ends up getting hit with Atomic weapons.
Without a Nazi rocket scientist your rocket tech does not take NASA to the moon.
Without Russia the German Wermacht and Waffen SS defeats everything that moves.
Without without without. A fun game this how history could be different?
well the defeat of Napoleon was complex but about 80 Britain and 20% Russian winter. Effectively Britain isolated Napoleon, caged him in Europe, which forced him into the Russian campaign Killing one of his field armies, at the same time Britain destroyed the western end of his empire ripping through Spain and invading France Destroying the rest of his field armies. At that time Prussian was nothing more that an enslaved state. Then when he came back the British army crushed a new french field army at Waterloo, the Prussian forces came later and supported and put the final boot in the trend, but by they time they arrived the french field army was already crushed and routed from the field. So any balanced look at the Napoleonic wars would say the only effective state in destroying Napoleons empire was Britain.
Remember, CSG21 was a proof of concept trial, after a period of at least 10 yrs.w/out integrated carrier ops. Deficiencies–admittedly (e.g., organic AEW, aircraft complement, no, of escorts, submarines, etc.), but these areas are all slated to be resolved, or at least mitigated, by end of decade. This will be accomplished through progress/completion of build programs (e.g. Astute, Type 26, Type 31), aircraft acquisition and insertion of drone tech, among other measures. Any interim issues would be addressed on an ad hoc basis by USMC and USN participation, as already demonstrated by CSG21.
ChiCom strategic decision process complicated by number of independent decision making nodes–fact, not speculation. Any sane leadership has to account for probable actions of all actors who can eliminate every vestage of one’s civilization.
ChiComs not necessarily prepared even for leas-rhan-total (unrestricted) war.
Formation of AUKUS alliance was a distinctly negative event from ChiCom perspective, resulting in decidedly negative long-term implications for the conduct of conventional warfare and/or coercive diplomacy.
Errata… delete (unrestricted)
Errata redux…less-than-total.. 🙄
Type 31 is essentially a large OPV without any real warfighting capability – no AShMs, no torpedoes, no longer range air defence.
Kind of like an LCS really but probably with better sea keeping.
CSG21 revealed the RN to be hollowed out and reliant on allies to perform even a peacetime deployment.
As for AUKUS we have no idea what it really means except Australian nuke subs (assuming they get here). I actually think AUKUS was the wrong move.
Correct one would have involved Japan, South Korea, France (far more a Pacific power than Britain) and Singapore. In the long run it should have strived to get India in as well as coax Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines away from neutrality or even cooperation with China.
And your own Whitehouse in 1815… 😉
Yes, have been meaning to discuss this matter w/ all of you…really don’t mind that you initiated the first known instance of urban renewal in the US on August 24,1814, but annoyed that this action contributed to the loss of two frigates and a sloop. Please relinquish two Type 26s, at your earliest convenience. We’ll discuss the sloop when you begun building the Black Swan class…😁
😀
It’s true, hyper polite put aggressive island cultures are never to be underestimated or poked with sticks, least they metaphorically club you over the head and eat you for lunch.
Nonsense.. the uk doesn’t act as if it is a pacific power at all..it had huge resources in the east until late 60s early 70s then pulled some of them back home..but since 97 until now they only have the brunei base. The defence sec said last year about building a new base in the area so the idea is to have some assets permanently based in Pacific in the future.
CLICKBAITE ignore the child.
We had substantial resources well after WW2 – 5 fleet carriers up to the 60s.
We can still do power projection today.
But I agree that it is an exaggerration to say we are a Pacific power.
I completely agree, China should be our focus.
The rest of NATO, even without America, seem capable of fending off Russia. That’s not to say we shouldn’t provide aid to Ukraine, but we should be focusing most of our efforts towards China.
Lots of foreign business quietly relocating to other countries, in 5 or so years; 25m retirees & 12m new workers, mortgage payment strikes, run on rural banks that ‘froze’ savings, quite the debt bubble, Belt & Road loan defaults & renegotiations… many issues that don’t bode well.
Funnily enough all those are western problems too.
People keep talking about Chinese demographics yet ignore western ones.
Eg median age
China 38.4 years,
US: 38.1 years
Japan: 48.4 years
South Korea: 43.7 years
Germany: 45.7 years.
France: 42.3 years
EU: 44.1 years
Australia: 37 years (albeit massive immigration scheme).
Levels of deft to GDP (private)
China: 250%
EU: 90.8%
USA: 204%
Levels of deft to GDP (public)
China: 68.06%
EU: 95.6%
USA: 137.2%
Husehold debt to GDP
China: 61.7%
EU: 51.6%
USA: 67%
Australia: 120%
Problem is too many people are too nationalistic and completely biased – “Yeah, I’m British/American/Russian/Bhutanese and we rock. All those other people I hate have got issues with debt and demography and will die and we’ll live forever and be super awesome x 2”.
Median age ‘does not tell the whole story’ in Age demographics bud – https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/06/median-age-does-not-tell-the-whole-story.html
In simple terms, you need to look at those big bulges nearing retirement & the slimming near the bottom showing teenagers about to enter the workforce.
I’m fully aware of the issues facing the UK & the West. Inflation, public debt, private debt are all serious issues & we can’t borrow or print our way out of things much longer. Add to that a myriad of systemic problems such as; we’ve paid/encouraged generations of people to fail thanks to increasingly expensive welfare, more University graduates with pointless degrees & the terrible management of public services which have them taking more and more money for less and less results. Did you know nearly 1 in 4 people in the UK are Government employees now…? Does not bode well for us.
I could talk for hours on this, and the EU issues, and USA problems etc. etc. BUT, 1) not really th forum and 2) Johan mentioned issues in China, so I added a little info about that & the multiple issues they face. As it happens, I’m also aware that China has faced similar problems over the past 20 years and successfully worked their way through them with minimal impact so, they could well come through these without much issue too.
Problem is too many people are too quick to judge a persons entire worldview on a snippet of information provided in conversation – “yeah, he said something about a thing so he MUST be a moron and not understand all the other things and the complexities of the world like I do because I’m super awesome. x 2”.
Well said
Interesting that 1SL is focussed on China and CDS is focussed on Russia.
We are able to support Ukraine in the way that we are. What would we do to counter Chinese expansionism – sail a Carrier Strike Group/Task Group/Battle Group into the SCS again? What else? Is there a role for the army/commandos/RAF?
Reasonably certain a contribution of special forces (e.g. SAS, SBS, etc.) and RM would be welcomed by any ad hoc allied coalition. Expeditionary RAF contingent, hosted out of Japan, would also be appreciated. Substantial contribution from army would probably be a longer term proposition. Simply my opinion, no direct knowledge of plans or capabilities.
Thanks mate. Some elements of the army we can deploy quickly, especially 16 Air Assault Brigade. Then multi-nationally (and non-NATO) there is the JEF and CJEF – happy to supply details or just read up on Wikipedia etc.
Time to issue a Mea Culpa. Apologies for a premature senior moment in neglecting to list 16 Air Assault Brigade (Combat Team?–currenr formal title per Wiki). Don’t understand how I could have overlooked listing elements of the Parachute Regiment (acclaimed successors to the participants of operation Market Garden). Really should remember more of my PME. 🤔😳🤯🙄
Summary, somewhat nebulous, info available on JEF, and CJEF. Lack of detail re ORBAT. Details please, if/when convenient.
Hi pal, 16 AA Bde (comprising about 6,200 troops), now retitled 16 AA BCT (to copy our US Army brethren!), formed in 1999 from an amalgamation of 5 AB Bde and 24 AM Bde, and centred in Colchester, Essex. Great formation – I used to be COS Colchester Garrison so ran all their training areas, ranges, barracks and all manner of Facilities Management etc. They suffered a bit of a defence cut a few years back but still have recce pl, two para bns, and at least one light infantry bn, an artillery regiment, engineer squadron, CSS etc.
UK Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF) – Formed in 2014 and successor to UK JRRF, the UK Joint Expeditionary Force is a non-NATO United Kingdom-led expeditionary force (all services represented) which may consist of, Denmark, Finland, Estonia, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Sweden and Norway. Eight of the countries are also members of NATO, with Finland and Sweden currently outside that alliance.The JEF is intended as a pool of high readiness, adaptable forces that is designed to enhance the UK’s ability to respond rapidly, anywhere in the world, with like-minded allies, or on behalf of international organisations such as the UN or NATO. The UK’s contribution will include the lead commando, airborne, armoured, aviation, air and maritime task groups. No set Orbat.
Combined JEF – The Combined Joint Expeditionary Force (or CJEF) is envisaged as a deployable, combined Anglo-French military force for use in a wide range of crisis scenarios, up to and including high intensity combat operations. As a joint force it involves all three armed services: a land component composed of formations at national brigade level, maritime and air components with their associated headquarters, together with logistics and support functions. Land Component is min of 1 UK BG and 1 FR BG.
The CJEF is not conceived as a standing force; instead, is available at short notice for UK-French bilateral, NATO, European Union, United Nations or other operations. Combined air and land exercises commenced during 2011 with a view towards developing a full capability. The CJEF is also seen as a potential stimulus towards greater interoperability and coherence in military doctrine, training and equipment requirements. No set Orbat.
Thanks for the comprehensive explanation re composition and role of both JEF and CJEF.
I have a general sense of unease re future projected reduction in end-strength of British Army (73,000?). Presume you, w/ more specific knowledge, have more focused concerns. Even a complete outsider can forecast a future potential train wreck of enhanced commitments vs. reduced means. 🤔
You are right that Government (not MoD or the army itself, of course) is forcing a further reduction to 73,000 Army Regulars (Active Duty).
Unbelievable to some, the British Army has been reduced once or twice a decade since the end of our involvement in the Korean War!
I joined and was commissioned in 1975 when we had about 180,000 regulars [I left in 2009].
General Dannatt (ex-CGS) said about a year or 18 months ago that we could not at that time deploy a warfighting division, by which I assume he meant a div of 3 bdes, all with modern equipment.
That was a profound moment – in my early years of service we had a Corps of four armoured divs in Germany (with many Corps Tps units) plus an armoured bde in Berlin and a division-equivalent in NI (albeit many troops (UDR bns) were locally raised) – plus an AB Bde and an AM bde and many, many more light role bdes in GB.
I served on Op HERRICK (Afghanistan) for 6 months in 2008/9, an enduring operation mainly in Helmand province and requiring a Bde(+). We could not do that again without constant contributions from a re-organised 3 Cdo Bde (part of the Naval Service) and the Reserve Army.
Other concerns, aside from manpower, centre around ageing and largely unmodernised equipment, transition to reduced equipment numbers, some very troubled equipment procurements, insufficient artillery, other capability gaps, mostly poor storage for complex AFVs, perceived insufficient ammunition shortages for high intensity warfighting and litigation directed against ex-Forces who were already cleared of wrongdoing. Happy to elaborate on the above.
By way of balance, the British Army is incredibly flexible, has good operational morale, good leadership, excellent training and has done everything from supporting the NHS fight the pandemic and assist in flood relief tasks to effective deployments to eastern Europe and amazing success in the chaotic Kabul withdrawal. Plus great support (training and weapons/ammo donations) to the Ukraine armed forces.
Firstly, please let me praise and congratulate you on a 34 yr. career, including an end-of-career tour in an active theatre and op! But please, any mention of the cluster-f**k US political decision process re Afghan w/drawl is not beneficial for my blood pressure.😤😡🤬 It certainly is not a politically correct statement, but, in reality, a straight line could be drawn to Mad Vlad’s calculus in Ukraine, and trust me, the ChiComs were also taking copious notes. I simply couldn’t forecast or believe how swiftly the poison fruit of that decision would ripen. Howecer, excellent UK support for Ukraine, hope it continues under next PM.
Regarding current/projected status of British Army, presume a very healthy infusion of coin of the realm and less bureaucratic interference would alleviate most issues. Unfortunately, we both know that will not occur until after hostilities have commenced and bloodshed has begun (accompanied by a scathing critique of professional military by politicians seeking cover). Trust me, nearly identical process would be duplicated in the US. Would be willing to place a large wager that very similar conversations occurred during the inter-war yrs. Attempting to recall the George Santayana quote, “Those who fail to recall the past, are doomed to repeat it.” (Or words to that effect.). Really have begun to wonder whether the West won the Cold War, or whether history will judge us as simply played for fools (democracies couldn’t wait to realize a peace dividend through disarmament). What a Pyrrhic Victory that would be…,🤔
I wouldn’t be too sure- with sleepy demented Joe in power in the US and Macron and Olaf in France and Germany respectively it looks like there is a distinct lack of robust leadership within some of the major NATO powers. I think it wouldn’t take much for Putin to calculate that NATO wont stand against him as a unified force. That is why we should be looking towards our own defences and replacing every single piece of hardware sent to Ukraine and double down on military investment now whilst we still can. To win a war you have to prepare and lay the foundations for victory.
Putin is aware that NATO is standing against him as a unified force, and NATO is expanding due to his war. We are standing in a fullsome deterrent posture in the east of the Continent – and countries who are NATO members are arming and training Ukrainians.
Cobblers. NATO knows the score. As do the Finns and Swedes.
The Swedes haven’t had anything to worry about since 1991.
Pre-1991 most of Baltic southern coast was in Soviet hands/control – Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland and Eastern Germany. Hence Sweden was unofficially allied with USA and maintained a large military.
Baltic is now a NATO lake for most part. NATO can blockade St Petersburg without breaking a sweat.
Only exception is Kaliningrad which in reality is a large version of Snake Island – ie a small “island” surrounded by the enemy.
I suspect Kaliningrad is target #1 if it ever comes to war and I doubt it would last more than a day before being rolled up.
no, it seems it is more important to cut corporation tax.
I know, personally, that Russia has stepped feet on NATO. I met them, it was only Latvian Russians – that knew me – intervening that stopped it becoming a tad sticky… for me.
The Russians are agitating in former States.
Agree Putin is playing the long game- he seems happy to lose tens of thousands of troops and thousands of pieces of military hardware if the end result is victory. He is counting on a winter of discontent in Europe with cost of living climbing, all UK gas supply is likely going to be sent abroad to the EU to maintain French and German industrial production with little to no thanks to the UK for our gas being redistributed their way. We will probably never even be told the gas has been sent abroad- all we will know is that there is rationing, and very very high bills. whilst the UK pays extortionate bill, the French and Germans (our supposed allies and friends) will eventually grovelingly agree to the division of Ukraine probably along the line of the donbass. All so that Putin can turn back on Nordstream 1 and commission Nordstream 2.
Flippin marvellous- hopefully Liz Truss will have a bit of backbone and not let this happen- the EU needs to feel a bit of discomfort- it is a situation all of their making by Merkel and Macron- Germany scraping its nuclear power plants and agreeing to become a vassal state utterly dependent upon Russia for its energy supply.
Liz Truss has shown backbone in dealing with the Russians as Foreign Sec.
Er, no, she hasn.t.
Backbone is when you have the will to stand up in a threatening situation – something I did with my best mate 4-Cell, his nick name was Maglite – against PARA on Friday nights in the Shot.
She.s mouthed words and taken photo ops. No Maggie.
She went to secondary school in Yorkshire. Could be a female Geoff Boycott.
David, Your brawl in Aldershot is a bit different to how Foreign Secretary’s do business.
10 Feb 2022 – Liz Truss’ crunch showdown with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov. Steve Rosenberg, the BBC’s Moscow Correspondent, said that “to say that Liz Truss ruffled weathers in Moscow would be an understatement”. The British foreign secretary infuriated Russians, as Mr Lavrov said British-Russian relations had reached their “lowest point in years”.
22 Feb 22 – LIZ TRUSS has summoned Russia’s ambassador to the UK for showdown talks after delivering a Ukraine evacuation order.
27 Apr 22 – Mansion House speech. The foreign secretary, Liz Truss, is playing with fire. On Wednesday night she described Russia’s Vladimir Putin as a “rogue operator” lacking rationality, and with “no interest in international norms”. As a result, she said: “We will keep going further and faster to push Russia out of the whole of Ukraine.”
Not saying she is trying to be a Maggie, although she dresses like her. She has also supported training of Ukraininans and supply of kit to them. Strong enough, I would think.
Aldershots a scary old place, lived there once, generally backbone was needed almost every Friday night.
Faster running away was the priority.
Yes very very true….as well as the art of keeping your mouth shut.
Thanks for that heads up, driving through the Lakes valley’s at 11pm causes problems BBC radio 4 reception.
She’s the same idiot who told Lavrov she didn’t recognise Russian sovereignty over chunks of Russia (Rostov and Voronezh) after Lavrov set a trap for her.
She’s an idiot who barks a lot but has no clue (much like most modern British pollies).
100%
Another female barker is Priti Patel. Anyway, if Truss gets the job she has committed to 3% GDP defence spending so I could forgive her.
I’m inclined to agree but Poland and other former Eastern block countries will not be pleased. I hope they also take a strong position.
Firstly, if we want to navigate present crisis safely it is essential to avoid adopting a punishment mentality. We need to be generous in adversity.
Secondly, this country needs to sort itself out and rediscover what matters. When one of the best candidates for PM can be trashed by some trivial leaked half truth about her views on changing your gender or be criticised because she can do her job without getting into a built ridden lather, we have a problem as a society.
Yes that was a shitty campaign all told. Really unpleasant stuff.
Why would UK, or any other European country so far away from Mordor need any of these weapons? We don’t. Better them being useful on the actual front.
It was announced weeks ago that the Treasury had supplied £3bn from the emergency contingency fund to cover the Ukraine War. This included funds to replace weapons/ammunition supplied by the U.K.
And the money from said fund comes from where exactly, perhaps more borrowing…..
Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for supplying the UKR with what it needs, best thing Boza ever did, but let’s be honest, the money ‘contingency fund’ or whatever is still coming out of our pockets.
All government funding ultimately comes from taxes. Borrowing just defers it. But without taxes we’d have no military, NHS, or education system, so they’re a be necessary evil. Though there’s plenty of other government spending I’d slash.
Wouldn’t we all Sean wouldn’t we all!
Point is the money comes from somewhere thus will need paying for no matter what fund/dept it’s for/from.
Yes from taxes, pretty sure everyone knows that with the exception of the Labour Party 🤷🏻♂️
Personally I have no issue with my taxes being spent on arming the Ukraine instead of wasting it on, for example, Diversity Managers in the NHS.
Cross my heart I have never come across a Diversity manager in the NHS. We do have people working on accessing healthcare for hard to reach groups, but that generally includes having to go and meet scary people who the police try to avoid and asking them to let their children have vaccinations please.
Just gonna leave this here: https://www.jobs.nhs.uk/xi/vacancy/917298335
All I can say is thank goodness it’s only a 6 month short term contract and it’s in London which is a law unto itself. Basically the rest of the NHS in England and NHS London have a bit of a hate hate relationship. NHS London gets 800 pounds more funding per head than the rest of the county ( 37% more) while having the shortest journey times, no issue with rural isolation and having 1 hour long journeys to definitive care..what is worse is the DOH live there and decide everything that happens in London should happen in the rest of rural isolated England……. can I formally distance myself from NHS London and vote for them to hand over all that extra cash to the regions and places like Battle etc….
Well 50, 50
I’ll support the Ukr but, the Labour Party understands taxes.
100% on pride cobblers etc.
Agreed, but I do wonder why the entirety of NATO evidently cannot supply arms and ammunition fast enough to prevent the Ukrainian front line from regularly running out as we’re hearing, especially after all these months. In other words, I want any explanation to be due mainly to logistics and not principally politics. We cannot afford to ‘lose’ this on behalf of Ukraine. No judgement at this time, just monitoring future outcomes.
Sadly that are countries in NATO that are not pulling their weight in supplying weapons to Ukraine. Not surprising given how slow many have been at meeting the 2% spending target.
different calibres is a big issue. However UKR moving over NATO ammo.
Well it does seem Germany have started with the we have nothing left to give. as it sold everything. and didn’t invest and as Trump said Hiding behind Nato. But then Ukraine has had a while to load up and didn’t.
The wheels have come off in Germany…
The public aren’t bothered by the cost of support to Ukraine and see it is a good cause and most are more concerned about issues closer to home. I don’t see this changing anytime soon.
We dont use the M109 anymore , replaced by AS90 ..So I presume we kept them as war reserve…… still our reserves eaten into though , I just read we used to have 140 of them ,some previously having been sold to Austria
The M109’s are ex-Belgian Army and refurbished (I think ?) in the UK
Yup more on the story here:
I’m quite pleased with that. We’re actually being quite proactive about supporting Ukraine if we’re sourcing gear and ‘tiddlying it up’ before sending it on.
I presume we are replacing the NLAW’s to a degree with new production which allows more of the old stocks to be sent. However as Switzerland is banning use of any newly produced versions at some stage we will hit a rather large fence in supplying them. I would like to see UK and Sweden look to eventually move warhead production away as a punishment but have no idea if that is at all feasible, but certainly I would exclude them in future as far as is at all possible from involvement in our weapons supply.
Yes, I think they switched from local explosive to Swiss supplied insensitive ones about half way through production.
Surely Switzerland cannot ban the UK military from supplying any kit it damn well chooses. Where did you get that information from?
NLAW are produced in Belfast for the UK armed forces- I am hoping the production line is in a war footing and mass producing as many of these wonderful weapons as they possibly can.
It’s true! Ordinary Swiss nationals think it’s taking the piss being conscious that making a load of money from armament sales and then playing the neutral card if there passed on is questionable. Ukraine is deserving. We’ll need to watch this space.
Of course they can. We keep banning uk produced parts being sold to Argentina. Just a matter of what you put in the sale contract.
Not saying it’s right, but when has right/wrong come into international arms deals.
When the Swiss sold the explosive to us within the contract would have been an End User Certificate which is a standard type document used in all legal international purchase or transfer of prohibited products like explosives, firearms and ammunition. We use it in all our contracts as well. To change it needs the agreement of the source of the product.
And? Don’t you like the fact our ability to source, upgrade and deliver weapons and munitions to Ukraine assists their war effort? Surely as a plus 70 year old Englishman as you claim, any help we send to Ukraine is welcome? As the invasion of Ukraine is illegal and needs condemnation by every free and fair and right minded individual and organisation, yes?
The help needs to be more than drip feeding weapons in what has the chance to become a forever war.
If west wants Ukraine to win, the donations would be greater in number and would also include all those things needed to win a war – long range strike, multi role combat aircraft, longer range SAMs etc.
Instead NATO’s happy giving Ukraine bits and pieces so they can keep fighting the Russians to the last Ukrainian.
Well Switzerland is making its product unfit for purpose which will result in us sourcing alternative suppliers. It’s really up to them how much they like money.
I don’t think we are replacing, as there would have been a public contract for it and reported in the news, as nlaws are a popular story.
However, Ukraine have a more urgent need for them and the UK has no realistic threats on the horizon, so time to restock in the coming years
I’ve been puzzled for years about the fate of the UK’s M109s? Have you seen one in private hands like the Abbots, which are commonplace? Just further proof the UK is fighting a war by proxy. I doubt our war reserves will be maintained whilst this conflict continues.
I think ours were sold to Austria, who have now sold them to Latvia (?).
The UK retired the M109 in 1992/93 on the introduction of AS-90 and sold all 140 A1 and A2 versions to Austria in 1994. We do not keep equipment of a type that is no longer used by the army (such as M109) in war reserve. Equipment past its OSD is rapidly withdrawn and generally sold quickly before the condition deteriorates/value drops – or is gifted to UK (MoD sponsored) museums and units as gate guardians. Occasionally equipment is not sold but is converted to a new role or scrapped.
I have no problem with us fighting a war by proxy, if justified.
Maybe it is time to retain weapons for at least ten years after withdrawal as a war reserve in climate-controlled storage. The decade would ensure a percentage of experienced operators could if needed, in a time of crisis, man these vehicles? A true war reserve should be established to ensure enough equipment is available once frontline units are engaged. The MOD has enough spare sheds and bases to accommodate reserve stock. The Ukraine war is proving that war by proxy may be the way of military engagement in some future conflicts? Ukraine is drawing down UK war stocks and we must hope that Britain is not drawn into direct confrontation without a plentiful replenishment programme.
Or just properly replacing weapons and ammunition at sufficient numbers.
A radical and interesting idea, but it costs a huge amount to store equipment in CHE (we only have a little CHE) and you would also have to store all the related ammunition, special tools and test equipment, spare parts, training simulators and other training aids, publications and fund PDS and you would have to periodically service and exercise them, and run familiarisation training for drivers/operators/maintainers every so often. You would lose receipts from sales when the retired equipment is at its most valuable and attractive to a buyer so Treasury would be against it. I think it is optimistic to think that soldiers familiar with that equipment would still be in service and could operate them up to 10 years after they had been put into retirement storage.
If we are talking about vehicles the army dramatically reduced storage by closing AVSD Ludgersall in March 1997, thus having to cram A Vehs into Ashchurch which had previously only been for B Vehs, Plant (C vehs), trailers. The place is totally rammed – there is typically 2-3″ between tanks, side to side.
MoD closed Ordnance (storage) Depots at Didcot and Weedon (and possibly some others) in the 60s and Chilwell in about 1980 leaving just 2 major depots (Donnington and Bicester) for general (non-vehicle, non-ammunition). Kineton is for ammunition.
The MoD has very few spare sheds at Donnington, Bicester or Ashchurch (vehicles), and is having to build a few more sheds at either Donnington or Bicester as existing sheds are so rammed.
It would be interesting to know what we do hold in the war reserve, if anything. There is meant to be a load of kit in the Falklands, from the war, flagged as war reserve, I keep meaning to look up what is there
Steve, of course we have war reserve kit (of all natures) in UK depots to replace that lost in combat. Used to be called WMR (War Maintenance Reserve) but everyone says Attrition Reserve now. They are all in-service equipment not old stuff that went out of service years ago – that gets sold, gifted or scrapped really quite quickly. So there are no old Chieftains or Challys 1s or Saracens, Ferrets etc etc at Ashchurch.
We do hold war reserve items down in the Falklands (but not old crap languishing from 1982) but I can’t tell you what they are. However it is well known that Gunners from the Reserve Army (eg 103 Regt RA from Merseyside) frequently do their annual camp in the Falklands!
https://www.thefreelibrary.com/TA+TROOPS'+FALKLANDS+EXERCISE.-a0308660721
I doubt you could look up what is stored down there.
Depends on your definition of a war reserve. There is the ammo/gear/spare parts we need for a small short term war and there is the reserves we need for a longer one. The US and Russia have all their massive reserves of old gear that could be reactivated if the worst happened. Not sure we have that side of the story.
Hi Steve, I have said several times in this thread that the MoD does not hold vast stocks of equipment together with spares, ammunition, training aids, special tools and test equipment, publications, PDS support etc etc for equiment that has been declared obsolete and withdrawn from service. There is no shed at Ashchurch full of Centurions, Chieftains, M109s, Saracen APCs, Ferrets etc. The same is true (I am sure) for the other services.
If you take Chally 2 we have 3 regiments totalling 168 tanks, then there are some in the Repair Pool (RP), some in the Trg Org and some in the Attrition Reserve (AR) – totalling 227 tanks which is the number we declare as ‘active’. In extremis you could take RP tanks and re-designate them as AR, and perhaps a few from the Trg Org. Given that we bought 386 tanks, and we have not sold any, there are a good number that are also held, but non-active and they are probably in a shocking condition having been robbed for spares and not benefitting from support funding. Thats the story. No CR1s, no Chieftains.
We are not the USA or Russia – we do things differently and down to a tight budget.
The greater concern might be ammunition holdings if we are to expend at a rate similar to the Russo-Ukraine war.
Kizzy, We don’t keep kit that has been superseded in war reserve.
It would appear to be short term thinking. Artillery no matter how old could be useful in an attrition war, just ask Russis. Might not be optimal but big difference between non optimal and useless.
I guess the counter argument is it’s better to sell and use the funds to offet cost of newer stuff, so you can have more of it. Even if the sale value will be tiny.
We have never kept old kit ‘for a rainy day’ once it has been declared obsolete and replaced with new kit. Its a financial issue – and storage space is limited these days. Sale value is rarely tiny.
The Russians have a different view – they perhaps think about major peer-peer war or WW3 more than we do.
Are parts of this from other sources.
Have M109s not been retired here a long time ago and sold off to Austria? But will BAE have a stock?
Do we even have loitering munitions?
Do we need a Gromit to keep Wallace on track ?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrmZIgVoQw4😎
Indeed, I think AS90 replaced the M109 in my old Regt back in 97, so it would have been out if service for 25 years. I Assume in the not too far distant future AS90 will be replaced and become war stock so I feel the any value the Ukrainians can get out of those M109s now is more beneficial for us and the rest of Europe than gathering dust in some warehouse.
When AS90 is replaced, we will not keep any in war reserve stock – they will all be disposed of ASAP.
Brilliant! Haven’t seen that one for a few years. Show it to the Russian soldiers – they’ll all die from laughing!
Matt wrote:
“”Are parts of this from other sources.””
Yes, Ive posted above a link to an article from a month ago where it states the UK purchased the 20 M109s from an arms company in Belguim and then refurbed them here.
Matt wrote:
“”Do we even have loitering munitions?””
Yes the Uk purchased a load of Switchblade 30s last year (some of which we have handed over to the Ukraine)
Matt wrote:
“”Do we need a Gromit to keep Wallace on track ?””
To be fair he has done more than anybody else across Europe, seeing as the Uk isn’t part of contiguous Europe, that speaks volumes.
Thanks.
Don’t worry – I have become an immense admirer of Mr Wallace. If I get the chance I will buy him a drink – he deserves it.
But I couldn’t resist the pun.
M109s were retired in ’92/93 and all sold to Austria in ’94. BAE would have a reference vehicle, probably in the US, as they are the DA. They would not have a ‘stock’ of them.
I wonder where 50k Soviet arty rounds are coming from? Surely wouldn’t have them sitting in warehouse in the UK?
Since the start of the war the MoD has had people going around the world looking for Soviet era weapons and ammunition to acquire and then supply to Ukraine.
I also read that the Russian’s are doing exactly the same and all over the world arms dealers in shitty countries with ex soviet weapons stocks are having a field day playing off Russian and Chinese arms buyers against Western (mainly Uk and US). Still if HIMARs continues to hit Russia’s ammo dumps and we can keep a supply line open into Ukraine than that could be a turning point in the war allowing the Ukrainians to reach firepower parity or possibly even localised superiority to the shitty Russian army.
Arguably the Ukrainians could be at effective parity with the Russians. Although the Russians have far larger numbers of everything, they use large amounts of it randomly targeting civilians, housing, infrastructure, etc.
Whereas the Ukrainians focus on targeting the Russian military and strategically significant targets…
It’s like comparing a gang member ‘spraying and praying’ with a MAC-10 versus a trained soldier with a sniper rifle. It’s not how much you fire, it’s what you hit that counts.
Talk in the Daily Telegraph today of sending Gripens.
Yeh, I saw it reported in the US sources that the US has funded training of Ukrainians on F16 and F15. Not familiar with the various F16 models. Does the F16AM do PGM?
F-16AM does do PGMs.
Surplus A10’s are being talked about in the US. There is an article on the very subject over on ‘The Drive’
A10s would really ruin Russia’s army. In fact any decent Western military aircraft is going to show the Russian military up.
Czechia has chosen F-35 from late 20s, even though offered their existing leased Gripens for effectively nothing.
Possible source if they can be backfilled?
Gripen might be politically less provocative than US aircraft but there are only a dozen in Czech Republic. In terms of numbers, spares, training F16 makes more sense. For me the key capability is less air superiority than delivery of precision guided weapons – game changer.
Read that to. Warzone quoted US has finally said whatever Ukraine flies next will be non Russian. F16 seem the logical choice but US has mentioned A10s also. Something that can deploy APKWS would be useful, cheap and accurate.
Whatever it is a single type would be preferable. Logistics on multiple artillery and missile system is bad enough, but maintaining multiple complex aircraft would be a nightmare.
There’s about 14 JAS-39 white tails that were produced and SAAB is looking for customers. Not sure how complete these are.
Rest of European Gripen fleet is relatively small:
Czechia – 14 JAS-39C/D – sole supersonic fighter, to be replaced by F-35 in late 2020s.
Hungary – 14JAS-39C/D – sole supersonic fighter
Sweden – 94 JAS-39C/D – sole fighter. JS-39E replacement for 72 JAS-39C slowly entering service.
So no-one really has spare airframes right now except for 14 white-tails.
L159 might fit the bill.
It doesn’t offer much capability- it is an upgraded L39 trainer after all.
I think the Czech ones can do Sidewinder and Maverick
Could everyone please read the article before commenting and asking questions
That’d be a novelty 😏
👍
Completely agree and I would add read earlier comments too before posting
Good point.
M109s are i think ex Belgium stock rejuvenated at unknown cost for the MoD because AS90 not fit to deploy? i am unsure that any plans to replace stock sent to Ukraine have been put into action as yet. ased on articles in Tulsa’s Defence Analysis.
It’s becoming a bit of a circus. With 100 US raptors clearing the sky’s over Ukraine and a 100 plus typhoons and reapers doing ground attack and this thing is over inside 3 months. Russia sent home and hopefully the Kremlin learns a hard lesson. This mess is all Bidens fault, lack of mental ability, which is sad, but also a lack of backbone from the leader of the West. Boris may have had his flaws but I am sure he would had made sure the UK contributed more than our fair share to the above. It’s a hard lesson for us old Brits :but the hurtful truth is we cannot stand up to bullies or stand up for what is right any more without US help. On the whole very sad for a more civilized world too!
“This mess is all Biden’ss fault”
There is major land war going on in Europe because the war criminal Putin decided to invade Ukraine and it’s all Biden’s fault. Do you guys even listen to the stuff that you say sometimes. Do you ever wonder if he was emboldened by the previous president kissing up to him at every chance he got. Even throwing his entire national intelligence infrastructure under the bus just to keep Putin from getting upset with him. Even calling him a genius for invading Ukraine this past February. Please come back to the real world.
Real world:
Obama admin: inept departure from in Iraq(and ISIS appear), invasion of Ucrania/Crimeia.
Trump admin: 0
Biden admin: inpet departure from Afghanistan(Taliban return), bigger invasion of Ucrania.
Showing ineptitude destroys deterrence, surprise…
“Obama admin: inept departure from in Iraq(and ISIS appear), invasion of Ucrania/Crimeia.”
I think you should research the status of forces agreement between the government of Iraq and the US before you make that claim. Hint- it was signed by the previous president.
“Trump admin: 0”
That claim speaks volumes to be honest. I won’t even bother responding to that.
I really don’t want to get into a political debate as it destroys any meaningful discussion but seriously do a little open minded research before spouting some easily disproved claims.
I accept that Putin is responsible for the deaths, murders, etc in Ukraine and I hope and pray he gets one day an appropriate comeupance. But Biden could have lead the West in preventing this war and did nothing. If fact I would say his policy was to let Russia have Ukraine, it was only with Ukrainians resolve, bravery and UK Nlaws did it dawn on that Whitehouse administration that they could help Ukraine seriously undermine one of their rivals. It’s still possible to end this war in the manner I previously prescribed. But it seems the yanks are “frit” when it comes to the Russians. It means more Putin and a lot more deaths.
There was nothing short of putting NATO troops boots on the ground in Ukraine that was going to stop this invasion. Russia has been planning this since before 2014 as evidenced by all the years of preparation, building and extending military bases close to Ukraine and the ever larger and complex exercises held each year in Belarus and the takeover of Crimea. This act by Putin transcends any individual US President.
I do think Biden and the US was slow to react so we agree on that and if the decision was mine the response would be a lot more forceful. But I imagine the president has to be a lot more deliberate when dealing with a nuclear armed state whose doctrine sees tactical nuclear weapons as just another tool in the toolbox. There are more than one ways to skin a cat and charging headfirst into a military confrontation with Russia plays into Putin’s hand.
Realistically the only time NATO could have safely stopped this was before the war started, but everyone including me thought Russia was a serious threat and putting NATO forces there could have been a disaster. Now if they get involved, yes they could beat the Russian on the ground but it would like result in ww3.
I at the time before the war was saying we should have put a large NATO training mission into Ukraine, to make Russia think twice, but it would have been extremely risky
I think the USA wanted the war. Russia was getting too assertive elsewhere and the Americans understood the benefits of a quagmire closer to home. Of course the Americans thought Ukrainian army would be wiped off the face of the planet in a few weeks so they openly stated they would be supporting an insurgency.
Note the Americans have never cared much for any diplomatic solution since 2014 – they never participated in Minsk I or II.
Biden administration also did the following before the war:
Literally the Americans said: “We aren’t going to talk and we expect Russia to become subservient to us. But if Russia invades Ukraine we will do nothing except threaten them with sanctions and maybe send money and weapons to insurgents.”
The Europeans were largely quiet on the matter except Macron who was busy trying to keep the peace.
The Americans knew the Russians wouldn’t be able to resist themselves – people like current CIA director William Burns and likes of Kissinger and Kennan have been warning that a western allied Ukraine is a red line for Russian political elites since the fall of the USSR.
Blinken and Austin have both openly stated the goal is to weaken Russia so it can’t do this ever again but without clarifying what this means. Last time countries were “irreversibly” weakened, they were destroyed (Libya) or conquered (Iraq).
The goal is now simple – have Russia bleed itself to death fighting to the last Ukrainian. US Chief of Staff, General Miley has warned this war will take up to 10 years. that’s not a warning, it’s the intent.
To enable this Americans and Europeans drip feed weapons in as well as drip feed sanctions. The weapons are sufficient enough to stall the Russians but not substantial enough to decisively beat them on the battlefield. The sanctions are designed to have long term effect but not too uncomfortable in the short term (that would have seen west sanctioning everything Russia does as well as as secondary sanctions on anyone continuing to trade with Russia).
The west has again not offered any kind of out for the Russians in terms of diplomatic solution.
So you’ve got a war designed to be a stalemate with any way out.
War has been a massive boon for America – not only is Russia knocked out as a contender but Europe has been forced back into NATO with dreams of European specific collective security mechanism as promoted by Macron and others flushed down the toilet.
Europe is now back in its place as a dutiful American patsy.
It’s the ultimate proxy war and infinitely more successful beyond America’s wildest dreams.
Yep create a western version of Russias Wargner group but just on a different level. Ukraine contract them in, West states its a private organisation has no say over it.
Biden was to clear on what he wouldn’t do so for Putin the consequences were worth the Risk. Its ironic cos politians are usually were good at being nonspecific and ambiguous 😀
Yeah that was quite dumb.
And US only said anything positive about Ukraine resistance well after the Russian initial assault failed.
For all his faults Boris and his Churchill fanboyism saved the day.
I really don’t get how Boris got this right, considering even he couldn’t name any real success stories of his PM or major of London, but somehow he got this one right. I suspect it was in spite of him and things happened without his involvement, but we won’t find out for a number of years.
Whatever the reason, this has massively repaired our global military reputation after the damage caused by Iraq and worse still afgan. Plus no doubt will be a recruitment tool locally, as I’m sure many are proud of what our armed forces are doing indirectly there.
There are plenty of PMC in the US and UK, they are no different than Wargner group, although their tactics might be more human but same could be said about the conventional forces of UK/us Vs Russia.
I think you’ll find this is all Putin’s fault.
Yep, if Russia had taken it seriously at the start it would have been all over fast, they almost managed with what they did send. The west got lucky. Also Ukraine got lucky, I read their initial forces attacking the capital were meant to be massively reinforced by an airlift but Ukraine managed to take out the airfield just before it was due to land.
Russia took it seriously, they radically under estimated their opponent. They thought it would be a repeat of 2014 when they rolled in and took Crimea without any major resistance.
Yes the VDV attacked Hostomel Airport in an attempt to secure it to allow reinforcements with armoured vehicles to be flown in. The plan was then to push to Kyiv, and to seize the government quarter within 72 hours. But the Ukrainians were ready for such an obvious move and pretty much wiped out the entire Russian attack force. The Russians repeated the airborne assault, this time aided by armoured forces advancing from Belorussia, and while they did eventually take the airfield it was too late, with the element of surprise lost and the airfield too damaged to use.
The interesting point is that the first attack, by Russia’s ‘elite’ VDV were heavily defeated by Ukranian units that were from from their best. All their best units were positioned in the East.
The Ukrainians have been readying themselves for this invasion since 2014. I suspect our own Operation Orbital has held somewhat in that preparation.
The underestimate was what I meant by not taking it seriously. Either their intel was terrible, which is unlikely considering how good Russia is at spying and clear evidence they had inside men, or the initial attack was polictically planned rather than planned by the military.
Go in light and take the city and claim it was a peace keeping mission aimed and stabalising Ukraine /weeding out terrorists linking it to west actions in afgan/Iraq, and lie heavily to the rest of the world like they did in Crimea, hoping to not take too much negative impact from the west.
I am wondering if ukraine did see it coming. You would think if they had been prepared for it, they would have put some anti air assets near the airport, resulting in the initial russian para drop being a turkey shoot.
They did destroy several helicopters in the first wave using manpads – the troops were all helicoptered in.
The Russians and west also forgot that the Russian army was defeated in 2014. 3 BTGs were wiped out including ones attacking Mariupol.
Everyone was too busy thinking about how clever those “little green men” were to remember just a few hundred kilometres east, the best units the Russians had were being cut to shreds.
This is why 2014 ended in such a stalemate too – the Russian offensive was stymied but Ukraine lacked offensive capability to push them out.
How can you forget Russia is still a nuclear super power?!? Even if only a quarter of its active warheads is successfully deployed that’s still 400 nuclear warheads detonating in Europe and Russia!
Taking out Russia’s military would require numerous strikes on Russia itself be it airbases, SAM sites, C3 sites, railways and other logistics etc.. It would probably require an invasion of Kaliningrad to neutralise it.
At some point Russia would have no choice but to launch a nuclear retaliation even if it is mainly tactical nukes against allied formations or airbases.
Why did my post disappear? It was not inaccurate, but did mention another publication. just wondering.
Whoops it has not.
Apologies.
It is more accurate to say that those M109s will arrive from Belgium via the UK. Those M109s are not ex-British Army examples but upgraded ex-Belgian Army M109A4BEs. They were stored in Belgium until very recently and might still be there in fact.
M109s will be very useful to Ukraine but I’m not too sure how useful 105mm light guns will be in an artillery duel with Russian 122mm & 152mm guns. I believe we are also supplying 3 x M270 GMLRS too.
Rob, the thing with the light gun in the BA is that it’s air portable underslung. I don’t see that happening with the Ukrainian forces, I’m unsure what CB Radar the Orcs have and how long it would take them to return fire onto a enemy position, if it’s more than a couple of minutes then the Ukrainian forces could just shoot and scoot. The other opinion I could think where they might use them is in pre prepared defensive positions in the anti tank role.
I keep reading that the reason we retain the 105 light gun is because its air portable. But the M777 is air portable too, that was one of the key parameters for its design (and I bet I know which one the Ukrainians prefer!).
As you say, being able to drop it from a C17 or sling it under a Chinook are probably not primary concerns for the Ukrainians right now.
Still, hopefully we will send all the 105’s over and get them replaced with M777’s!!
No chance, I know..
Mate no chance as the ones being sent to Ukraine are the L119 and not in UK service, slightly different to the in use L118, and more importantly the 119s are still using the dial sight and not the APS.
My thoughts too, not at all sure what use 105 light gun would be other than for basic artillery training maybe? Perhaps the MOD just want to clear out some of our old stuff to make way for something a little more useful like M777?
Only joking, I know that won’t happen, the light guns will go and not get replaced.
Doubt they’ll be doing any dueling, more likely fire support for Kherson offensive. Smaller rounds maybe mean they can be used closer to advancing friendlies.
So whilst we are on an article about artillery, anybody seen the pictures and videos from the Antonovskiy Bridge over the Dnipro River which connects the Russian occupied city of Kherson with the area just above the Crimea. It’s the only bridge over the river for 50kms and it has been struck by the Ukrainian army using HIMARS these past 2 days. Not sure how wide the bridge is (Sure Ive read its 20 metres across) but they targeted it with GMLRS missiles the other day with TASS stating that Moscow claimed they shot down 5 out of 6 of them. They then air the following video, which shows a really tight grouping on one lane of the bridge. That grouping really does show how accurate the GMLRS is and why Moscow (isnt happy with it)
Rob Lee, has posted a number of tweets on the above subject. The interesting thing here, is if the Ukrainians can take down the bridge, it will limit the ability of Moscow to reinforce Kherson if they decide to advance on the city.
Hopefully they can keep these HIMARS units out of Russian hands and that the Kerch bridge is on their hit list too.
Bear in mind that this equipment can either be used by Ukraine against Russia, or we could leave Ukraine to fall and then use this equipment to fight Russia ourselves. It seems sort of immaterial to me who its being used by at this point
Exactly! 👍🏻
Quite
Indeed, and with the huge caveat that it’s Ukrainian blood. Sod Russia, give ‘our allies’ what they need. Let them hit the Kersh bridge while they’re about it for previously itemised reasons and bullocks to Sergey Lavrov.
Ukraine is fighting the war for us, least we can do to help.
We are going to need to replace all of this gifted equipment pretty damn quick- if Russia can grind out an eventual victory in Ukraine it will have to be confronted sooner or late and our armed forces need to be match fit. I’d strongly recommend using the foreign aide budget to replace all this equipment. No better use for it. I’d much rather the UK sensibly invested in reserve forces, ammunition stockpiles using foreign aid budget than giving it to China or India- both have taken a pro Russian stance on Putin’s expansionist war and both have nuclear and space programmes- not a penny more should go to either of these countries.
It’s depressing but true that most countries who need and recieve our aid are backing Russia. What that says about our Foreign policy and the nature of the regimes concerned is worth thinking about.
If Russia does grind out a win, it will be years before they can take on another country of any size, and so plenty of time for the UK to replace stocks.
I don’t think Russia ever intended taking on another country of any size in a full fledged conventional war. Ukraine was meant to be a 3 day operation. Even before the war Russia’s military was too small to defend the country hence it’s doctrine was “active defence” ie limited offensive action to buy time and degrade enemy’s ability to launch offensive actions.
And by 2030 even this would have been untenable with at least a third of the air force up for scrapping without replacement as production could not keep up with retirements. Basically Russians needed to replace about 800 Su-24/25/27 and MiG-29/-31 but under current production rates would have managed to produce only 400 jets at maximum given current production rates and these would have been the already partially obsolete Su-30/34/35 and a small handful of 4.5 generation Su-57. And they are unable to produce 5th generation jets or new AWACs or PGMs indeed any of the stuff that makes up a modern air force.
The ground force as we have seen was in bad state and this just would have continued to worsen as even the upgraded Soviet kit ala T-72B3 got to the point of complete obsolescence and all those issues associated with age, let alone the scores of un upgraded 1970s and 1980s junk that made up the bulk of the forces (eg second most common tank lost in Ukraine after upgraded T-72B3 is ancient T-72B).
(Don’t even talk about the Navy – virtually every single large warship is over 30 years old).
I suspect the Russians knew all this hence investment in ballistic and cruise missiles, nuclear weapons and surface to air defences. It’s the same strategy pursued by other countries with limited conventional capabilities ala North Korea and Iran.
With Ukrainian war, Russia’s military would have been in dire straits by 2030 and completely obsolete and facing collapse by 2040.
Yeah I think your right. Although I suspect it wasn’t quiet as black and white as made out about the quick war. If they really thought the war would be over quickly why did they amass over 200k soliders on the border. They must have been there as a contingency for it not being over fast, but clearly the contingency has badly failed.
200k is not many soldiers for such a giant target such as Ukraine USSR deployed 500k for invasion of much smaller and much less populated Czechoslovakia. Arabs deployed 1 million men against Israel in 1973.
And there was no contingency qs Russian kept bashing their head against a Ukrainian wall for over a month before refocusing on Donbas.
I think they ammassed 200k for appearances. Poor intel led them to believe that the sight of a seemingly huge & unstoppable force rolling down every road in Ukr would lead the Ukrainian Army to lay down their arms and capitulate, or welcome them rather than fight their “brothers”.
It looks like (to me at least) the Russian leadership misread/missunderstood the reality on the ground & expected the Ukr government to either run away or welcome them too. Seems some were in the pay of Russian intelligence prior to hostilities or at least, that’s what the FSB was telling the Russian leadership.
All speculation of course.
👍
No.
M109 long gone, MoD bought these elsewhere. NLAWs there are thousands more. Stormer once numbered around 150 I recall so 6 will not scratch the surface, nor will the 4? GMLRS.
Gentlemen,
Damn proud of your country’s level of response during this crisis! Would, however, advise not completely cleaning out the supply cupboard; there is a distinct possibility of a round 2 w/ many players crashing the party. 🤔
Quite happy to empty the cupboards if it gives the Ukrainians a fighting chance. If it gets to the point all of Europe in involved and we only have token armour left then let Germany and France worry about it with their ample stores of armour.
True, but as I see it, every Russian tank or gun destroyed now is one less for later, if push does come to shove…
True but I’m sure the US has loads of good stuff squireled away we can use when the s**t hits the fan 😀.
In all seriousness though an NLAW sitting in storage ain’t doing much good as opposed to one sitting in Ukraine taking out a Russian tank. Every Russian vehicle we take out now is one less that can be used against us in future. Russia is rapidly disarming its self and taking chinas only potential ally off the board.
Wiki says we still have 151 Stormers in service, so right in saying 6 gifted to an ally is affordable.
On the books may be, but not all in service.
The HVM Stormer Regiment used to be one of the biggest regiments in the RA I understand.
Now we have but one, and its 3 SP batteries are far far smaller than what they were. I recall 36 in the regiment, 12 per battery, when there were once I believe 36 per battery!
Add a handful with the AD Bty with 14RA at Larkhill for training/ trials and an unknown number ( to me ) with the AR AD Regiment, not many I’m sure, and it’s not 150.
Pretty much correct. I don’t really think the U.K. has sent anything that really would effect the U.K. own forces.
Great news on the 50,000 soviet shells. Hopefully they can find more somewhere else. Most of the stuff given has been sourced elsewhere or can be replaced. Interesting about the loitering munitions been sent. I wonder what they are?
Hope more arrives in time for the late summer counter attack. Going to be big battles coming.
I would guess Switchblades. I’m not aware of anything else.
I think the switchblades were only on trial for us though.
I didn’t read of any trials. I did read along lines of unspecified number for UK MoD for unspecified operators.
So to that obscurity to mean in use RM or DSF.
Yes, Wiki needs an update. The RE used to have 29 flatbed Stormer mounting VLSMS Shielder but they were retired about 2013/14 when SM were banned by international treaty.
do we have ‘scores’ to give them?
Did you read the earlier posts about these being ex Belguan?
i’m more than concerned that we are in danger of leaving the cupboard bare in giving so much away.there can’t be a lot left thats for our own needs
I just did not realise the MOD shoved so much old kit into warehouses. Who knew….feels almost Russian in its philosophy ( the Soviets never threw anything away).
Also where did we get 50,000 rounds for soviet artillery….did we rob someone
You’d be surprised what the MOD has locked away for a rainy day.
Great for world peace and security!. We urgently need to put Ukranian military into Typhoons and Apache helicopters including bunker bursting missiles. Training must start now so that in the next 6 months, they can bring war to an end.
This war would be over in a week if NATO had any real balls. But Biden is scared to death of Putin and starting WW3. So the suffering will go on and on with no end in sight. Btw, the old fool still hasn’t visited Ukraine but just visited Saudi Arabia and Israel. Ugh.
Are u not scared of ww3! I and most I know were very concerned. Remember in February everyone thought Russia was a serious force of well trained and equipped forces.
Hindsight is a great thing.
The USA president can’t visit Ukraine. Could you imagine the secret service dept numbers needed. Russia would frame it as an invasion. He would have to travel on the ground by train or car. Can’t take airforce/marine force 1 into Ukraine.
The USA has done lots and continues to do so. This is a conflict 1000s of miles away from them. They could easily of said it was not there problem.
Crikey the last president would be giving himars to Russia cause putin told him ukraine was bad. So bad. (Big tough men were coming up to him crying saying how bad their were(.
Congress also holds a lot of power it’s not just the president.
Standard Dan post.
You do realise that world war three will probably be the end of humanity. It will almost without question lead to almost all nuclear powers using nuclear weapons and with modern crop modelling and greater understanding of the effect of black soot we know with a good probability 100 nuclear weapons would equate to a 10% loss of food production for a decade ( so every 100 warheads leads to the starvation and death of 10% of the worlds population).
If Russia did not have 1000+ nuclear warheads then it would only be a questions of possible a few 10s millions dead in WW3 ( just actually try to imagine that level of suffering and loss) as it is world war three would even with a small nuclear exchange shatter the worlds infrastructure and led to a billion dead…a 1000+ warhead exchange would lead to a mass extinction event with humanity high on the list likely to go out.
And he should be scared of starting WW3! War isn’t a computer game, and what you advocate him doing might well result in global nuclear war and the death of billions!
You go on about Biden but your idol Trump was figuratively sucking Putin’s d*ck for 4 years. Probably literally, too!
Obviously there’s concerns over are own stock, but at the end of the day this stuff was mostly intended to fight aggressive Russians, and that’s what it’s been used for.
Agree, it’s serving it’s purpose, Protecting western democracies ( us) from Aggressive authoritarian totalitarian states. I can’t think of a better use for it. Sometimes there is a moral question around supply arms ( and I struggle with anything we supply to any totalitarian states, even an ally that it’s pragmaticly sensible to support). But in this case we are supporting a democracy being attacked by a totalitarian state, these no question we should be throwing every support we can their way.
At least if UK forces have no ammo it makes it harder for them when they are trying to escort agency scabs in to displace me from my job.
You have of course made the effort to read the comments above and understand where this kit is coming from haven’t you? Please explain when any HM forces have escorted any agency workers anywhere?
HM Forces, Don’t escort agency workers in industrial disputes.
What planet are you living on?
When it comes to the firemen I suspect HM forces will BE the scabs as they were before.
HM Forces the scabs during the fire strike? When we did it all we got was cheers, rounds of applause and crates of pop and drinks dropped off by pretty much every civvy we came across or drove past!!!! It would seem only you has a chip on your shoulder as on our 12 off we used to go and shoot the breeze with the striking fire fighters outside their station! You seem to be a prize throbber pulsing his way around this site carrying big chips on your weak shoulder!
His name is actually Buck Rogers he lives in a galaxy far far away👍
That was this galaxy but in the 25th century…sadly I live in a time where Kwasi Kwarteng and the UK gov is the biggest threat to my way of life, not Putin. To think I voted for them too 🤦♂️
Come on then Buck I will ask just what is it you do that you are so concerned that the nasty state is going to kill you off?
WTF gibberish are your lips flapping about?
😄
😆😳
You sound like you having a hard time. Hope it gets better.
This tragic time in history just feels we’re pissing this supply up against a brick wall.
I think Putin won’t think twice about using it’s various missle force’s and think we’re staring down the barrel of larger NATO involvement as supply chains become target’s for Putin’s propaganda machine.
Watch this space lads, War is coming to a shore near you.
We can only hope not and that Russia exhausts itself and realises naked aggression is not a way to a safe and prosperous russia ( or at least the leaders realise it’s not a way that will keep them in power in the long term).
I’m hopeful at some point they will realise they are butting their heads against a brick wall and sod off.
Glad to see the UK provide equipment that Ukraine needs now for its defence. I would like to see Ukraine provided with a decent long-term lend lease, we could offer our soon to be retired typhoon tranche1 fighters, T23 frigates montrose and Monmouth (although it needs an extensive refit).Finally CAMM missile system to protect their cities and military installations.
Like the T23 idea to Ukraine with a CAMM fit. They might get a few more years out of them.
As it would take a fair bit of time to refit Monmouth and training of Ukraine personnel, this would be for after the current phase of fighting is over, also UK is building P50u boats in Rosyth, think they may want to have a look at their weapon fit
Actually an inspired idea! HMS Montrose would require relatively minimal refit after return from Gulf, HMS Montrose significantly more (but in wartime, if there is a will, there is a way). Would, of course, require full complement of Harpoons, if not selected for upgrade by RN. Obvious logistical issue covertly inserting into Black Sea, but Turks may be bribeable. Would love to see more of Mad Vlad’s Navy join the Moskva in being “liquidated” (sorry, couldn’t resist). Previously assumed T-23s would be sold to either Chile or Brazil, but really, what is that critical re South America?
Hi , could outfit them to utilise the Neptune missile that Ukraine produces, might be worth evaluating as a cheaper alternative till the future anti ship missile is ready.
Trouble is the Black Sea is a death trap to navel units, ships survive by being hard to find in a big occean, parked in a pond next to an airforce with with no way out is just a death sentence.
Can the UK send some of the tranche 1 typhoons that they seem to be in such a hurry to get rid of. They basically can only do air-to-air. Although they can’t use meteor at all. I’m guessing it would still be helpful to the Ukrainians. They are supposed to be retired in a couple years anyway. Also is there any hope for any of the tornadoes that were retired a few years back. At least they have the capability for ground attack.
I’m a little bit concerned that we’re back broadcasting what we’re sending again. Surely a wee bit of discretion might be advantageous for the current situation in Ukraine? Not sure how good Russia’s satellites and spy ability is but we do seem to give them ready checklists of what’s coming for them to keep a watch out for! Sure, keep the supply lines coming, full and protected and hopefully slowly but surely Ukraine 🇺🇦 can take back its country! No need to tell Russia what we’re doing all the bloody time! Do they tell us everything? No, they don’t give a stuff! Strength to Ukraine, it’s forces, people and President!
Meanwhile, according to today’s Mail Online, the UK is to send “a fleet of submarines to be based in Perth WA to counter the rise of Chinese sea power in the Far East!!
🙄 I cannot see how they can spare even one.
Hi Daniele. I don’t exaggerate about the Mail and blood pressure my friend!
Hope you are well and that the weather in the sunny south east has calmed a little
Cheers
Geoff
Morning my friend.
Yes, cooler since Wednesday. Rain now.
Fleets indeed!
I agree, it’s unfortunate but true and it’s not even like we could produce SSNs for Australia. This really needs the US to support and provide.
Our SSN should be no further east than the gulf unless a carrier is over there.
There is no need. If we had 15 then fine.
Even one is a massive hit on availability for the NATO area which must be the priority given our force size.
Agree, North Atlantic, North Sea, Baltic, Norwegian Sea, north east passage, med, gulf and being part of a major deployment ( carrier or amphibious group) is plenty for our 5 SSNs to be doing. The US has plenty of resources cover the rest ( Indian occean and Pacific areas.
The usual political grandstanding. We don’t need to be facing off vs China no more than Australia is facing Russia.
One SSN has to protect the CASW bomber at all times, so we only have 4 to play with.
Towed guns seem pretty vulnerable , even M777 have been hit. 155 guns have the range to stay behind the lines.
So whilst mobile M109 makes sense, what actual utility do the 105mm guns have?
Are they intended for direct fire modes in built up areas?
The Ukraine would have limited helo lift or amphibious capability which might function as a commando or air assault role in the British forces.
So are they any use? Seems just another burden on the logistics.
I suppose the logic is that they are better than nothing David! I was also interested to read(in the Mail!!!) that Russia and Ukraine have agreed a process by which Ukraine’s grain can be exported without interference from the Russian side!!?
It’s very much a war of attrition, russia has lots of these older fires, so Ukraine needs the mass to take attrition as well. This needs to be an eye opener for the west. Attrition and high intensity warfare over long periods of time is still a thing in the modern world and building militaries based on a concept of smashing open the front door and all over in a month may lead to problems in a conflict with china that has mass and is developing technical parity.
re Davids comment ‘what actual utility do the 105mm guns have?’
I think the Ukrainian artillery is approx 700 122s, 350 152s, 150 155s and they are running short of ammo for the 122s and 152s hence their far lower firing rate relative to the Russians. The ammo situation is currently more serious than the actual number of guns. Our ability to help with ammo we do not make is limited and their ammo plants are wrecked. We make 105 and 155 ammo and have large stocks so give them all the 105s and 155s we can spare. A 105 you have ammo for is a vastly superior weapon to a 122 with no ammo.
We bought the guns from Belgium to refurbish and send to Ukraine.
I am genuinely impressed at the level of UK support to Ukraine….and our apparent ability to find war materials when needed (to be quite frank I didn’t think we had most of this stuff available). However….and I have banged on about this before, this massively underlines the lack of munitions and sheer ‘mass’ of our armed forces. We need to seriously deal with this as a matter of urgency. Starting with munitions as an immediate issue.
Who have we purchased the 50,000 rounds of soviet rounds from to supply to Ukraine?
UK MOD have been looking out for supplier’s for eastern block ear ammo for ages now or the kit to make it
Any news what direction the UK government are looking at for new Artillery system yet guys 🤔
Orcs now using AA missiles for ground work!
https://defence-blog.com/russia-uses-soviet-era-air-defense-missiles-to-engage-ground-targets/
Watched forces news (but late) and the Ukrainians are training at RSA on L119s not 118s, and subsequently using the old dial sights and not the APS as is on the in service 118s. My Bro said their the ones being sent, although not all are UK 105mm stock.
All this piecemeal aid is really just keeping Ukraine in the fight (which I have suspect is the Anglo-American goal all along). Indeed current Ukrainian offensive in Kherson has only seen limited success (though who know, they might break out and kick the Russians across the Dnieper).
They clearly lack the capability to launch a meaningful major offensive.
To win Ukrainians are going to have to build up much larger reserves and more critically a reasonably large and modern air force with all the trimmings – SEAD, long range stealthy strike (eg AGM-158 launched via F-16 or F/A-18), AEW&C etc etc and all with sufficient airframes to maintain sortie numbers.*
*Because even if Russians don’t shoot them down, jets break down and wear out.
Dare I say you need mass to take on the Russians as well as all the high tech kit, intelligent strategy & tactics, and well trained and motivated personnel.
I doubbt those alone will dislodge Russians from the 20% of Ukraine the Russians hold including Crimea.
Maybe over time but that doesn’t help Ukraine as the country is laid to waste.
Also slow pace helps Russians in long run especially as their military is ponderous and slow. It helps in other areas such as western fatigue (already setting in).
A capable air force is the ultimate force multiplier and if used properly can rapidly roll back an enemy.
Also forgot to mention, as the war goes on the Russians get air superiority by default. The vast bulk of Ukraine’s air defences are Soviet era S300, Buks, Osa’s etc. The more modern Buks and S300s are rare in the former Warpac NATO members.
So as the war progresses, Ukraine will run out of these missiles.
The promises of IRIS-T and NASAMS are limited in number and also don’t offer as much capability as long range S300. The particular IRIS-Ts the Germans promise aren’t even manufactured at this point
So at some point Ukraine’s air defences are degraded through lack of ammunition. This opens up the more blunt end of Russian airpower as used in Syria and Chechnya – carpet bombing. You don’t need an Iskander missile if you have a Tu-22M able to operate freely.
This would put a massive dampener on Ukraine’s offensive capability which by its nature requires concentration of force (as did the Russians who stuffed up first part of war by not concentrating force).
But throw in Patriot PAC-3 and F-15/-16 plus EA-18G & E-2 and the Russians are royally stuffed. However the Americans won’t do this either through fear of escalation or limited stocks.
How is it that can we refurbish Belgian M109’s at the drop of a hat but not get any of our own AS90’s in running order?!?