A guest post from Jed We have a lot of discussion of fire support for mobile (armoured, mechanised) infantry, and touched upon the same subject in the context of light infantry. A number of articles penned by TD, myself and others have generated comments that examined one aspect or another of various elements of direct and indirect fire support: TD [...]
A guest post from Jed There have been a lot of interesting comments made in the various post-SDSR army articles written by TD (and guests), some by serving soldiers, some by us arm chair generals, but I am focusing here on the ones about the Warrior upgrade, and the Protected Mobility variants of FRES SV. Those comments have prompted me [...]
A guest post from Jed A major part of the FRES program is to procure a fleet of “utility vehicles” to replace a very broad range of vehicles from the existing armoured fleet, from tacked FV432 derivatives, and CVR(T) family variants, to the Saxon wheeled APC and many other specialist engineer, recovery vehicles and ambulances etc. In the comments [...]
A guest post from Jed, currently enjoying Florida I think! In his article “A need to rethink FRES” our friend Monty provided a number of alternative designs for a light weight tracked armoured vehicle to supplement the ‘heavy’ FRES SV in the shape of the GC ASCOD II Scout. The idea was that these designs were options for a [...]
A guest post from Jed. The term “medium armour’ is banded around in connection with the SDSR post 2020 force structure, but what exactly does that term mean in this context ? The Army has been ‘experimenting’ with medium armoured formations on paper, and in exercises at BATUS in Canada for some years, in the form of mixed formations [...]
By Jed TD recently did his article on the future of the rotary wing fleet. We have had a few pre-SDSR and post-SDSR conversations about the future of the rotary fleet in the comments section of various articles. Based on some of these comments I thought it might just be interesting to do a very quick comparison of statistics for [...]
We have had lots of discussion recently on politics, SDSR etc, but I have used the debate in the blogosphere about the cancelling of the USMC Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV) programme as an excuse to return to a “shiny kit” type of article ! The cancelling of EFV has had lots of impact in the USN / USMC community. There [...]
With all the rumour around at the moment about a spare billion being spirited from somewhere, I just thought we should have a little look at some of the possible alternatives for a new Maritime Patrol Aircraft. Just to provoke debate, I thought we could split this into high, medium and low risk. I suppose I could have done it [...]
Aims This article is meant as both a primer on naval warfare (Sea Power 101) and as a link between the general concepts and some of the specifics as laid out in the SDSR. It is meant as background information for those of us who enjoy indulging in fantasy fleet creation, and whimsical design exercises. Hopefully it may help people [...]
This is a post from Jed with a bit of embellishment from Think Defence designed to get peoples thought processes moving as a precursor to summarising the Future of the Royal navy series of posts. Don’t take it too seriously or dig too deep into the scenario assumptions its just an exercise. The Scenario The year is 2025. Yemen and [...]
As we move to the conclusion of this series its good to include a couple of alternative views. This one from Jed Just a quick article to examine a slightly alternative view from that put forward by TD in the posts on forward basing of “presence” squadrons, littoral ops and the humanitarian / disaster relief capabilities, and yes I think [...]
I want to borrow the catch line of the Canadian American Strategic Review (CASR) web site and make some “modest proposals” about maritime security operations, in the context of the SDSR and reducing budgets. There are many suggestions in the comments placed on other articles on this site that run along the lines that UK (in the form of the [...]
This is a subject we have not touched much in our FDR/SDSR coverage, as we balance our pragmatic real world budgetary realism with our love of all things shiny and our delight in delivering our fantasy fleets. Information Operations to use the latest NATO acronym is an immensely broad subject area, but this is not going to be a really [...]
This short article focuses on the ‘teeth’ arms and specifically armour and infantry units, because everything else, capability wise hinges on these two main elements. Current organisation In total the British Army has 36 Regular Battalions available for service and this total combined with the 14 TA battalions (excluding The Royal Gibraltar Regiment) could give a mobilisation strength of 50 [...]
This a response to the Think Defence article offering an alternative view of how the Formation Recce Regiment might be organized in my ‘fantasy world’ or a reorganized British Army. I would essentially keep the Regiments structure as it is today: Recce (Sabre) Squadrons The biggest change of course would be the replacement of the Scimitar CVR(T) with the shortened [...]
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