Over this weekend I attended a fantastic event which was extremely interesting. There were lots people there to which I could relate to very easily. The nature of the event led us naturally to consider aspects of Britain’s military history, present and future. There are few countries which can be so wholesomely buggered as Britain when it comes to research. We have this inane ability as a people, to have these wonderful, marvellous and quite frankly, crazy ideas – but we never have the money to fund them.

I was once told that what is now ethos in the MoD is to have British scientists dream up the ideas, sell them to American, let America develop the idea into a final product, and finally buy it back and improve it. This have been done a lot over recent years in the UK with regards, at least, to military hardware. The Apache is perhaps a quasi-example; the UK did not buy the supplied avionics software for the apache but instead developed their own, which turned out to be so good that eventually the Americans bought it back from us. Who’da thunk?

Which leads us to perhaps the most depressing story yet in Britain’s aviation history; the cancellation of the English Electric/Vickers-Armstrong TSR-2 which was terminated in 1964. This aircraft was so revolutionary that even today it would be modern and it was designed 50 years ago. The whole story is drenched in failure and political dereliction. It has produced one of the, to my mind at least, finest but most depressing statements to date

All modern aircraft have four dimensions: span, length, height and politics. TSR-2 simply got the first three right.

-Sir Sydney Camm

There are of course many theories surrounding the whole sorry story of the project mainly relating to economics and politics. The British economy in the 1960s was in huge financial debt and was still struggling to pay back monies owed to America from WW2. The Labour Government was politely told you will buy the F111E, you have no choice. All tooling and production lines of the TSR2 are to be destroyed. This is the unofficial version of the reason why the project was cancelled. Over the years the government has denied these accusations completely. They of course would, but most people who worked on the project know that this is precisely what happened. All tooling, production lines and blueprints were certainly destroyed, so afraid were the Americans that they had their British embassy personnel shipped into the factories to personally make sure that everything was destroyed.

There is more to this shameful piece of British history than meets the eye. The only remains of the project are the prototypes XR220 and XR222. They only survived because they were shipped around the country for engine testing and evaluation. It would have been a scandal to chop up and burn these aircraft in front of the public. Instead a team was dispatched to the testing grounds and took pick axes to the inside of the prototypes so they could never be flown again. Their internal organs were ripped out like savages, where cold calculated economics destroyed one of the finest machines ever built.

I am in favour of the ‘special-relationship’ and I have vigorously defended it in times of need on this blog. But 50 years ago American politicians were frightened TSR2 would affect their exports of aircraft. Coupled with Lord Mountbatten’s desire for this plane not to succeed and personally telling the Australian government not to pursue its commitment to purchase 30 airframes. Previously before being made aware of the whole TSR2 scandal I would have defended the ‘special-relationship’ but what they did was just mean to put it politely. There is not even a hint of good sportsmanship and while the defence industry in this country is still going fairly strong, Great Britain has never recovered its lead in the aviation world since the destruction of the TSR2 project.

I am often called an ‘old man’ by my friends and I think that is because I am very cynical about the world, I think this is fairly obvious when you realise how often we do not end up on top on every sphere of international cooperation. We always manage to get ourselves screwed, this if anything has been the enduring ethos of the past century. There have not been many international cooperations where we have actually benefited. This is not to say that we should not cooperate, we most certainly should, but not in engineering. This is something we do much better on our own and always have done.

There is hope though at least if you are willing to look outside the box and look back to a time when we could built very gucci stuff. TSR2 was to be nuclear weapons capable, and also able to carry conventional bombs. The roll of the fighter/Bomber was to fly from a short runway from within the UK to attack Russia, remember the Cold War was very much still on. The aircraft was to enter Russian air-space at extreme altitude over 58,000ft. Then descend to under to under 200ft to avoid ground radar. Once near the chosen Russian target a nuclear bomb or missile would be released to devastating effect. Now the Cold War is over but the Tories are committed to a new nuclear deterrent in the form of nuclear submarines. I suggest you consider the content of the article below if you have not already guessed where I am going with this.

The TSR2 story is one of incompetence, mismanagement and failure. It is also a story of brilliance, determination and courage. It might sound crazy but if we want to we can build things like the TSR2 again -if we want to. Someone only needs to tell the boys in Whitehall that British manufacturing is nails.

The TSR2 story ended with XR219, XR221 and XR223 being taken to the shooting ranges at Shoeburyness, all eventually to be destroyed as ‘damage to aircraft’ targets. XR220 was kept at Boscombe for a year or so for engine noise testing and then placed in storage at RAF Henlow after it had much of its flight test equipment ripped out (even the wires were cut rather than disconnected). It was later transferred to RAF Cosford’s Aerospace Museum. XR222 was gifted to the College of Aeronautics at Cranfield for instructional use. She was later donated to the Imperial War Museum at Duxford. All the other airframes were scrapped. In the months after cancellation, all the tooling and jigs were destroyed, and a wooden mockup of the TSR2 was burned while BAC men filmed it for publicity purposes.

In many ways the destruction of so many aspects of the project reflected the even greater act of vandalism that had been perpretrated on the British aviation industry.

Click here to view the embedded video.

And what might have been

Click here to view the embedded video.

The first couple of posts are from guest contributors…

Privatising the Royal Fleet Auxiliary – pragmatic or problematic?

For those of you who do not know, the Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA) is a civilian-manned fleet of the MoD which enables ships of the Royal Navy to maintain their operational requirements around the world.

The RFA’s primary role is to supply the Royal Navy with fuel and supplies. It also counts a repair ship, and amphibious assault vessels amongst its assets. RFA personnel are members of the MoD civil service who wear Merchant Navy-style rank insignia with naval uniforms and are under naval discipline when the vessel is engaged on warlike operations. RFA vessels are commanded and crewed by civilians, augmented with regular and reserve Royal Navy personnel to perform specialised military functions such as operating and maintaining helicopters or providing hospital facilities.

The RFA is funded out of the defence budget and its employees are counted amongst the 85,730 civil servants currently employed by the MoD.

Before going into detail about the virtues and vices of the privatisation proposal, consider first why it has been given so little attention in the main stream media.

Firstly the Army gets most attention currently which is only natural given the dire, albeit, kinetic situation in Afghanistan – with the government looking ever so amateurish with every new procurement announcement.

Secondly very few people actually know that the RFA exists as an organisation. It is a tiny organisation, relatively speaking, when compared to the likes of the RN and employes only 2,000 where the latter employes 80,000 – active and reserve. Neither does it have a particularly long military history by British standards, being established as recently as 1905 (the RN has been going since the 16th century) . When all is taken into account it is no surprise that this issue is making little noise on the mainstream airwaves.

The RFA has and remains a very active service in terms of deployment and ship building.

They recently (2006) received a batch of Bay-class landing ship docks and what is more are leasing Point class sealift ships under the Private Finance Initiative. Hence it is a very new fleet and at first glance it seems like a very odd suggestion to privatise it – this is without even considering the security related issues.

First consider the financial aspect; the RFA employes 2,000 and operates a grand total of 16 ships. According to the Times each department head at the MoD has been asked to identify savings of at least 10% resulting in a saving of £200m – by Christmas. The most expensive part of running the RFA comes from personnel costs; though they are few they are highly skilled at what they do.

Refuelling a destroyer at sea, whilst moving, is no mean feat.

Only two years ago a survey was completed on the RN and/or Civilian Firms taking on the role of the RFA. The RN found they could not man the Bay Class ship for example, with less than 200 (RFA – 91) and the Civilian firms could not man the RFA ships with crews holding the required Military and civilian qualifications, let alone continue with the in-house training (provided by the MOD(N) and sea colleges).

Thus, while flogging of the entire service remains on the table, it appears that it would be a very problematic option in terms of who exactly would take it over.

Financially it is cheaper to keep it in-house since privatisation is always run for a profit and margins will be added to the bill handed to the MoD.

A different plan which has been suggested is merging the RFA with the RN.

This plan, though attractive to financial reasons, has its drawbacks as well. The problem with incorporation is that many RFA personnel are in the RFA as they do not want to be in the RN (though it also contains a lot of ex-RN). Merge the two together, and watch UK merchant seaman join other firms.

Additionally, the RFA is the single largest employer of UK merchant seamen – lose this and you ring the death knell of the Merchant Navy – no matter how persuasive the logic may be.

However considering the continuing swing towards militarisation of the RFA over the last 40 or so years perhaps full integration into the RN as is done in many other countries, may be more sensible from the operational point and still provide cost savings. Certainly from a political point of view the latter option is very attractive, particularly with the Conservatives. MoD civil servants may well recommend to Mr. Cameron that the RFA becomes RN; he can then fulfil his pledge of cutting MoD civil service numbers whilst boosting RN hull numbers and personnel.

This is of course assuming that Liam Fox, Shadow Defence Secretary, was serious about cutting MoD costs by 25% but boosting operational forces, they have to find thousands of people to sack (it would be interesting to see if that becomes a manifesto commitment, but it is independent of any future Treasury review).

Finally one must remember that this story was provided first by the mainstream media who are looking for a sensationalist ‘bash-the-government-story’ and they are hence, by their nature, going to strangle the cat in the bag before it is even let out. Savings must be made since the current government has been living well above its means for the past few years and when (if) the Tories enter office there will be a lot of cuts, as a result civil servants and senior military brass will consider short-term cuts which look good on paper for the incoming government, so that they in turn can tell the electorate that they can be trusted.

However privatising the RFA is not a short-term cut and if enacted would mean that every other possibility was either not financially or politically plausible. Cuts are coming but most likely not to frontline personnel (not to mention operational personnel) hence we can but wait and see what precisely Dr. Fox meant when he said

“Frederick Duke of York was preparing for the Napoleonic threat between 1792 and 1804 he increased the size of the Army from 50,000 to 500,000 – and he did it with 38 staff in Horse Guards.”