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 – 40mm, 90mm or even 105 ?
• Jed – Medium armour
• Jed – Is the MICV concept past its use by date ?

My constantly re-stated preference for turreted, breach loading, smooth bore 120mm mortars led one fellow commentator to suggest I may be a shill for a mortar company ! I am not, I assure you my dear readers, involved in the arms industry at all, just an ex-Matelot, ex-Squaddie, professional IT geek, who has an opinion on everything………

So, I thought I would write a little piece to provoke some more discussion (because you all require SOOO much provoking….) around the subject of Mortars, aka “lightweight tube, HE, for the dispensing of.

History

So, Mortars have been with us for a surprising long time, I am not going to do any of the history, you can all go and read Wikipedia for yourselves: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortar_(weapon)

A mortar team fires on insurgents outside Forward Operating Base Khar Nikar in Afghanistan. G (Tobruk) Company is a Ghurkha Reinforcement Company attached to 1st Battalion, The Mercian Regiment (Cheshire) for two years. For the duration of the existence of the company, they are a Mercian Company in all respects. Photo credit to read - Corporal Gary Kendall RLC

Modern British Army

The modern L16A1 81mm mortar (UK MoD equipment page), originally a product of Royal Ordnance (but now BAe) is one of those surprising little export successes. Incrementally improved, with advances including lighter weight tripods and baseplates, the wonders of modern IT applied to targeting, and lethal improvements to ammunition; such as notched steel wire wound around the inside of a thinner case for more shrapnel, and air-bursting proximity fuses, the good old 81mm remains a mainstay of infantry fire power at the battalion level, and nobody seems to have a bad thing at all to say about it !

Click here to view the embedded video.

You could perhaps be a little critical of our TOE and the way we have designed our structures for employing it. For example, we never got round to developing a mortar carrying variant of the Warrior family, instead relying on ancient FV432 series vehicles, utilizing the standard hand laid, and hand loaded 81mm firing through the open roof hatches. Also our employment of 6 mortars per battalion in “peace time” to be raised to a “war time” establishment of 9 tubes – by adding TA augmentees (or more likely stealing bodies from another battalion in the “less than all out war” scenarios of the last decade). Contrast this to the “standard establishment” of 10 tubes of a US Army Stryker Brigade – but more on that later.

At the platoon level, we used to issue the L9A1 51mm hand held mortar, a weapon of a type often referred to as “Commando” mortars. As you all probably know, apparently our involvement in the Global War on Terror used up our stocks of 51mm ammo rather faster than had ever been planned, and then we found out there was no economical way to acquire more. This, alongside a long held desire by some within the infantry establishment who were envious of the US M203 under barrel grenade launcher, to see such weapons deployed widely, eventually saw the official replacement of the 51mm platoon mortar with up to two 40mm UBGL per section. Of course the 51mm had greater reach than the 40mm, it made a bigger bang, its illumination rounds produced more light, and its smoke rounds burned for longer, making more smoke, etc etc I have no issue with this, different tools for different jobs. New model 40mm grenades (medium velocity) have increased range, and increased bang, but they are still really direct fire weapons, not suited to ballistic-ally lobbed, in-direct fire.

However as it ever does, the cyclical nature of wars and technology made sure that what went around came around, and the UK issued a UOR for lightweight 60mm mortars. My understanding of this, and I could be wrong here, is that we first went out for such kit for limited special forces use, and then broadened the procurement to what in effect was a direct replacement for the 51mm as a platoon level weapon for use by non-SF troops in Afghanistan.

So now we have 40mm UBGL’s, 40mm AGL/GMG, Hirtenberger M6-640 60mm mortars, and 81mm mortars – surely our infantry have enough “fire support tools” at their disposal (we are not even touching on “rockets”).

Well before we go there, let’s examine the start of the art; see what we don’t have, and what others are doing.

The modern state of the art

First a caveat, I am not going to examine, mention the often exotic world of Soviet / Russian mortars, with big calibres, automated systems etc. I am going to stick to the “western” worlds systems and developments.

I am also not going to put much emphasis on our humble, beloved 81mm – I will mention developments in the calibre where necessary, but would like to focus on the latest developments at the lower end (60mm) and with its big brother (120mm).

The modern 60mm families

There are many 60mm systems, and families of systems to choose from:

• Israel’s Soltam – the design chosen to become the US Army M224
• Denel – the South African manufacturer of various mortars
• Hirtenberger – the previously unknown (to me) supplier of the UK’s 60mm systems.

The 60mm mortar has recently become an extremely versatile weapon system, building upon the simplicity of operation of predecessors such as the UK’s 51mm and it’s WWII predecessors; while at the same time taking great advantage of light weight materials, improvements in fire direction and targeting and the lethality of munitions. Different nations use many different bits of kit for fire direction and targeting, but at the lowest end of the scale, the Commando variant 60mm is hand held and aimed by eye for direct or indirect fire at what can be very short ranges:

Hirtenberger 60mm Mortar

At the other end of the scale Denel’s new long barrelled M6, firing special long range ammunition can reach out almost as far as its traditional 81mm bigger brothers, and thus benefits from all the modern battlefield C3 systems, from hand held laser rangefinders for the Mortar Fire Controller (MFC) to hand held ballistic computers.

Munitions range from the staple HE, IR screening smoke, White and Red Phosphorous smoke / incendiary, white light and IR illuminating rounds, with various companies claiming their modern 60mm rounds have the destructive potential of the 81mm rounds of ten years ago (or less).

• Hirtenberger 60mm ammo
• Rheinmetall Denel 60mm ammo
• U.S. 60mm ammunition

The family of systems approach makes good use of such commonalities, while levering the technology. Denel for instance can provide the M4 short barrelled, hand held “Commando” or “Patrol” mortar, “standard” barrel lengths for tripod mounted “platoon” mortars, and even long barrelled variants (as mentioned above) that might replace 81mm tubes at the battalion level. All can fire the same basic ammunition, with the sub-set of special long range rounds required only to make the most out of the long barrelled variants. Add in the latest M10-BLLR breach loading variant based on the M6 long range, and you have a turreted weapon for direct or in-direct fire support from AFV’s !!!   TDS even have a new “aiming” platform for rocket launchers and mortars, called Scorpion, which means you could have an automatically laid long range 60mm mortar on the back of something like a Foxhound WMIK ……. just saying…….

As a doctrinal compare and contrast, the US Army puts it’s 60mm tubes in the battalion Mortar Company, alongside any other mortars of any other calibre, and detaches a two tube ‘section’ to each of the 3 Rifle Companies. British practice with the 51mm was that it was carried by the Platoon HQ, giving a minimum of 3 per Rifle Company (with a fourth with the Coy HQ ?). Anecdotal evidence suggests the 51mm was utilised more for smoke and illumination than it was to make big bangs, but I can’t find any info anywhere on what the generally ammo scales were. The US M224 can be used hand held or with its base plate and tripod.

Click here to view the embedded video.

As an interesting aside, all versions of the Israeli Merkava MBT have a 60mm mortar as ‘standard’ kit. MK1’s had this externally mounted, but all other versions have fitted to be loaded and fired from under armour. The Israeli’s picked up this habit from us – a 2 inch mortar was a standard fitting on the Centurion Mk3 we sold them!

Battalion Artillery – the 120mm Mortar

Although the British Army has never “gone big” many of our NATO allies have.

The 120mm mortar is perhaps seen as somewhat of a strange beast; too big to man pack (not that you really, really want to be man packing 81mm, but you can), not as long ranged as the 105mm Light Gun, but lighter and easier to manoeuvre on a wheeled carriage or under slung from a helo. Modern technology has once again started to change the game here, with precision guided rounds, cargo rounds, extended range rounds, and light weight materials being applied to tripods, carriages etc. However while it might be lighter and easier to lug around than a 105 for light infantry, it is really in the mechanised area where the 120mm has made large bounds in capability. There are so many variations on the theme, it is worth examining them in terms to off a categorization of technological capability:

First, good old fashioned – a manually laid and manually loaded 120mm tube in the back of your favourite vehicle, e.g. the old M113 based system of the US Army, and the original version of the Stryker Mortar Carrier Vehicle (MCV-A). 

Second, automatically directed – an automatically laid, but manually loaded system is now the standard for the US Army Stryker brigades (MCV-B) and Heavy Brigades (M113) uses the standard 120mm tube on the CARDOM platform provided by Israel’s Soltam. The platform is connected to the fire control system and automatically “lays” the mortar as required to achieve the firing solution as soon as the vehicle comes to a stop. 

Third, automatic loading – the Singapore Technologies SRAM (Super Rapid Automatic Mortar) system is a good example. Fitted to anything from the rear module of a Bronco (Warthog AATV) to a HUMVEE or even their own “Fast Attack” lightweight 4 x 4, the SRAM is a recoiling mortar with an automated arm loading the bomb into the tube.

Fourth, best of both worlds – Auto laid and auto loaded – this was the goal of the USMC Dragon Fire Expeditionary Fire Support System (EFSS) – which unfortunately did not quite come to pass – yet. The European TDA 120mm rifled mortar, on a platform like the CARDOM which automatically aims the weapon, while also having an auto-loader function like the SRAM. The EFSS would be fitted in armoured vehicles (LAV) and on a trailer for towing.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Instead the Marines have deployed a towed trailer based system, which with a “prime mover” Jeep type vehicle small enough to fit inside a V22 is manually laid and loaded.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

V22 Loading

Fifth, turreted Breach Loading – ahhhhh’ soooo much flexible fire support goodness ! But again, so many options to choose from for your direct and indirect fire support requirements, depending upon the state of your bank balance:

Fifth and a bit. Manual turreted – the BAe Advanced Mortar System (AMS) and AMS II are good examples. Fitted in a manned turret and operated by a crew like any other breach loading tank gun. Tested on the Warrior and used in service on the GM LAV wheeled AFV by the Saudi National Guard

Finally,  automatic turreted – say “Ahhh, Patria” – it rhymes ! From the twin gun goodness of the AMOS to the much smaller and lighter weight fully automated death dealing goodness of the NEMO, the Finns’ have you covered ! I like that Sven Ortman when he stops by always worries about the rate at which the AMOS will fire all its rounds, so don’t forget to buy a second, identical armoured vehicle of your choice to use as an accompanying ammo re-supply vehicle if you pick this puppy ! To be honest, high rate of fire with simultaneous rounds impacting on target at the same time, might just bump such a system from being the infantry pocket artillery to be a “close support” element of the actual Artillery :-)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

So, if you want to join the big boys and go up to 120mm there are options, from an infantry mortar in the back of an FV432 that used to carry an 81, to putting a manually operated turret on a refurbished Warrior, to buying a FRES SV variant with a NEMO turret – “you pays yer money and makes yer choice.”

Flexibility – guided and long range rounds

As I noted, the 120mm mortar might be lighter and easier to cart around than a 105mm Light Gun, but it has much shorter range. That differential is being eaten into a little by super-charge rounds, and even by rocket assisted rounds. However the advantage of the mortar in this respect is that it has a higher weight of HE than a 105 round (being closer apparently in effect to a 152 or 155mm rounds) but also in the amount of money being invested by many parties – both users and suppliers, on applying new technologies to the humble mortar round.

The STRIX infra-red guided, top attack, anti-armour round has been available for a long time. It beat the British Merlin MMW radar guided 81mm round by actually making it into service. However at the moment, developments appear to be moving down two well trodden tracks: GPS and Lasers. The main obstacle to adding any kind of guidance electronics to a mortar shell in the past has not really been miniaturization, as you might think, but the G-shock hardening of components. With all solid state micro-electronics, this appears to have been dealt with now. Another break through has been in the aerodynamics and the electro-mechanical actuators to fit movable fins to the front end (the fuze or guidance section) of a mortar round to do the actual guiding of the flight path.

Click here to view the embedded video.

A GPS guided round can much improve the CEP of even a well surveyed and laid in mortar – and despite the reputation of being an ‘area’ effect weapon, mortars can be quite accurate. The GPS also allows for range extension, in that the flight reaches the topic of its ballistic arc, and then takes a non-conventional “gliding” flight path to its eventual destination. As you may not need such accuracy for every mission, the additional cost of a GPS enabled round should not be a big factor in any way.

Next up is the semi-active laser guided developments underway. Based on the requirements of the COIN centric last decade of wars, with tough to meet Rules Of Engagement (ROE) the US and other nations have decided that a laser guided round is a good idea for pin-point accuracy while producing less colatoral damage than even an Small Diameter Bomb (SDB) dropped from your personal favourite fast air platform. Such rounds are in testing, so expect to see them in a back of a Mortar carrier vehicle near you soon !  Actually, the potential issue with laser guided rounds appears to be the paucity of laser designators avilable to illuminate potential targets. This might actually be less of a problem for armoured or mechanised formations, because again, with the miracles of modern miniaturization a laser designator able to “paint” a target out to 4km or more is no longer a “60lb Bergen” sized piece of kit, and should be added to recce vehicle turrets or RWS reasonably easily. Of course nothing is that simple, as then we have to set the beam to the right Pulse Repetition Frequency (PRF) for the seeker in the weapon to find it etc, but despite the devil being in the details, laser guidance is being talked about for 81mm and even 60mm rounds !

As I have mentioned in numerous comment threads, the turreted 120mm mortar could even take on the anti-tank over-watch role, at a pinch, with the Israeli LAHAT laser guided, top attack, dual warhead anti-tank missile, which was designed to be fired from smooth bore guns.

Mortar employment / deployment – Compare and Contrast

Just a quick compare and contrast exercise with our US allies. A Stryker Medium Brigade Combat Team (BCT) has 10 Stryker MCV-B, each equipped with the CARDOM 120mm mortar system. 6 are detached as two vehicle sections to the Rifle Companies, 4 are kept at ‘Battalion” level. Although the vehicles are identical and all carry the same 120mm system, which cannot be dismounted from its mounting, the American mortar company takes the ‘arms locker’ (or armoury, or “golf bag”) approach – the 4 battalion level vehicles carry an 81mm mortar for dismounted ops, and the 6 company level vehicles carry the M224 60mm mortar. I have no idea as to the amounts of rounds of any specific calibre that are carried per vehicle as standard, or what this means for their logistical support in general but it is an interesting approach.

In a similar manner I have recently read that Canadian Army artillery troops are going to be trained on the M777 155mm howitzer, the 105mm Light Gun and the 81mm mortar, and will deploy with the appropriate system as required (we do something similar with cross training on AS90 and 105mm LG).

Summary

Is the solid old 81mm being left behind as a soon to be ‘red haired step child’ ?

Could a “family” of 60mm mortars, with hand held Commando mortars in the Platoon HQ and long barrelled, long range 60mm versions being used at the battalion level replace the ‘81’ for light infantry formations ?

Could the heavier 120mm mortars in some form replace the 81mm for mechanised and armoured formations ?

A modest proposal, or two, or three……..

So to provoke the discussion I will make a few modest proposals, I don’t care about budgets really, this is heading into fantasy fleet land somewhat, as I said mainly to provoke discussion in the comments thread

1. 120mm turreted mortar becomes standard for Mechanised / Armoured Infantry formations, and is added to Brigade Recce Regiments (ex-FRR). Let’s go with BAe AMS II turret on Warrior and FRES platforms.
2. 60mm mortar becomes standard for non-mechanised infantry; with a hand held Commando mortar in the Platoon HQ, and the long barrelled, long range variety in the weapons / support coy.
3. Marines get SRAM for Viking in the Armoured Support Group. 29 Cdo Rgt RA gets 120mm on wheeled carriages or on BAe trailer mount for close support fires.
4. 16 AAB gets an Armoured Support Group with all the Warthogs, which also gets an SRAM variant. 7 RHA also gets 120mm in place of 105 LG.
5. TA get all 81mm, and eventually make the slow transition to 60mm, same as regs.
6. FRES SV “Protected Mobility” variant gets Israeli style “under armour” 60mm
7. Scimitar MK2 gets accepted into core fleet as specialist light armoured fire support vehicle with Rarden replaced with Denel M10 (or just gets the Denel turret with it in).
8. 1 x RA regiment re-roled to “Armoured Close Support” with 4 batteries of 8 x FRES SV with AMOS turret (paired with FRES SV Ammo tender), batteries on 1 in 4 roulement (training, high readiness, deployed, re-set).
9. 105mm Light Gun retired (consider this in the light of more mortars, a wheeled 155mm, AS90 all to TA and LIMAWS(M) revived for “long range sniper” role with GMLRS).

I am sure there is enough contentious claptrap there to get you all talking !

##TD##

As a close to this piece from Jed

Watch this

Click here to view the embedded video.

Followed by this

Click here to view the embedded video.

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 to ask my contentious question which provides the headline for this article, is the concept of the Mechanised Infantry Combat Vehicle (MICV) or Infantry Fighting Vehicle (IFV) passed it’s use by date ?

You can choose to interpret the question in its most broad sense, but I will attempt to constrain my meandering thoughts and arguments to the confines of a post SDSR British Army.

History

But first, the potted history of the MICV / AIFV, starting with it’s predecessor, the Armoured Personnel Carrier:

As is often the case these days, a succinct and reasonably accurate history is available from Wikipedia:

• APC : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armoured_personnel_carrier
• MICV / IFV : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MICV

Apparently as early as WW1 the British Army built a “tank” variant with no main armament but designed to carry up to 30 troops, who were provided by armoured loop holes from which to fire their rifles, as the vehicle wadded through the mud, ran over German trenches, and protected said Tommies from machine gun fire. This was news to me, but hey it appears we invented the MICV before the APC !

Move onto WW2 and we have iconographic images of both German “Hanomag” and American M2/M3 “half tracks” providing “protected mobility” to infantry accompanying tanks formations. Already we are to the crux of the matter, the development of what we call the “combined arms” formations, tanks and infantry working together; each has its strengths and weaknesses, vulnerabilities and advantages.

For example the Hanomag (Sd. Kfz251) provided protection for Panzergrenadiers (mechanized infantry) from small arms fire and some artillery shrapnel, while also providing tactical mobility close to that of the Panzers.  The infantry could use their personal weapons from within the vehicle, or de-buss to deal with anti-tank guns, infantry with Bazookers, PIAT’s or Molotov Cocktails etc, thus basically protecting the tanks by making up for some of their weaknesses (lack of situational awareness and all round vision, etc).

Click here to view the embedded video.

Post WW2 and into the Cold War era and the APC got a roof – not only to better protect against shrapnel (and the weather ?) but also as part of the efforts to provide some NBC protection.  This era produced the iconic American M113 tracked APC and its wheeled Soviet counterpart in the BTR series. In the UK we got the home grown M113 look-a-like in the shape of the FV432.

Vietnam brought the re-learning of old lessons when the M113 went into action – gun shields for pintle mounted MG’s, and a disturbing realization of how vulnerable these vehicles were to Rocket Propelled Grenades (RPG’s) spawning the first use of bar armour.  Of course we have even more recently re-learnt these lessons again !

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

M113 in Vietnam – not the gun shields

M113 in Iraq – bar armour and Gun Shields!

Evolution – APC to MICV

And then…… along came the BMP !

Click here to view the embedded video.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMP-1

The Soviet Army thought that allowing the infantry squad in the back of the APC to bring their weapons to bear might be a good idea. At the same time they added a turret mounting a low pressure 73mm gun, which fired HEAT rounds which apparently were supposed to be able of defeating the front armour of M60A1, Leopard 1 and Chieftain MBT’s and, well just to make sure in case it didn’t, an AT3 “Sagger” wire-guided missile sat on a launch rail just above the main gun barrel.

BMP-1 internal layout and weapons firing positions and arcs

Although the modern German Army had a small APC fitted with long barreled 20mm cannon during the 50’s, it had no firing ports for its small 5 man infantry team, so I will go with the conventional wisdom that says the BMP-1 was the first (modern?) MICV.

Western responses included the U.S. Army Bradley, with firing ports, a 25mm cannon and two TOW wire-guided ATGW, and the German Marder, with a 20mm cannon and later on a Milan ATGW launcher. As well firing ports for the onboard infantry, the early versions included a rear MG, with direct optics allowing it to be aimed and fired by the troops, but this was not an Remote Weapons Station (RWS) as we now know them.

In this era Britain got the Warrior. The main design differences from our allies (and enemies) was that instead of the fast firing auto-cannon, or large caliber low pressure gun (like the 76mm of the Saladin and Scorpion) we went with a bigger auto-cannon, clip fed rather than belt fed, with a much lower rate of fire. The idea being that well aimed high velocity Armour Piercing Discarding Sabot (APDS) would penetrate the armour of BMP-1’s and other Soviet light armour, without recourse to a big and expensive ATGW. Meanwhile the co-axial 7.62mm and the embarked infantry weapons would take care of enemy infantry, and HEI shells were available to take on buildings, sangers, soft skinned vehicles etc.

As can be seen, perhaps the biggest difference between the British Army MICV and those of both our allies and potential opposition is the lack of a anti-tank missile on the standard squad vehicle.

Why not ATGW ? It’s just not British old chap………

I have never been able to find a book or scholarly journal that clearly states why British Army doctrine led to this difference. We can of course make our own inferences – in the combined arms battle group, the Warrior would be fighting alongside the MBT’s (Cheiftain, Challenger 1 and Challenger 2) which are considered the main weapon system for dealing with enemy tanks and other threats. In a mixed battle group setting with Armoured Recce assets the British preferred the “anti-tank” over watch methodology, with the Striker vehicle and it’s Swingfire missiles.

We can then add on the other elements of the “combined arms” teams – artillery and aviation.  So if the tank-MICV combo come under ambush from enemy tanks or infantry anti-tank teams, we could call in fast air with cluster bombs, or a full battery of 155mm “HE dispensers”.  Although not available in huge numbers, there might have been TOW equipped Lynx helicopters available too.  Finally the infantry carried in the Warrior can always de-buss and take up their own ambush positions with Milan launchers or their unguided anti-tank rockets.

Non-the-less many other countries saw, and still see the benefit of equipping the standard squad MICV with an ATGW (including Kuwait’s version of the Warrior).

Continued evolution – back from Infantry Fighting Vehicle to Protected Mobility

Updated variants of all the main MICV / IFV vehicles featured improved armour protection, and all of them lost their firing ports because of this. So in some way’s we have moved full circle – the original aim of the IFV, be it the WW1 Mk X tank or the BMP-1 was to allow the carried infantry squad to contribute to the carnage with their personal weapons, while remaining behind armour.

As the weapon versus countermeasure battle moves inexorable onwards, we are now back to a scenario where protection levels mean the squad are back to being somewhat passive passengers, as they are in a simpler APC.  So now the main difference between IFV and APC is the main and secondary weapons, the weight of protection and maybe the tactical (“keep up with the MBT”) mobility.

The most interesting element of this to me, and the of the various comments made on various TD articles, is the evolution of the main armament, the turret versus RWS and the “fire support” vehicle debates.

So while this applies to any modern armoured vehicle, lets confine this right now to the Warrior update and FRES SV Protected Mobility variants.  Based on the good old British doctrine of accurate, heavy punching, low rate of fire auto-cannon development we have the introduction of the CTA 40mm Case Telescoped Ammunition gun, with its very high velocity APDS “kinetic energy” rounds designed to take on light and even “medium” armour (and who’s to say it is not going to penetrate the more thinly armoured rear or side portions of some MBT’s ?). 

However now it also has an air bursting HE round, suitable for dealing with infantry in defilade cover, or in buildings. As you all know we are looking to standardize on this weapon for both the Warrior upgrade (or IFV) and our armoured Recce vehicle (FRES Scout).

Fine -  but now we have the manned turret versus unmanned turret debate.

How much situational awareness do you need ?

I fully understand the arguments for a Recce vehicle retaining a manned turret. I am not so sure the same arguments are applicable to the IFV. If an unmanned turret allows all the crew to be lower down, protected by the thicker armour of the hull, we can probably all agree this is a good thing. However critics suggest that even with modern sights, periscope and TV sensor technology there is a potential loss of “situational awareness” in this arrangement. However as the most recent example of why “fighting heads out” is a bad idea, the U.S. experiences of Iraq once again seem to suggest that in a fire fight, sticking your head up out of the hatch is a bit suicidal !

But, do we even need the unmanned turret ? Do we need a medium caliber auto-cannon with co-axial MG (and maybe ATGW ?).  Perhaps we could make do with a big RWS, able (as some on the market right now are) of taking say a 40mm auto-grenade launcher and a 7.62mm MG.

As someone noted in a comment, 40mm HEAT grenades are not really up to much, even against light armour. However with the right fire control system, 40mm grenades are also available as an air bursting HE weapon, providing a cheaper alternative to the cannon HE round when you want to fill the air around enemy infantry with shrapnel. So if the primary role is to provide cover for the MBT against close in infantry anti-tank teams and to provide cover for the embarked infantry team as they de-buss to get “up close and personal” – then is this not heavy enough weaponry?

If we look at ASCOD 2 FRES SV Protected Mobility variant, CV90 Armadillo and Israeli Namer vehicles, they all have prominent “cupolas” with direct view armoured vision blocks, as well as the main sensors on the RWS and “situational awareness” enhancing CCD cameras covering the rear, front corners (or the driver) and even providing a panoramic 360 degree view.

ASCOD FRES Protected Mobility

ASCOD 2 based FRES SV Protected Mobility variant – note quite low profile commanders cupola between drivers hatch and RWS

Click here to view the embedded video.

CV90 Armadillo – note the much more prominent commanders cupola and vision blocks.

The APC variant of the French VCBI actually puts its RWS on top of a large cupola with 360 degree direct view “vision blocks”.

Many of the RWS are fully capable of adding a pair of Spike, Javelin or other ATGW to the mix, so does that cover the lack of ability of the 40mm GMG ?

Detractors of the RWS approach may point out the reduced ammo capacity, and the inability to reload under armour – which is a feature of some of the unmanned turrets.  Good points, I guess it just comes down to the cost benefit analysis.

Adding “fire support” vehicles into the mix

At the same time as the so called “strategic” review and defence cuts see us reducing our fleet of Challenger 2 MBT’s – the plan for FRES SV includes an element for “fire support” vehicles, and we have had many a discussion in the comment threads about 120mm, 105mm or even 90mm medium / high pressure guns, and of course my personal favourite the turret mounted breach loading 120mm smooth bore mortar.

So, if we are going to have the following potential mix of vehicles in a armoured / mechanized battle group, do we still need the cannon armed IFV ?

1. MBT – 120mm rifled gun, possibly to be replaced by 120mm smooth bore at some point ?
2. FRES SV Scout variant – 40mm CTA
3. FRES SV ‘Fire Support’ – who knows ? Medium caliber gun of some type ?
4. FRES SV ‘Anti-Armour Over Watch’ – specialist anti-tank vehicle

Perhaps we could save considerable money on the Warrior upgrade by dispensing with the turret all-together and fitting a dual weapon RWS ?

Is the logical extension of this thought to simply put effort into keeping the Warrior in service just long enough to replace it completely with FRES SV Protected Mobility variants ?

Questions

So let me leave you with 3 questions to get the discussion thread heated up:

• If we have less MBT’s available to the combined arms battle group, are we really able to dispense with the turret mounted 40mm cannon
• If we are to have less MBT’s should we fit every standard squad IFV with an ATGW ?
• Should we dispense with the idea of dropping MBT numbers, and just use them instead of developing new fire support / anti-tank vehicles on the “medium” weight chassis ?
• Should we think outside the box, and examine a turreted 120mm mortar with extended range, guided and tube launched ATGW as a truly multi-purpose fire support platform (direct, indirect fire support plus direct and indirect anti-tank fires).
• Has the time of the IFV gone, and considering both current threats and budgets, is the RWS armed APC or “protected mobility” variant  the way to go

If you go chaps, lets see how big we can build this comment thread J

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 to a recent article I suggested that the BAe RG 35 family of vehicles seemed to provide the ideal opportunity to provide a wide range of variants based on a common chassis and components, indeed a chance to indulge TD Admin in his desire for “massive commonality”.

First of all some RG35 links for you:

• BAe RG35 6 x 6 product page (with links to other resources)
• Wikipedia Page
• Defence Update
• Army Technology
• YouTube Video
• Photos on Flickr

One reason the vehicle has the potential to be so versatile is its size; at 7.4 m (24ft) long by 2.5 m (8ft 2 in) wide and 2.7 m (8ft 10in) high, it has a curb weight of 18.13 tonnes and a max gross weight is 33 tonnes with a payload of 15 tonnes. The 550hp Cummins diesel can drive it at over 70mph on good roads, to a range of 1000 Km (620 miles) – and a statistic that shows how big this really it, it can carry a driver plus 15 pax in APC mode !

The RG35 is described as a “cross over” i.e. a mix of MRAP and ‘conventional’ wheeled armoured fighting vehicle. It has the MRAP ‘V-shaped’ hull and of course the modern capability of additional modular armour kits. This of course is how it can replace both vehicles such as the Saxon on one hand, and the much more modern Mastiff 2 on the other.

The latest variant is the a smaller 4 x 4 variant RG35 “Protected Recce, Patrol, Utility”;

L  5.2 m x  W 2.69 m x H 2.5 m, curb weight 12 tonnes, max gross 21 tonnes, for driver plus 9 pax. So even this smaller version can carry a driver, gunner and full 8 man infantry squad (so is this the true Saxon replacement ?).

Of course in the current fiscal environment when discussing revamping the tactical / armoured vehicle fleet we must turn the iron triad (protection, mobility, fire power) into the Aluminium Square by adding the dreaded factor of cost !

So is the RG35 as survivable as the Boxer MRAV – probably not I suspect. Does it have the Boxers modularity – nope.

But is it cheaper – oh yes, I think we can agree it would be considerably cheaper !

As I noted the RG35 does not have the modularity of the Boxer or the Ocelot / Foxhound design, but if we freeze the BAe marketing video, we can get a nice screen grab of a shot showing multiple variants – I have labeled them and provided a key below:

It’s difficult to see exactly what some the versions are, even if you zoom in on the image (sorry about that) but this is my take on what is shown here:

1. 6 x 6 APC
2. 6 x 6 Engineer ? Looks like a canvas cover on the rear and a jib ?
3. 6 x 6 MANPADS based AA
4. 6 x 6 with manned AAA mount ?
5. 6 x 6 AA with larger SAM ?
6. 6 x 6 APC with RWS
7. 6 x 6 APC with pintle mount MG
8. 6 x 6 with manned turret
9. 6 x 6 with ATGW turret
10. 6 x 6 155mm gun
11. 4 x 4 APC with RWS
12. 4 x 4 APC with pintle mount MG
13. 4 x 4 MANPADS AA
14. 6 x 6 with additional armour (no windows / vision blocks)
15.  6 x 6 Recce – additional armour and manned turret
16. 6 x 6 Command vehicle (or Comms or EW vehicles)
17. 6 x 6 Engineer vehicle
18.  6 x 6 Recovery vehicle

18A. Recovery vehicle shown towing

1.  6 x 6 with VLS cells ? (CAMM carrier ?)
2. 6 x6 “Prime Mover” (apologies for accidently labeling it 19 too!)

Note shown above, but mentioned in the links is a 120mm mortar version. It would appear that even the 4 x4 version is big enough to carry the STK ‘s Super Rapid Advanced Mortar System.

One would presume the smaller vehicle would be cheaper than the larger, and as I already suggested it would appear to be the right size to replace the Saxon as a wheeled APC “battle taxi”.

Conversely if you increase the size of a “Motorised Infantry” section back to the old 1970’s FV432 size of 10 men, or even the USMC size of 12/13 you can still carry them all in the 6 x 6 APC version, and still have room for ammo and kit under armour !

The ambulance and Command vehicles obviously benefit from the vehicles size, and it would appear that the 6 x 6 might provide a return to the LIMAWS(G) platform for a cheaper and more strategically mobile 155mm artillery capability.

Interestingly the 6 x 6 “Prime Mover” variant suggests that even if the main chassis is not long enough to fit an MLRS module behind the side mounted engine, one could be towed on a trailer providing an articulated wheeled rocket launcher for the old LIMAWS(M) requirement. This arrangement might also need to be used to provide the protected cargo replacement for Wolfhound. However the standard version has considerable under armour volume for cargo carriage if the seats are removed.

This vehicle would seem to cover the middle ground of a set of wheeled armoured vehicle families:

• Heavy – MAN SV trucks with protected cab kits
• Medium – RG35 in 6 x 6 and 4 x 4 variants
• Light – Foxhound family in 4 x 4 and perhaps later a 6 x 6 variant.

So to summarize, it might not be as sexy as a Boxer, but it should be “good enough” and hopefully it might be cheap enough for us to buy in volume (with them being built in the UK, not South Africa, of course……) because I don’t believe in labeling units as “light infantry” simply because we don’t have enough armour, and in a world of asymmetric threats, as many troops as possible should be under armour as standard, including Combat Service Support units.

Over to you guys for the comments !

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 CVR(T) Mk II – that is a highly mobile armoured recce vehicle.

In TD’s original article and in the comments to Monty’s article we discussed the difference between vehicles that can “fight for information” and those that can “sneak around”.

Smaller, low profile and quieter are the kind of attributes for a sneaky vehicle, but with protection and offensive armaments sized for what is basically as self protection requirement.

Other commentor’s seem some what hung up on the operational utility of having a vehicle that can be slung under a Chinook for air-mobile ops.  I had suggested that both the planned (?) WMIK version of the new Foxhound, and perhaps a dedicated recce variant my fill these needs, however there were many answers that tracks might be better than wheels, in order to traverse really adverse terrain, and thus use it to our advantage.

So, our requirements then as I understood them were these:

• Tracks – for good tactical mobility
• Small size – a small volumetric footprint aids strategic (ship and air) and tactical mobility, and to some extent visual ‘stealth’ – so if possible a similar footprint to the original CVR(T)
• Protection – armour and active defenses if available, but only at a level commensurate with keeping the weight down and the mobility up !
• Commonality – if possible be based on a vehicle already in use, for logistical simplicity
• Recce smarts – sensors and comms kit essential to the role.

Taking these suggested requirements into account , I present to you my modest proposal for a non-developmental, off the shelf replacement for the CVR(T)

The Front Module of a Warthog !

Warthog

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Yes, that’s right, lets just chop the articulated armoured personnel carrier in half, and use the front bit !

OK, now bare with me for a while, its not as daft as it sounds……..

As we all know the Warthog is an up-armoured / better protected variant of the ST Kinetics (of Singapore) Bronco All Terrain Tracked Carrier (ATTC). It has been introduced into British Army use for in Afghanistan as a better protected replacement for the BAe BVS10 (originally purchased as an amphibious APC for the Royal Marines).

The STK Eng PDF brochure for the Bronco family is available here

The Army guide page for the Bronco is here

Basically I am suggesting simply ditching the rear module, because we don’t need it in this application. As such the same 350bhp engine is going to be well capable of driving the vehicle over all terrains, even loaded up with mission role kit. The engine is mounted at the rear of the front module, and the fuel tanks are in the front module too, which is how we can do without the rear module.

The front module is rated for 1200Kg load

The open source info says the Bronco is armoured against point blank 7.62mm ball, and artillery / mortar shrapnel. However we know the Warthog has enhanced ballistic and IED protection, but we don’t know to exactly what levels, as this is an operational secret. However I would suggest if it’s good enough for the APC variant for Afghanistan, it is good enough for my scout vehicle.

IBD of Germany are said to provide a “passive” (armour ?) upgrade, and they have also marketed their active RPG / ATGW defense system for the Bronco family:

IBD Active protection

Adding this is a must for me, more expensive than slat armour, but keeps the dimensions down, and does not interfere with amphibious capabilities.

The front module of the Bronco can hold 6 crew, and I don’t know if that holds true for the Warthog, but I would drop it down to 4 which should give weight and space margin for Bowman comms kit,  EW electronics, (and even a boiling vessel for brewing up).

The British Army doesn’t appear to like / trust transparent armour and the passenger door vision blocks / windows of the Bronco are removed in the Warthog – well I would re-instate them, as I think the additional situational awareness provided to the crew is a good idea in a Scout / Recce vehicle.

With a crew of 4, consisting of driver, vehicle commander / gunner and two “Cavalry Scout’ dismounts, the later two can jump out and belly crawl up to the ridge line for really stealthy recon !

The ST Kinetics RWS brochure is available here

The RWS with (1?) weapon and ammo only weighs in at 350Kg.

I would fit a 40mm GMG with  7.62mm co-ax. The GMG with HEAT rounds should be able to contend with enemy light armoured vehicles, and the 7.62mm can take on dismounts.  Of course if we give STK some more cash, maybe they could add 1 or 2 Javelins to the mount

I think there would be space on the rear portion of the roof (above the engine compartment ?) for a Redback 40mm Grenade Launcher, which provides a second set of optronics, and 4 barrels each with 4 stacked 40mm grenades.

Redback Grenade Launcher

So, that is my modest proposal for a CVR(T) mk II, based on (half) of an in service vehicle, with excellent tracked driven tactical mobility and a small weight and volume foot print (compared to an ASCOD II SV) – I am not sure, but it may have enough buoyancy to be amphibious without the rear module attached.

Even the STK brochure does not split the dimensions and weights into the two modules, but as the whole vehicle is 8.6m long, I would guess the front module is no more than 4.3m long by 2.3 m wide with a gross laden weight of 8 tonnes. This compares well to the CVR(T) which is 5.8m by 2.1m and 8 tonnes (basic) according to Wikipedia.

Is a 40mm GMG as good as 30mm Rarden – well it depends what you want to do. I don’t really want to be advancing to contact and fighting for information in this class of vehicle, but would it more tactically mobile and better protected than a Panther CLV, or as yet non-existent Recce variant of the Foxhound ?

I think it would.

Add to this the logistics commonalities, and the modest survivability enhancements, I think this is a good example of an off the shelf option to fulfill a specific requirement – but what do you think ?

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 of Challenger 2 and Scimitar recce vehicles – I seem to remember a good article in Combat & Survival (last year ?) but I must have recycled it as I cant find it now……

I suppose in any such exercise the Scimitar CVR(T) variant was being a surrogate for the still non-existent FRES (SV). With its slightly larger caliber main gun (40mm CTA) the idea seems to have been to use FRES(SV) in direct support of infantry, as well as in its traditional ‘Formation Recce Regiment” roles.

Before we progress any further lets just take a quick look at the old armoured formations setup.  We had the ‘heavy armour’ in the shape of the Challenger 2 Main Battle Tank (MBT) regiments, numbers of which have been constantly dwindling for some years now.  Then we had the 5 Formation Recce Regiments based on CVR(T) family of vehicles – more light than medium armour.  Finally we have the TA Yeomanry regiments, although I am not sure that these have really been ‘armoured’ since they lost their Fox scout cars after the wall came down.

So when we talk about medium armour in the context of the 2020 force structure, do we mean a ‘medium’ weight vehicle, in the shape and form of the FRES Scout Vehicle, or do we mean some sort of new hybrid formation ?  Well it could mean both.

Personally I think it means the 5 Formation Recce regiments will become 5 multi-role ‘medium’ armoured regiments, based on FRES(SV) and related family of vehicles. With a 40mm gun that offers a good punch in its APFSDS round, good enough to destroy most if not all modern IFV’s,  a general purpose HE round for use against soft skin vehicles and bunkers, buildings etc, and an air bursting HE round that can be used against enemy troops in defilade, that does not sound too bad – or does it ?

FRES Scout

Personally I think there is a an awful lot missing from the concept, so accepting that this is probably what we are going to get, I would like to widen the discussion to the more generic aspects of “medium armour”:

Why go medium ?

Well it depends on your concept of operations, but it could be because medium weight class vehicles are cheaper to procure and maintain than MBT’s, or perhaps because you have a focus on expeditionary operations and its easier to move a medium weight vehicle long distances by either sea or air.  It could be because to be survivable at all on the modern asymmetric, IED and RPG filled battlefield requires a level of protection that means ‘light’ armour is a thing of the past; except in some very special circumstances. Maybe it’s a budget driven fudge, rather than a doctrinal thing…… but I digress.

Although recent advances in blast protection, active armour and even ‘old fashioned’ technology like the “anti-RPG cage’ mean that medium armoured vehicles, whether wheeled or tracked, have much better survivability, perhaps the game changer in this respect is active protection systems. The pioneering Israeli products such as the Trophy system (recently tested in combat as well as passing US Army evaluation), have been joined by many products from many manufacturers. Generally speaking these system employ sensors to warn of incoming projectiles and munitions which are launched to disrupt or destroy the incoming. The offer an additional layer of protection, which when added to modern composite and re-active armour, and good mobility mean that a medium armoured vehicle is much better protected against infantry anti-tank missiles and rockets. Some of these active defence systems are even supposed to have an ability against tank gun rounds !

So we have an added dimension to the rules of: “don’t be seen, if your seen don’t be hit” – we can get into the “if your hit, keep moving” etc later.

By the way, one argument I am not going to rekindle is wheels versus tracks, there are plenty of vehicles in both categories that come fall in the “medium weight” category, and I have no intention of going into benefits of one form of locomotion over the over, it’s a moot point for the purposes of this article.

So protection has improved to the point that, while a medium weight vehicles is no Chally 2, Leo 2 or Merkava 4 able to waddle through hell, new technology means its probably good enough for most jobs the vehicle is required to do.

Weapons (“we need more guns….” Neo, The Matrix).

So the other side of the iron triangle that we need to consider is weaponry.  Of course here we have many, many options and again it’s a bit dependent on what exactly you want your medium armour capability to achieve.

Auto-cannon

25mm to 35mm auto-cannon are popular. There are few users of the big 40mm Bofors and we have our new 40mm CTA, which has already been described above. Whatever the specifics we can see the utility of such weapons against other armoured vehicles, soft skinned vehicles, infantry in the open or concealed, even against helicopters etc. The thing is, when we are trying to decided what constitutes ‘medium armour’ in less generic terms, in other words what separates’ it from Infantry Fighting Vehicles (IFV) is the auto cannon the differentiator ?

Is it the weapon of choice for the IFV and armoured recce vehicle, and does our generic ‘medium armour’ monica suggest something else ?

We are lucky to have as a frequent commentor on this site Mr Tony Williams, an eminent weaponry expert, who has an excellent website with a page on Light AFV Guns, so click on that link and go have a read.

Anti-tank missiles

OK, I know, lots of countries mount anti-tank guided missiles on their IFV’s too. We have always been behind the curve on this one, but at least at one time we had the Striker variant of the CVR(T) family, and we had Spartan APC’s fitted with twin Milan launchers too. What we never did, and still don’t do is endow our IFV’s (Warrior) with the ability to take on heavy armour while on the move. In other words a Warrior has to stop for a Javelin team to debus and take cover, or at least shoot from the rear hatch, but I am not sure how practical that is !

Of course for us, this another budgetary thing, the U.S. has always had TOW on its M2 Bradley, and at the other end of the spectrum the new German Panther has two Euro-Spike Consortium Spike missiles on its unmanned turret:

As an aside, there are plenty of turrets with Spike integrated, but I have never seen a Javelin integration ?

Pandur II with Spike missile

Click here to view the embedded video.

A guided ATGW would allow our medium armoured capability to take on enemy MBT’s, for which it might be cost effective, but in the infantry support role, the ATGW might be a bit expensive for frequent use against buildings or as a bunker buster, so that moves us onto – big guns !

How big is big then ?

There are a number of ‘big guns’ available for a medium armoured vehicle, so again it comes down to what you want to do with the vehicle. At the really big end there are 120mm cannon, the RUAG 120mm gun is used on both the new Polish Anders and the CV90-120T vehicles:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Note the different approached, unmanned versus manned turret. Still, as someone commented on a different thread, front engine, rear troop compartment and rear door = Mini-Merkeva !

There has been discussion on the pages of this forum before suggesting that the RUAG 120mm gun would not be able to throw the NATO standard APFSDS round ‘hard’ enough to penetrate modern threat tanks. Even if that’s true, it might still be cost effective for lots of other target sets.

However if we don’t need or want to take on the bad guys MBT’s, then perhaps we could drop down to the good’ol NATO standard 105mm ?

The General Dynamics ASCOD family (the basis for FRES(SV)) has a 105mm variant, and the French AMX10RC and the newer Vextra are good examples of a wheeled vehicle with such a large gun:

ASCOD2 LT105

ASCOD and GD 105mm

Nexter Vextra with GIAT 105mm gun

However if 120mm is not going to take out an enemy MBT, then 105mm seems a bit pointless too (except in our case it’s already integrated with the ASCOD chassis ?).

Just to confirm, we are not getting into tank on tank slugging matches with our medium armoured regiments, so perhaps the Cockerill 90mm is going to be big enough for the infantry support role.

With plenty of ammo types, including HEAT, HESH and even anti-personnel canister,  it would seem to have most of the bases covered in the infantry support role.

However stepping away from general purpose infantry support, and going back to anti-tank for a moment,  even if the 105 or light weight 120 can’t produce the kinetic energy required for an MBT kill,  they may still have an anti-tank ace in their pack, in the shape and form of IAI’s LAHAT gun launched ATGW. Designed originally to be fired from the Merkeva MK1 105mm gun, this laser guided tandem HEAT warhead missile can be fired from any 105mm or 120mm gun.  Interestingly if you follow the link above you will see a photo of a quad pack for attack helo’s – well it looks to me that you could easily put 2 LAHAT in a turret mounted armoured pod like those designed for Spike, but more on that later.

The Most Versatile solution ?

OK those you who have read my stuff on this blog before will know what is coming next: A turret mounted 120mm smooth bore breach loading mortar ! These guns are the modern descendents of the French Thomson Brandt 81mm Gun-mortars that were used in many types of French armoured car. Capable of direct fire to approx 1.5km as well as the more usual indirect fire role, and as just another ‘tube’ for launching the LAHAT even capable direct fire in the anti-armour role (as an adjunct, Thomson Brandt had a ‘high velocity’ HEAT round which embedded the mortar bombs fins and propulsion charges in a combustible ‘shell casing’). In the indirect fire role the versatility is almost endless with laser guided, GPS guided, IR anti-tank, sub-munition cargo rounds and extended range rounds all in development or production. I am not talking about an AMOS or a NEMO here, but a turret mounted solution, so that you can still have crew heads out for situational awareness and a co-axial MG etc and example being BAe’s Advanced Mortar System Mk II.

BAe AMSII

Mock up (?) of a 120mm mortar turret on a Warrior. [ed, think this was called Project Thor]

Summary

No discussion of strategy or doctrine.

That might come later when we get into the post “SDSR Army” series of articles TD is planning. Instead I return to my original question – what is a “medium armour capability” ?

The after looking at all the above, the answer really remains “what do you want it to be?”. It can be wheeled or tracked, 30 to 40 tonnes, armed with an auto-cannon (and ATGW !) , a version of the ‘big tank gun’ (120mm high velocity smooth bore) or what might have been considered previously as a short ranged artillery piece (120mm mortar).  Modern automotive technology should endow it with good tactical mobility, and even more wizzy modern technology gives it a chance of surviving against fair size blast bombs (IED) as well as ATGW and RPG type rockets (and bullets and shrapnel of course).

What do I think a medium armour capability will look like in the British Armies post 2020 force structure ? Unfortunately I think it will look like a reduced buy of FRES (SV) being used in an infantry support role.

What would I like it to be ? Personally I would like it to be the short wheel based CV90 FRES (SV) with its turret mounted CTA 40mm gun supplemented by two LAHAT in an armoured box launcher AND a 120mm mortar turret on the same or the full size CV90 chassis. Each regiment have two Sabre Squadrons of each.

However we all know that is not going to happen.

Over to the comments – what do you think reality will look like ?

And what would you rather see instead ?

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 some of the aircraft types discussed, either from the manufacturers sites, or Wikipedia.

As such some of this data is “approximate” for example Wikipedia seems to use the maximum take off or emergency power rating for engines. That for the Merlin and Chinook are definitely maximum continuous rating, not so sure about the others.

As you can see data points for various aircraft are empty, because my quick Saturday afternoon search could not find the information – if you have it, or know a source, please let us know in the comments and we can amend the table

Of course nothing is ever simple, and a lot of the conversations have been based around troop lift capacity. As Gabriele pointed out, the AW101 brochure (PDF) is very open about the seating arrangements that are possible and the standard arrangement in ‘crash worthy’ troop seats of 27 men, includes seats arrayed so that the starboard side trooping door is unusable. Not a problem in my opinion, the Chinook for example does not have side doors either. On the other hand I can’t find any thing that the figure of 33 for the Chinook suggests this is in crash worthy seating, but extrapolation would suggest it is.

For the Eurocopter EC725 Caracel, the available PDF is clear that 29 troops can be seated in the cabin, but that drops to 20 with wall mounted crash worthy seats, and if you want to use the large front opening windows for side gunners, that drops to 16. Similarly the workhorse of the US Army can seat 14, but more usual is a standard US Army squad of 11, plus two side window gunners.

At the lower end, the AW literature for the AW139M and AW149 talks about Fully Equipped (FE) troops, with support weapons (GPMG’s and LAWS?) or Lightly Equipped (LE) which I take as personal weapons and ‘fighting order’. Our venerable Puma’s seat 16, but I don’t think these are in crash worthy seats anyway, and I have not looked up figures for the refitted Pumas, but stuck with HC1.

I could not find any figures at all ref the seating details for the Mil Mi-17-1V, which fits squarely between the NH90 and the EH101 based on empty weight, it just says “30 troops” and I have the feeling that’s not in crash worthy seating.

So, there you are team, so figures to play with when disputing what our machines can manage to do.

Oh, and just in case, although I am sure you would never forget, just because a brochure gives a maximum number (for example the 40 you can cram into a Merlin) – that won’t be on a 35 deg C “hot” day at high altitude in Afghanistan.

The cancelling of EFV has had lots of impact in the USN / USMC community. There has been much discussion about whether the basic concept of operations needs to be revised, whether or not storming a beach in an amphibious armoured vehicle is even do-able against ‘near peer’ enemies, whether the LCAC is vulnerable, whether the MV22 is good enough at what its supposed to do, whether the LPD 17 class is too expensive etc.

You can visit Solomon’s SNAFU blog, or Information Dissemination, or take a quick peak at this USNI blog post to get the flavour of the conversation.

Remember though, the EFV was built to a set of requirements – requirements that many would say were simply too much. The conops was for USN amphibs to stay over the visual / radar horizon, and so the EFV had to be fast on the water to cover the distance to shore (25nm) fast enough to cut down the period of vulnerability. Once ashore it had to be better armed and protected than its predecessor (the venerable AAV7), include protection against big IED’s and have land mobility to allow it to keep up with M1A1 MBT’s – is there any wonder it ended up costing so much it would simply have swallowed up too much of the USMC’s budget.

Right tool for the right job

My initial thought was that it would be better to stick with horses for courses. Rapid ship to shore movement by hovercraft in the shape of LCAC (and its improved successor) or alternatives such as PASCAT and L-CAT type vessels, plus armoured vehicles that maybe amphibious, but are designed primarily for protection and land mobility. Many such armoured vehicles already exist, both wheeled and tracked, and indeed the USMC also has a requirement for a new APC.

However this leaves a requirement for a fast amphibious vehicle to get Marines ‘feet dry’ in the face of enemy fire. This is where my ‘modest proposal’ for an assault hovercraft that is a little more ‘souped up’ than the RM’s current type (the 2400TD) comes in. (By the way, why don’t these have an RWS instead of an open “freeze yer boys off” MG mount ?)

Royal Marine Griffon Hoverworks 2100TD

I won’t re-hash the fact that the hovercraft is an excellent British invention, or that we had the amazing Vosper Thorneycroft VT2 well before the Yanks were thinking about JEFF-A and JEFF-B, I will stress though that in the shape of Griffon Hoverworks, we have probably the biggest manufacturer of hovercraft in the world (at least in terms of number of customers, if not in terms of sheer volume of vehicles delivered).

The biggest purely military craft that Griffon Hoverwork produce is the 8100TD, which is in service with Sweden and a number of other countries. The Swedish variants have some ballistic protection (wheel house armoured against 7.62mm ball), and with a payload of 12 tonnes can carry a BVS10 type vehicle internally. It has a length of 21.3 meters by 11 meters in the beam and can do 45 knots fully loaded. See this page for more details. This is only slightly longer, but substantially broader than the LCVP Mk5 which can carry 35 Marines at up to 25 knots (15.5 m x 4.3 m).

The Modest Proposal

I would suggest an armed and armoured version of the 8100TD might make a pretty good assault hovercraft, so based on the fact that a RM Bootneck with a full Bergen and lots of kit for an “extended stay’ somewhere might tip the scales at up to 150kg, but if only tricked out in fighting order for the initial assault that might drop to 100kg each, I reckon we get between 40 to 60 troops onboard if we cut our payload to 6 tonnes.

For our 6 tonnes of additional kit, I would pick and chose from systems developed for helicopters, and systems developed for armoured vehicles. So for example helicopter style night vision compatible avionics and displays would take over in the cockpit, which might include both aluminium armour, but also lightweight boron or composite armour developed for aircraft applications. Certainly thick bullet proof glass as used in MRAP’s would be required for the windscreen and windows of the control cabin / cockpit.

Just as an example an STK dual-weapon RWS with 7.62mm MG and 40mm GMG comes in at 350 kg including ammo, and includes daylight and thermal imaging systems. If take an active protection radar sensor suite designed for armoured vehicles and add the attendant anti-missile system, we might add 50 kg in antennas and I will use the MetalStorm Redback as an example of the anti-missile launcher, as these weight 70 kg each. I can’t find any weights for a loaded AN/ALE40 chaff and flare dispenser, but I can’t see them being more thank 30kg each ?

We have used 850kg so far. Perhaps with ESM and laser warning antenna sets we might be up to a tonne, which leaves us 5 more to play with. Perhaps 500 kg might be used on the Textron TRAPS “anti-RPG air bag” system (shown below) to give a second layer of defence against incoming threats ?

Textron TRAPS on a HMMWV type vehicle.

So lets say conservatively we have 4 tonnes with which to provide armour protection up to 7.62mm and artillery / mortar shrapnel for the main cabin, propulsion fan shrouds and enhanced protection (12.7mm AP ?) for the wheel house.

Please excuse my rather useless photo- retouching skills, but based on a Swedish 8100TD this might give us something like this:

Enhanced Armoured Assault 8100TD type hovercraft

Key

1 – Wheel house repositioned to the center, with two hydraulic ramps, 1 either side for troop egress.

2 – port and starboard RWS

3 – Port and starboard forward smoke grenade dischargers

4 – Port and starboard Redback 40mm weapons system as part of anti-RPG / anti-missile system.

5 – wide sliding side doors – both for troop egress or for helicopter style machine gun mounts

6 – Port and starboard AN/ALE 40 chaff and flare dispensers.

Back to the context of an alternative to a hydroplaning amphibious armoured vehicle. The 8100 Armoured Assault can deposit 60 Marines feet dry after running in from over the horizon at well over 45 knots, jinking and manoeuvring as only a hovercraft can at that speed. With full threat detection kit, it can do its best to avoid being hit on the run into the beach, flying over mines in shallow waters and on the beach.

Closer to the enemy it can put down supressing fire with 40mm grenade launchers (with air bursting munitions if required) and possibly up to 4 x 12.7mm MG’s. Active protection systems provide close in defence against RPG’s and guided anti-tank missiles. 2 such vehicles can deploy a company of 120 heavily armed Marines within minutes, clearing out enemy snipers or RPG / MG and mortar teams waiting to ambush the unprotected LCAC coming in the next wave. Such a vehicle would obviously have other littoral and riverine uses.

Of course as it has been pointed out in the USNI blog posting I linked to at the beginning of this article, hovercraft require extra wet dock space, whereas AAV7 / EFV or amphibious APC’s take up vehicle space on the cargo decks, and unfortunately the 8100TD is not that much smaller than an LCAC (26.4m x 14.3m). Having said that, lots of commentators have suggested the USN should be buying more, cheaper Schelde Enforcer type amphibs rather than gold plated LPD17’s……..

How about 6 for the RM and we could ship them to trouble zones on a hired merchant?

Just to provoke debate, I thought we could split this into high, medium and low risk. I suppose I could have done it by capability or cost, but we will examine those factors too.

Before making my suggestions on what might be out there that we could purchase, I am going to suggest that the billion pounds sterling includes a capital purchase of aircraft, some contractor support, training (i.e. buying simulators, or simulator hours)  a spares and maintenance package etc.  I have no idea how much each of these aircraft might cost, but I am sure if you have seen figures anywhere, you will all chime in via the comments.

By the way – I consider “MPA” to mean a fully ASW capable armed aircraft, NOT an unarmed maritime surveillance type.

There are a number of other options described in the Think Defence post, The Future of the RAF 13 – ISTAR #07 (Maritime)

High Risk – New

Looks good on the web and no doubt the most capable solution I am examining here, but I also label it as high risk for one simple reason: it does not exist except on paper. Airbus is attempting to keep the risk low by using its FITS mission system which is already in use on other aircraft. The A319 would be very capable with extra fuel tanks for long endurance, an 8 weapon station bomb bay plus four underwing hard points.  However compared to some of the options, its big making it expensive to start with, and oh, did I mention, it does not actually exist yet……..

A319 MPA

High Risk – Second Hand

The USN retired its fleet of S3B Viking carrier borne ASW aircraft to the desert bone yards a couple of years ago (end of 2009). A 2004 Full Scale Fatigue Test by LM determined that the airframe fatigue life could be as high as 23,000 hours (the average number of flight hours on all S3′s at the time being less than 13,000 hours). Of course flying these aircraft from runways would eat up the life much slower than catapult launches and arrested landings. The main problem is that the USN removed the sono-bouy launchers and acoustic processing equipment during the 1990′s. However upgrades to the rest of the aircraft were constant up to its requirement. I suggest we could probably get these aircraft dirt cheap, and we could buy twice as many as we need in order to strip aircraft for spares etc. I label this as high risk because we would need to buy new (or re-integrate) original sonobouy launchers, the sonobouy receiver and acoustic processor of the Merlin HM2 could be fitted, but this would mean integration and would cost some money.

However its most high risk because integrating new kit can cause problems, which equal budget increases and delays.  However with respect to the rumour that the FAA might be flying the MPA’s – this is a jet aircraft which might allow us to keep some FAA pilots current on jets, and it only has a small crew of 4, so the wages bill would not be too steep !

See here and here

Low Risk – Second Hand

P3 Orions. Yep, thats what I said, Orions….. Building on its experience re-vamping Brazil and Spain’s P3s, Airbus Military will rebuild some for us, again using the FITS mission system. I suggest this is low risk as they have done the rebuilds before, and so this should be a known quantity. We could pick up old airframes from the USN and off we go. However, this is a bigger aircraft, it maybe turbo-prop but the running costs might be a bit higher. Personally I don’t like the idea of refurbishing an airframe almost as old as the Nimrods !

P3 Modernisation

See here

Low Risk – New

The jewel in the Airbus Military crown ? The C295 MPA is already in use with the Chilean Navy and Portuguese Air Force, and based on the earlier CN235 which is in use with many more air arms. With 11 hour endurance and 6 weapons stations this dual turbo-prop could be the optimum commercial solution. Procured as “Military Off the Shel” with out gold plating by MoD, the C295 could be the “good enough” solution to give us a low risk, viable solution for probably pretty low capital acquisition and running costs.

C295 MPA

See here

[TD, Jed, what about the ATR42/72]

Re-using Nimrod mission system components

3 out of the 4 options above are from Airbus Military and all come with the FITS mission system, which can be considered low risk as they have been fitting to planes for the last 15 years. We could introduce an element of risk by re-using some of the systems developed for the Nimrod. The Thales UK Searchwater 2000 radar (which is generally accepted as being best in class) springs to mind, so with TD’s mantra of : “commonality, commonality, and more commonality…..” in mind how about –

The A400M Option

Yep, I went and said it didn’t I !

I am not sure where I want to place this option on the spectrum of risk, but here goes:

You fit the Searchwater in the aircraft (and ESM and other antenna would not be permanent fixtures on the airframe too), but all the other mission systems, displays processing etc go into a purpose designed pod which is rolled into the A400M’s cavernous hold. The hold being much bigger than a Nimrod’s cabin I assume we would fit crew rest area, galley etc. The rear para-trooping doors could be replaced by port and starboard sono-bouy launchers. The main issue would weapons fit. We know there are outer wing hard points for hose and drogue refueling pods, a pair of Stingrays on each of these would be pretty low risk.

As the A400M rear ramp has a 6 tonne cargo capacity, would it be beyond our ability to design a reasonably low risk solution using drogue chutes to pull a Stingray out of some sort of magazine fitted to the ramp ? With the good ground clearance of a tactical airlifter, perhaps under fuselage hard points could even suffice ?

Of course the other problem is the A400M is not in full production yet, so it would take a while for us to get any online, but otherwise just thing of the commonality………..

http://www.airbusmilitary.com/A400M.aspx

Make use of kit we already have ?

I will finish with a more off the wall suggestion. We don’t need an ASW capable MPA, because we could simply upgrade ALL remaining (38 ?) Merlin HM1 to Merlin HM2 standard AND fit some of them (for shore based use) with the in-flight refuelling probe which has been tested on Merlin’s before, AND buy some KC130J fitted with SeaSpray 7500E radars (as the USCG Herc’s).  Or we could even get Marshall’s to refurb and upgrade some second hand Herc’s (or our own, like the two they did for the Dutch Air Force !). These aircraft could do the long range surface search and SAR tasking, while being able to air-to-air refuel Merlin’s could keep them on station longer when sanitizing the approaches to the west coast of Scotland for any nasties lurking in wait for our ‘bombers’……

To finish on a really, really blasphemous note, perhaps Marshall’s or FRA could even provide the Herc’s on a “power by the hour” basis…….. !

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 to understand that given the rhetoric of the SDSR, particularly the identified threats, the requirements for expeditionary operations and the requirement to undertake independent national operations; that the rhetoric does not actually match the priority given to the RN in the 2020 force structure or indeed the maritime domain in general. As I don’t know what books you have all read, there is a large selection of references links to the good old Wikipedia at the end of the article, but you may want to scroll down and go and read some of them first.

Sea Power – The Main Theories (in a nutshell)

Don’t be fooled by the age of these major theories, I assure you they are still debated and critiqued in war colleges around the world. The wikipedia links are better than nothing, but hit the local reference library or do some Google research for more details:

Mahon

The US Admiral Alfred Mahon was a very influential thinker and suggested sea power was critical for any nation. He broke down “command of the sea” into 3 main areas; decisive fleet on fleet engagement, blockade and disruption of enemy lines of communications (what we generally refer to as the SLOC’s – Sea Lines Of Communications). Communications in this context is not communications as in postal ships full of letters, but communications as in the transport of commerce across the sea, be it frakkin’ great container ships, or enormous oil tankers.

Corbett

Sir Julian Corbett was our home grown great naval theorist. He did not agree with Mahon on the importance of fleet on fleet action, but instead led us towards modern concepts of expeditionary warfare, suggesting maritime and land warfare were highly interwoven. As such securing your own SLOC’s and interdicting those of the enemy were more important than simply sinking his fleet. He broke down “command of the sea” further into geographic and temporal domains: general or local, and temporary or permanent. He suggested the two main ways to secure your SLOCs or deny them to the other team is to capture or destroy their merchant and naval shipping, or by blockade.

Modern theories / language

Neither Mahon nor Corbett would have heard the term “Maritime Security Operations” but both would have understood the concepts. You can apply Mahon or Corbett’s strategies to “actions less than war” to produce MSO; Visit Board Search and Seizure (VBSS) operations on the high seas are in effect simply a form of “blockade” operations. We attempt to blockade, capture or destroy “enemy shipping” in the form of drug runners “go faster” boats in the Caribbean and do the same to pirates of Somalia.

During the Cold War era, the USN developed the ‘Sea Control’ concept. This was the original “sea-air-under-sea” battle concept, and included the use of carrier task groups, battleship led surface action groups, ASW barrier task groups in the Greenland-Iceland-UK gaps, aggressive submarine based ASW and large amounts of land based maritime air (P3 squadrons, Nimrods etc). It merged together or utilized many of the concepts of Mahon and Corbett, and added the experience of World War II convoy operations (SLOC’s – The Battle of the Atlantic) and amphibious operations of the Pacific war. As the Soviet forces also employed both “anti-carrier” surface actions groups, and ASW task forces, it may even have resulted in some serious “fleet battles” !

This topic provides us a nice link into how the tactics and different elements of maritime operations link to these strategic concepts. Of course everything overlaps massively if you think about it. Submarines can interdict the enemies SLOC’s by directly sinking his commercial traffic in the open ocean or by laying mines off his ports or in narrow choke points can contribute to the blockade. Carrier strike groups can directly affect the land battle, or can use their assets to permanently or temporarily achieve local ‘command of the sea’. At a lower level of granularity, ASW is ASW, whether it is enacted by other submarines, surface ships, helicopters or aircraft. Likewise MCM is MCM whether enacted in your own estuaries by hovercraft, or thousands of miles across the globe by robotic submersibles deployed by 8,000 tonne DDG’s.

So in my rough Venn diagram below you can add specific capabilities, and the tactics to utilize those specific capabilities within an individual circle, or in the overlaps, depending on what your trying to achieve.

Sea Power and the SDSR

Now of course comes the difficult bit. Sifting through the rhetoric of HMG as published in the SDSR, with an eye to the 2020 force structure, in the context of “sea power” or if you like levering the maritime domain.

I am not going to regurgitate SDSR in this article, and we already have TD’s pages of analysis, but some direct quotes are quick way to establish the linkage:

National Security Tasks – 1.4 The Adaptable Posture (page 9): “ to shape a stable world, by acting to reduce the likelihood of risks affecting the UK or our interests overseas, and applying instruments of power and influence to shape the global environment to tackle potential risks at source.”

Generally speaking the most cost effective way to protect our overseas interests is through application of sea power in one form or another, but more on that later.

National Security Tasks – 1.5 iii) The Adaptable Posture (page 10): “to respond to growing uncertainty about longer-term risks and threats, we will pursue an over-arching approach which: ……… ensures those capabilities have in-built flexibility to adjust to changing future requirements”.

Carriers, big (CV) or small (HMS Ark Royal) are amongst the most flexible of naval assets, as long as you have aircraft and helicopters to fly from them. Amphibious warfare ships are also another incredibly flexible type of asset.  Ships of all sizes, shapes and types are of course inherently flexible assets and often are easier to upgrade (if space and margin is designed in) as they are more weapons platforms than weapons systems or weapons themselves. Not to say you can’t upgrade a Challenger II or a Typhoon, but that it should be easier to upgrade a ship to deal with new risks and threats, its just a size thing really.

National Security Tasks and Planning Guidelines (page 12): “an independent ability to defend the Overseas Territories militarily”.

Let’s have no white wash about 4 x Typhoon, 1 x (enhanced) River Class and an Infantry Company in the Falklands please. To get land power or air power into the fight in the defence of any of our Overseas Territories requires the participation of the RN. Even if this a scenario where there is no amphibious forced entry requirement, but perhaps the moving of a brigade sized force on leased merchant ships, non-state actors can now deploy shore based anti-ship missiles, or mine strategic choke points. Also lets face it, we will never have enough transport aircraft to deploy and maintain a sizeable force, but I digress…..

The future character of conflict (box out on page 16): “…… the differences between state-on-state warfare and irregular conflict are dramatically reducing……… Our enemies will continue to attack our physical (and electronic) lines of communication…….It will demand ….. protected mobility by land, air and sea.”

Irregular warfare might include use sophisticated capabilities including sea mines and anti-ship missiles (even if not the longest ranged, or most sophisticated models). Thus Irregular warfare in the maritime domain does not just mean swarms of IRGC Boghammers with HMG and RPG, to be dealt with by OPV’s with light auto-cannon.

Protecting our sea lines of communication and protecting our sea borne mobility should then inform our development of our fantasy fleets.

Principles (page 17): “ Our future forces, although smaller than now, will retain their geographical reach and their ability to operate across the spectrum from high intensity intervention to enduring stabilization activity”

I would contend that cost effective geographical reach means use of the sea, with all that entails.

Principles (page 18): “Expeditionary, able to be deployed to a distance from the UK in order to tackle threats before they reach these shores” and “defending our interests by projecting power strategically and through expeditionary interventions”.

Again if that does not put the primacy on the RN, I don’t know what does. Yes expeditionary warfare can mean the RAF deploying a Typhoon squadron to a stable (?) host nation, or a peacekeeping battalion deploying by coach and civvy air. However if it means facing down the enemy (or potential enemy) in an area with no stable allies, no political will to allow over flight or basing rights etc, then it means the Navy. Do not tell me your prescient enough to be sure we will always have all we need in the way of allies, basing agreements etc more than 5 years into the future, and I will not tell you the Navy is the only way to achieve expeditionary warfare, but I will tell you that navies can be tremendously flexible organizations that can utilize assets designed to achieve high end effects for other lower end uses (for example use of Amphibious warfare ships for “showing the flag” (defence diplomacy), soft power projection, constabulary MSO, disaster relief, etc…..)

Conclusions (and fantasy fleet design)

The culmination of all this writing is if you like the kind of “cascade of objectives” you probably get in your performance management system at work.

SDSR Principles -> Expeditionary Power Projection + potential scenarios and threat matrix = High Value Units needed to provide the desired effects.

As HMG has decided 1 operational CV / air wing, and a reduced amphibious shipping capability, plus Submarine delivered land attack capabilities can provide our maritime assets to facilitate expeditionary power projection, now when we are playing fantasy fleets and indulging in innovative ship design we can keep in mind that we need enough surface assets to protect a CV, LPH, LPD, say 2 x (A)LSD, say 4 Point Class RO-RO, and a brace of RFA supporting vessels against a potentially sophisticated adversary that may or may not be a non-state actor.

I will leave you to discuss whether 4 (available) T45 and 4 (available) T26 is enough to achieve this end.

References:

Wikipedia articles, good back ground reading:

Grand Strategy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_strategy

Naval Warfare (mostly historical perspectives): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_power

Naval Strategy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_strategy

Article on Rear-Admiral Alfred Mahan: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Thayer_Mahan

Article on Sir Julian Corbett: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Corbett

Command of the Sea: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_of_the_sea

Modern Naval Tactics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_naval_tactics

Anti-submarine Warfare: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-submarine_warfare

Submarine Warfare: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_warfare

Mine Warfare / Mines / MCM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_mine

TD Articles: Analysis of the National Security Tasks: http://www.thinkdefence.co.uk/2010/10/sdsr-analysis-04-the-national-security-tasks/

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 Somalia have moved along a similar political path and now form the two halves of the fundamentalist Islamic Republic of the Gulf of Aden (IRGA).  The IRGA in the north has an uneasy truce with Oman, and there are cross border clashes with Saudi Arabia. France has managed to hang on to Djibouti by not taking any threatening actions.

The IRGA has found favor with the UN and other international organisations for bringing governance to Somalia and reducing the need for food aid. Piracy and illegal fishing has dramatically reduced as a consequence of effective governance and harsh punishments.

The IRGA is heavily financed and supported by Iran.

The IRGA has made cross border raids into Ethiopia and is now openly threatening Kenya, who has asked for our support as a member of the Commonwealth.

The UK is responding by sending reinforcing units to Kenya, and instead of going around the long route HMG has decided to prove a point to the IRGA by passing through the 13.6 nautical wide gap between Africa and the Arabian peninsular.

Advance units of the Army are in theatre but need reinforcing with heavy equipment and it is thought that a display of resolve and force will rapidly de-escalate the situation.

For political reasons we can expect no support from France (Djibouti), Oman or Saudi Arabia. Egypt is providing support and will let us transit the Suez canal. The US is supporting our position and objectives but has fallen short of of offering any tangible support. The EU is holding a series of meetings to decide what to do next.

Mission

Move from the UK with a tailored task group through the Suez Canal and Gulf of Aden to Mombasa

Threats

• 2  x Kilo SSK
• 4 x Type 021 Missile Boats – equipped with Silkworm type anti-ship missiles
• Unknown (>20) Shenyang J8 / Mig 21 based in north and south IRGA
• Unkown (>20) Shenyan J8II Finback based in north and south IRGA
• 2 ex-Iranian Fokker F27 for maritime patrol.
• Lots of small fast boats armed with MG’s and RPG’s
• Land based (truck launched) Silkworm type missiles

RN Assets

High value units / main body

• 1 x CV, 12 F35C, Merlin ASaC, Wildcat, Apache, Merlin HC3
• 1 x LPD
• 2 x A(LSD) Bay Class
• 4 x  Point Class Ro-Ro
• 1 x Wave Class tanker
• 2 x JSS (or other Fort class replacement)
• RFA Argus as Primary Casualty Receiving Ship

There are 3 out of 6 Type 45AAW, and 4 out of 8 Type 26 ASW “escorts” available.  These are carrying 11 Merlin HM2 ASW helo’s.  I will only stipulate that T26 is equipped with T2087 towed array sonar, you can decide on the rest.

You can add your preferred Frigates, Global Sloops, Corvettes our armed OPV’s as required to sheppard your 12 “vulnerable” high value units.

You will note the CV is acting as a combined CV and LPH

Questions

Have a go at plotting your escorting force on the plotting form below (save it to your desk top as a JPG) – you might want to do two, with different range scales. Consider the range of your AAW weapons and sensors, your ASW helo’s and your potential air group on the CV.

It might be interesting to reflect on these additional points

1. Why would you bring your logistics forces through the same location when there are safer transit routes
2. What role would land based air power play
3. What could we realistically expect from allies
4. What would our SSN be doing
5. What happened if it all ‘kicked off’

Have fun.

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 all three of these are intrinsically linked.

The Forward Presence Squadrons.

First of all I don’t think we need forward basing to provide a presence around the world, forward basing costs, and we don’t have a lot of money. Other than that I think the TD idea of using a derivative of a large civilian design such as Off Shore Support Vessel (OSV) types actually plays to not requiring forward basing. A 4,000 tonne OSV type is going to have greater range and endurance, and better accommodation that a 2,000 tonne type design, such as the BMT Venator for what is essentially the Future Surface Combatant programmes C3 requirement.  As discussed in the comment threads, as long as this type of vessel can carry the latest remote surface and sub-surface vehicles to facilitate a sophisticated MCM capability, then all is good.

We can have a global presence, deciding where and when to patrol, provide a presence (large or small) by continuing the normal type of long range, global deployments that we undertaken now. In fact with the much greater habitability of modern ships, such as the T45, its not impossible to stretch the average deployment from 6 to 9 months.  This too has been done before, with the crew taking a weeks leave in he UK during a short maintenance period in a foreign port.

Littoral Operations

However for the Littoral operations side of things, and to support the C3 OSV in a forward deployed Maritime Security Operations (patrol boat) mode, I would turn once again to leveraging the support flotilla – the RFA.

The Bay class RFA’s are superbly flexible Landing ship Dock type vessels, built in the UK to a Dutch design, being derivatives of the Schelde Enforcer class. Unfortunately even though they are cheap to run, the current Government has decided to sell off one of the four ships of the class. This is incredibly short sighted as these vessels have a major war amphibious role, a peacetime MSO role (they have actually been used in this role) and the obvious utility to disaster relief operations of a vessel able to carry large amounts of cargo and move it ashore with its own landing craft, or cranes.

So we must keep hold of that Bay Class.

What is more, to provide a relatively cheap incremental increase to our littoral, amphibious and disaster relief capabilities, I would suggest building a second class of Bay derivatives. I am suggesting a ship with less cargo and possibly less vehicle lane capability in the hull, and with a bigger superstructure including a hanger and additional accommodation.  The hanger should be sized for 2 x Merlin, and as the normal Bay class can carry 360 embarked troops for extended periods, with 500 in “short term overload”, then I think maybe 450 plus helo flight, and perhaps additional medical personnel for an extending medical facility might be a good compromise.  These ships would also carry CB90H on davits. I have shown 2 as I can’t find the Lloyds Register rules as to how many lifeboats have to be carried for RFA crew, but that might be expandable to 4. The Well deck would carry LCU MK10, a PASCAT based replacement or an 8100TD hovercraft.  I can’t find any dimensions for the well deck, but an 8100TD has a beam of 11m when its up on its cushion, so they may be too big.  No worries, can always carry more CB90, RHIBS etc in the well deck.  So a rough drawing produces:

Evolved Bay Class

So I think 4 of these vessels would not break the bank, and working in pairs with the existing Bay’s would provide a great capability.

Littoral Fire Power

TD suggested an LCS(UK) design for bringing extra fire power to bear in the littorals. This is an area where I disagree.  I think the CB90H can be loaded up pretty well, and if we need something more, then the well decks of our amphibs can carry something like the Strb 2010 version of the Docksta Varvet 18M design:

Strb 2010

Also as littoral does not actually mean “shallow water” I would rely on both the amount of armed helicopters that Bay / Bay Derivative / Albion / Ocean etc could bring to the littoral party, and my Absalon based C2 “cheap and cheerful” frigate (sorry “Global Cruiser”) could provide a lot of firepower, off various types, from various ranges.

While I think we have all agreed on these pages in previous discussions that the Lynx Wildcat might not really be the best solution for the Army Air Corps anymore , it has the makings of the premier armed naval helicopter for use over the ocean, or “feet dry” overland in the littorals, with it’s excellent radar, new optronics and a potentially varied weapons fit.  The Wildcat can be supplemented by UAV’s for more persistent surveillance.

So no LCS(UK) in my future for the RN.

Additional support for presence, littoral ops and disaster relief

I will briefly return to one of my other favorite themes because it fits well with these use cases. I would make a large buy of the Dutch JSS type ships for the RFA, to replace at least the 4 Fort Class vessels, and preferably to replace Diligence and Argus, and chuck in a couple more paid for by DfID for good luck !  Jack of all trades and masters of non I admit, but I would rely on TD’s obsession with containerization to make these ships useful naval stores support vessels. They carry a similar amount of off loadable fuel as our old Rover class small tankers, but again they offer much greater flexibility, especially in their ability to carry  4 Merlin size helicopters.

So in summary, I would invest in CB90’s and 8100TD hovercraft, existing tried and tested designs.  I would invest further in a derivate of the Bay class to be operated by the RFA.  I would invest to make sure we have enough Wildcat and Commando Helicopter Force Merlins available for the tasking at hand.

As per my MSO / anti-piracy article I am putting the emphasis on cheap to run, civil servant / merchant seaman manned RFA vessels, add on RN “warships” as required, however a “presence squadron” of 1 Bay, 1 Enhanced Bay, 1 x JSS type with up to  6 CB90H, a couple of hovercraft, 4 Merlin’s and 2 Wildcats, with quite a large number of RM onboard seems like a pretty decent capability. You then grow it as required for your mission and based on the threat. Add in a C2 frigate, a Type 45 or allied ship for air defence cover, plus allied capabilities such as small corvettes or missile craft etc.

In the end, its about acquiring super flexible assets, tried and tested in the most case, that have multiple roles, (amphib, littoral, disaster response,  MSO) that cost less to purchase than “warships” and generally cost less to run, thus increasing our value for money overall.

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 Royal Navy) cannot afford “gold plated” warships, so it needs many, smaller cheaper vessels and that to remain relevant in the modern world, it needs to focus the use of these smaller vessels on missions such as “fighting piracy” – my pilot response to most of these suggestions in not printable!

Let me provide some background reading before going any further.

If you don’t know the Eagle Speak blog, its author, Eagle 1 (an ex-USNR Captain) does an excellent job of tracking piracy, and has been doing for a long time before Somalia become the media’s focus

Eagle 1 works with CDR Salamander (another active blogger) to produce the “Midrats” naval podcast over BlogTalk Radio; they recently interviewed Mr Stephen Carmel, a Senior Vice President with Maersk USA.  It is an excellent interview even though it has an obvious US centric view of piracy, commerce and shipbuilding.

Mr Carmel also recently gave a speech at a USNI conference where he suggested that piracy is simply not that big an issue from the commercial viewpoint; you can read the transcript here

As Mr Carmel points out, Navies may have long histories in fighting piracy, and other crime upon the high seas, but the operative word here is history. Piracy is not a military threat, to the UK or any other nation for that matter. Piracy is a law and order issue; do we call in the local TA battalion to deal with armed robbers or potential armed siege situations? No of course not, we call on appropriately trained and armed police – a civilian agency.

So I would like to examine a few points, and make a few of those modest suggestions, but lets start with the contentious stuff:

1. The role of the Royal Navy is war fighting, military operations, not global maritime policeman
2. BUT having said that, people who constantly moan about using T45’s (for example) for anti-piracy or anti-drug ops are missing the point: if we have such assets why not use them ? Would you rather they just sit alongside doing nothing at all?
3. Building on point 2 – warships can do maritime policing, but generally speaking maritime policemen (coastguard type OPV’s for example) are not much use in war fighting
4. The SDSR is actually divesting of assets that are very useful in maritime security type operations – more on this below.

Lets work this backwards a bit first, to get the modest suggestion for the RN out of the way.  If we do not accept that just letting commercial market forces (the maritime and insurance industries) deal with piracy is sufficient, and that for moral reasons we should intervene, then we should use the assets we already have to accomplish the mission.

So instead of mothballing one of the Albion class assault ships, we should make a modest investment in CB90 type vessels which can operate from the well deck on anti-piracy patrols. Now I accept the Albion Class are less than perfect, not having a hanger for their own helo, but perhaps we could attach a Bay Class style temporary shelter for a Lynx. However the main point is, a CB90 with its mix of range, endurance, speed and payload, its own radar, and even a cabin roof RWS with a 12.7mm MG is excellent small vessel for anti-piracy patrols closer into shore, with much cheaper operating costs than a Merlin HM1.

A previous TD article on the CB90 is here

Obviously the same combination would be quite good for anti-drug use in the Caribbean or anti-people smuggling in the Mediterranean. In the “West Indies Guards Ship” role, which has already been undertaken by the smaller Bay Class, the ability to carry large amounts of disaster relief supplies and equipment during hurricane season is an added boon!

Maritime Security Operations – Fleet versus Flotilla

OK, so now its time for that rather modest proposal I mentioned…………

If piracy, drug running and people smuggling are not a direct military threat to the UK, but a civilian ‘security’ issue, then perhaps we should leave it to the Coast Guard?  No, seriously, stop laughing….!

I know the UK Maritime and Coast Guard Agency is not exactly built on the same model as the US Coast Guard for example, and is not setup for such missions, but we have a successful model, which can be adopted: the Royal Fleet Auxiliary.

While writing this article, I seem unable to get to the main RFA site, which might have something to do with the recent hack, so for those who don’t know a great deal about the RFA, check out the Wikipedia page

The RFA might be described as a “para-military” organization. They are the supporting element of the maritime armed forces, what in the days of sail used to be termed the Flottilla, as opposed to the Fleet(s) of combatant vessels. The RFA is manned by civilian merchant mariners and supply specialists. The RFA has for many years been a model other countries have envied,  and personally I have spent 9 months working as part of the Naval Party onboard RFA Diligence and have a very high opinion of their professionalism, particularly the bridge ‘watch keeping’ officers I worked with.

So why not use the RFA model to undertake ‘coast guard type’ maritime security operations, both in UK waters, and further abroad?

Currently the RN operates 3 River Class patrol vessels, and there is a current opportunity to purchase 3 Port of Spain class vessels built for Trinidad and Tobago

Port of Spain Class

FantasyFleets has made a similar suggestion

The difference is I am suggesting these vessels be sailed under the Blue Ensign as part of the RFA, either ‘straight up’ as part of the Flotilla, or on behalf of the Maritime and Coast Guard Agency – personally I don’t care if they are grey, white, blue or whether or not they have ‘go faster’ stripes.

The existing Rivers should be transferred to the RFA and manned and operated in the same way.  In UK waters Fisheries officers could be carried, and Customers officers in the same way.  In the Caribbean or off Somalia I would suggest the boarding parties should be made up of Royal Marines

Using the RFA to provide this capability is only part of the response to a dwindling MoD budget though. The other element would be to take the Italian approach to funding; these maritime security ops could be financed in part by MCGA, Revenue and Customs, DfID etc not just from the MoD budget. If we accept that this is not a ‘war fighting’ role, why should they be funded by the MoD at all ?

Bigger is better

However, why stop there ? As I have suggested, I am not a big fan of smaller less flexible vessels, so lets go to the other extreme and examine the use of really big RFA’s for these maritime security operations.

As the RN surface fleet has shrunk, RFA tankers and the auxiliary landing ships of the Bay Class have been used on the ‘Windies Guard Ship’ and other duties. While some have questioned the veracity of using a tanker to do anti-drug runner ops’ I say “so what?” – it’s a flexible asset, use it for whatever you can J

TD’s pre-SDSR article on ‘At Sea Replenishment’ mentions the Dutch Joint Support Ship design

In my complimentary article, I suggested we should join the JSS program and buy at least 4 of these large and flexible vessels to replace all 4 RFA Fort Class vessels

In fact in the comments (some where) I went further than this, based on TD’s relentless pursuit of educating us all to be experts in ISO Container based logistics, to suggest that perhaps another 2 could replace RFA Argus and RFA Diligence, and again following the Italian model, a 7^th of class could be purchased purely for disaster response operations – paid for by DfID of course !

Now I realize these vessels are not that cheap (although relatively speaking they are certainly not that expensive either – c. 360 million Euro so 305 million GBP) but beating TD’s drum of standardization the benefits of having a large class of identical vessels (which would also reduce this unit price) would be great.

But what does all this have to do with anti-piracy or other maritime security operations?

Well many graphics of the JSS design show a LCVP type vessel on davits, port and starboard aft – if these were to be replaced by CB90’s we are back to my earliers suggestion of using Albion Class, we are talking about ‘mother ships’ – but in this case RFA vessels that have a big hanger to carry their own helicopters, two CB90’s on davits (plus RHIB’s of course) and even enough room on the cargo deck to build a containerized brig for your captured pirates.

So a single class of vessel which can act as tanker, dry stores support, helo training, support and transport, repair ship (remember the TD article about containerized workshops?) AND as a maritime security operations mother ship !

So whether you like big multi-role, or if your in the “lots of smaller hulls” school of thought, what do you think about giving this expanded role to the RFA ?

Information Operations to use the latest NATO acronym is an immensely broad subject area, but this is not going to be a really long article, because I am going to give you a couple of excellent links so that you may go and research the topics yourself.

Context

Disclaimer, I did ten years in communications in the Navy. I have literally had concepts such EMCON (emission control) and COMSEC (communications security) drummed into me since I was a ‘baby sailor’, so even though the landscape has broadened I have some experience in this realm, so I will try to keep the coverage at layman’s level.

When I joined the jolly old RN in the post-Falklands early 80’s we talked a lot about Electronic Warfare (EW). There was much discussion of why HMS Sheffield had not picked up the active transmitting radar of an Exocet missile on its passive radar detection kit (Electronic Support Measures or ESM). My first ship, and many others were having their ‘passive countermeasures’ (i.e. chaff rockets) supplanted with the new Type 670 jammer. Meanwhile our overall doctrine in the face of the Soviet naval “intelligence-reconnaissance-strike complex” and its fleets of missile carrying Backfires and Bears was to be very careful with our EMCON, to run often run around in radar and radio silence, so as not to attract attention to ourselves. On the other end of the scale, even though we had secure SHF satellite communications, we often practiced loosing the satellites to ‘enemy action’ and reverted to good old HF radio for long range comms.

In the air EW was both tactical, the use of external jamming pods alongside the chaff and flares on our tactical aircraft (although we were waaaay behind some of our allies in equipping our planes with such kit) and strategic with Canberra’s, modified V bombers and other ‘assets’ in use.

I did not get to play much with the army in those days, so I am not really sure how we used signals intelligence or direction finding as a targeting aid against the Warsaw pact hordes, but I am sure Army signalers got ‘EMCON’ bashed into them as forcefully as I did !

Evolution

Things move on. Technology certainly has moved at a great pace thanks to Moore’s Law, with computer processing power doubling every couple of years. When I left the TA the Panasonic Toughbook laptop I would use in the field had way more processing power than the whole Computer Assisted Action Information System (CAAIS) computer fire control system of my first ship (an Exocet / Sea Wolf broad-beamed Leander). The proliferation of computers has been a double edged sword for the military. We can pack massive processing power in aircraft or ships, even in the back of an armoured command vehicle. Software definable radios, and silicon powered encryption technology mean that every member of an infantry squad can speak to his buddies clearly, in the middle of a firefight over an encrypted channel the bad guys can’t eavesdrop on.

On the other hand, one of my roles in the TA was as the secondary ‘Unit IT Security Officer’ (primary was the ‘regular’ WO). Our systems are now open to a new form of attack – electronic attack. Our systems can be ‘cracked’ by the bad guys (I am an ‘old school’ IT geek, I don’t use the term ‘hack’ or ‘hackers’ in this context). Sure its questionable how tactical such electronic attacks can be, but it is a well known fact that our systems are constantly be probed / attacked at a higher (non-battlefield) level.

Increasing Complexity

One of the reasons Electronic Warfare has burgeoned into Information Operations is the way many different disciplines or areas now overlap:

• Strategic communications
• Civilian mass media
• Military PR
• Psychological operations
• Computer Network Operations / Computer Network Attack (CNO/CNA – “cyber defence / cyber-warfare”)

As a TA soldier I was a member of 15 (UK) Psyops Group, the UK’s tri-service Psychological Operations Group, so I have another perspective on this complexity. The UK’s Psyops capability is small, as is our military mass media capability, but the UK’s Psyops team has a great pedigree and a very successful track record. On the other side of the coin you might be surprised by the quality of the psyops products (DVD’s for example) churned out by the bad guys in Iraq, and we might also say that they have a more fertile audience who ‘want’ to consume their message.

So now we can be campaigning with bombs and bullets, locally attempting to win ‘hearts and minds’ with various physical projects, doing hearts and minds on a bigger scale with TV, radio and Internet, while electronically attacking and disrupting the enemies communications and mass media, and perhaps coming full circle to ‘kinetic’ operations against enemy information assets.

See, I told you it was getting complicated………

This is not to even mention really high tech EW stuff such as using electronically scanned phased array radars to generate and transmit advanced waveforms which can be used to attack enemy electronic systems, cracking the bad guys air defence network etc – any sci-fi geeks out there see the connection to the Cylon surprise attack on the Colonials and why the Battlestar Galactica had discrete non-networked systems !

So, before we get to the conclusion here is your homework; if your interested go read up on the topic at these two excellent UK web sites:

• The Information Operations page at the Information Warfare Site
• Prof. Phil Taylors site at the Institute of Communications Studies at the University of Leeds

(Prof. Phil used to come and lecture at 15 Pysops and it always incredibly interesting).

You might be surprised at the depth of the ‘open source’ / unclassified content at these sites.

The Question

So, does this burgeoning area of military operations need considerable investment in the post-SDR British military ? I would suggest it certainly does, but how do these abstract concepts hold up against the more traditional and easy to understand concepts of bombs and bullets ?

The US is struggling to setup its multi-service Cyber Command, but at least they are on the right track, acknowledging that there has to be a long term career path for “military geeks”.

So what are we going to do about it ?

Discuss………

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 infantry battalions.

1st Battalion, The Parachute Regiment is not counted in the above total, as it constitutes the core of the Special Forces Support Group.

On the armoured side there are 6 Challenger 2 regiments, one of which is the training regiment and 5 Formation Reconnaissance Regiments.

The Army is organised into a number of divisions. The ‘readiness divisions’ constitute the core of our land power and are allocated to the NATO Allied Rapid Reaction Corps (ARRC), these are:

1st Armed Division – British Forces Germany

• 7th Armoured Brigade (Germany) (1 Challenger Regiment, 2 Armoured Infantry)
• 20th Armoured Brigade (Germany) (1 Challenger Regiment, 2 Armoured Infantry)
• 4th Mechanised Brigade (UK) (1 Challenger Regiment, 1 Armoured Infantry, 1 Mechanised Infantry)
• 102nd Logistics Brigade (UK)
• Formation Recce Regiment
• Artillery regiments are deployed at Brigade level

3rd Division

• 1st Mechanised Brigade (1 Challenger, 1 Armoured Inf, 2 Mechanised Inf)
• 12th Mechanised Brigade (1 Challenger, 1 Armoured Inf, 2 Mechanised Inf)
• 19th Light Brigade (3 x Infantry Battalions)
• 52nd Infantry Brigade (3 x Infantry Battalions)
• 101st Logistics Brigade
• Formation Recce Regiment
• Artillery regiments are deployed at Brigade level

The so called ‘regenerative divisions’ replaced the old Military Districts in the UK and host the remainder of the infantry battalions in ‘General Service’ role.

Re-org constraints

• Can’t put more forces in Germany
• Can’t have more than 6 regular tank regiments
• Can’t have more than 7 Warrior battalions
• Can’t have more than 36 Infantry battalions in total
• Don’t want to increase budgets !
• Don’t want to reduce size due to operational tempo and requirements

Suggestions

So in a very brief article, with much detail on vehicles and equipment to come in follow up articles, this is my suggestion for a re-organization of the Army:

1st Armed Division – British Forces Germany

• 7th Armoured Brigade (Germany) (1 x CV90120T Regiment, 2 x Armoured Infantry)
• 20th Armoured Brigade (Germany) (1 x CV90120T Regiment, 2 x Armoured Infantry)
• 4th Armoured Brigade (UK) (1 x CV90120T Regiment, 2 x Armoured Infantry)

Turn 4th Brigade back into Armoured Brigade and give it a second Warrior battalion. Cut 7th Warrior battalion from orbat – spread the resulting surplus Warriors around (more on this later).

4 regular Army armoured Regiments convert to CV90120T (oh oh, this is actually spending money on a new requirement !).

4 x TA Infantry Battalions convert to Armoured role on Challenger 2.

Final (5th) regular Armoured Corps regiment would provide squadron strength regular cadre’s to the TA Challenger 2 regiments, thus a deployable Challenger 2 regiment could be pulled together at reasonably short notice without activating TA.

A single Royal Armoured Corps training regiment would have both CV90120T and Challenger 2. This is an increase in armoured capability, and introduces a considerable medium armoured capability via the CV190120T.

3rd Division

• 1st Mechanised Brigade (1 CV90120T, 3 Mechanised Inf) – Mechanised Infantry (Tracked)
• 12th Mechanised Brigade (3 Mechanised Inf) – Mechanised Infantry (Wheeled)
• 52nd Infantry Brigade (3 x Mechanised Infantry Battalions) – Mechanised Infantry (Wheeled)
• 12th Mechanised Brigade loses its Armoured Regiment, although technically on paper this could be the Challenger 2 regiment composed of the regular Cadre’s for the TA armoured regiments.12th Brigade would be ‘Wheeled’ mechanised infantry using RG35 and LPPV (Ocelot) variants
• 1st Mechanised Brigade based on Warthog as ‘tracked’ Mechanised Infantry. All variants used including repair and recovery, command, armoured logistics, flatbed logistics, ambulance and 120mm mortars
• 52nd Infantry Brigade – would become fully mechanised using Mastiff 2 / Wolfhound / Ridgeback vehicles and LPPV (Ocelot) as required
• 19th Light Brigade be removed from 3rd Mech Division and re-role as GS Infantry as part of one of the regenerative divisions.

Infantry re-org detail – : If we take total of today’s 36 ‘line infantry’ battalions and swap them around:

Current structure is 37 with 1 Para not counted (so 36) and with 18 battalions allocated to 1st and 3rd Divisions plus 2 air assault = 20. Leaving the 3 ‘regenerative’ divisions with 16 infantry battalions. Add 1 Para (SFSG) back and the tilt is slightly towards ‘readiness’ formations at 21 to 16.

If all below are allocated as ‘special to role’ and not available as ‘standard’ infantry battalions

• 3 x Para battalions as ‘Para-Rangers’ Special Ops
• 2 x Air Assault Infantry Battalions
• 1 x Army Commando

That leaves 31 Battalions.

With 1st Armoured Div and 3rd Mechanised Div having 18 infantry battalions as the ‘readiness’ forces, that leaves 13 battalions as part of the ‘regenerative’ divisions. Add the 6 special to role battalions and that gives a 24 / 13 split.

If 19th Brigade is moved from readiness to regenerative then that evens out at 15 ‘standard’ battalions each. So we get a 21 / 16 split i.e. the same as we have now.

So what do I mean by ‘special to role’ battalions ?

I am against the ‘light’ role as a title.

Light fighters should be specialists with a very special role. In my opinion there is no room in the modern battlefield for non-armoured / mechanised infantry unless they have a special role to play. The fact that ‘general service’ infantry battalions in the ‘regenerative’ divisions are seen as ‘light’ roled is simply because we cannot afford enough armour for everyone – but more on this in a later article.

So I would turn all the Para battalions into “Para-Rangers” – a level of Special Operations Forces below the Special Forces themselves (essentially similar to the US model). This would thus acknowledge that these highly trained light fighters have a special role. Similarly two replacement infantry battalions allocated permanently to the air assault role would train in a specialized light fighter role and would be the experts on air mobile / heliborne operations.

Finally I leave an extra Army battalion allocated to 3 Brigade, Royal Marines. Simply adding another RM Commando is not realistically achievable. With an Army battalion allocated to the Viking based ‘mechanised amphibious’ role, fully trained Green Berets can concentrate on their specialist light fighter role while the Army Commando’s could be put through at least the All-arms Commando Course at a whatever pace is realistic given the training resources available.

What if further cuts were demanded (god forbid) in order to fund various programmes ? Well we can fantasize about a Government that cuts international aid (or something) and increases defence spending, but……..

If we had to, I would contract the above scheme by 3 Brigades / 6 Battalions – removing one Mechanised brigade from 3rd Division and one general service brigade from the regenerative divisions.

Don’t forget if we cut these ‘teeth’ units there would be other cuts to supporting elements too, reducing manpower further.

Of course the politicians would then have to commit to not over-committing the armed forces !

I would essentially keep the Regiments structure as it is today:

(Org chart courtesy of www.armedforces.co.uk)

Recce (Sabre) Squadrons

The biggest change of course would be the replacement of the Scimitar CVR(T) with the shortened FRES Scout variant of the CV90. While I would prefer the Upgraded Warrior to have the unmanned turret from Nexter as developed for the French VCBI, I can see the point of a ‘recce’ vehicle retaining a manned turret with good direct view optics, and giving the vehicle commander the chance to stand up high in his hatch with a pair of bino’s (if the tactical situation allows it).. So, we will go with the CTA40mm turret as suggested for the CV90 FRES Scout bid. With 12 vehicles per squadron, full regiment strength is 36 CV90 Scouts.

Supporting Vehicles

The Spartan APC would be replaced by the ‘protected mobility’ APC version of the full length CV90, with an RWS equipped with a 7.62mm / 12.7mm MG or 40mm GMG as required.

Sampson recovery vehicles, Sultan command vehicles and Samaritan ambulances would be replaced by the similar existing variants of the CV90 that are already in production for various user nations, and these are distributed across the Regimental HQ Squadron, the Squadron HQ Troops and the ‘Fitter’ section as required.

Command and Support Squadron

I would add some capabilities to the Command and Support Squadron. Based on Command Vehicle and protected mobility APC variants, this is where I would put my tactical-mini UAV capability. I think we need a small, tactical system, able to be stowed in an APC, with the command and downlink workstation in a Command vehicle. Preferably something ‘hand launched’ – for the role of the Recce regiment, I don’t think we need longer range or endurance. I would suggest, just as a starting point the IAI Skylark 1 system.

Even smaller is the Lockheed Martin Desert Hawk, being used in Afghanistan by the Royal Artilary for patrol over watch and other roles. You can see how small it is when compared to its laptop ‘control station’

I think we can go with maybe 4 air vehicles and 2 Command Vehicle workstations. The Regiment should also have Rover ground stations and obviously the capability to receive imagery from larger tactical UAV’s and from helicopters etc.

The other capability I would add here is a mast mounted EO and radar surveillance capability, such as that deployed on the Canadian GD built LAV-RECCE (or Coyote as it’s known over here):

See: http://www.gdls.com/programs/lav2_coyote.html

Note that we already use the MSTAR radar, and I believe it is normally deployed on a Spartan APC, also that I am not suggesting fitting this kit to a standard turreted FRES Scout, but to a variant of the CV90 APC, with perhaps 4 vehicles in the Squadron (1 for each Sabre Squadron and 1 spare).

Recce Squadron ATGW and Support Troops

Currently the ATGW squadron is on paper comprised of 4 x Striker ATGW carriers, however their heavy Swingfire wire guided weapons were withdrawn sometime ago. The discussion of what ATGW to deploy into the Squadrons, and how provoked considerable discussion of missile types etc in the comments on the original FDR FRR posting.

I am only going to be slightly radically by suggesting providing anti-tank firepower in the guise of a Troop of 4 x CV90120T medium tanks with the RUAG light weight / low recoil 120mm gun, firing standard NATO APDS-FS rounds. These are also capable recce vehicles in their own right, and provide many rounds than an ATGW system. Of course, in my re-ogranised army, these are also the mounts of our regular Armoured Corps Regiments !

The Support Troop provides 4 x Spartan APC’s for dismounted recce ‘scouts’ for sneaky forward and doing recce on foot. As Spartan can only carry 4 x dismounts, and a CV90 APC could carry 8, we will drop the vehicles down to 2. However I would replace the other 2 Spartans with 2 x CV90 with AMOS 120mm breach loading, automatic smooth bore mortars. This is a truly multi-purpose weapon system with a direct fire capability, and the ability to drop rounds ranging from IR screening smoke (very useful to a recce unit) to the Strix IR guided top-attack anti-armour weapon. Also if we really wanted to add another ATGW to our mix, then the barrels of the AMOS can fire IAI LAHAT tube-launched laser guided missiles. A good idea might be to add a fifth APC to carry additional mortar rounds.

CV90 AMO

A Support Troop conundrum – anti-air capability?

I am sure most readers would admit that the British Army is not well endowed with air-defence capabilities. Sure we have the Starstreak HVM as our ‘manpads’ and mounted on a variant of the Stormer APC (a stretched CVR(T)). However as the Recce Regiment can be expected to be operating at the ‘forward edge of battle area’ or indeed fluidly operating across an asymmetric battle space, should it have some more AA capability embedded ? There is an AA version of the CV90 with a different turret mounting a Bofors 40mm with the requisite sensors and fire control:

CV90 Air Defence

The ‘dust bin’ on the turret is radar – perhaps we would just use the standard IR Air Defence Alerting Device (IR-ADAD) and replace the Bofors with the standard CTA 40mm – lower rate of fire, but adequate for anti-helicopter ? Of course we could fit the same turret with 8 x Starstreak launchers as used on the current vehicles, and Starstreak is useful against targets other than ‘fast movers’.

For now let’s just say 2 CV90 AA with IR-ADAD and CTA 40mm turrets with high angle capability.

Soft skinned vehicles and ‘close recce’

The Regimental HQ, HQ Squadron and Recce Squadron HQ’s have the ‘Truck Utility Medium – Fitted For Radio’ (TUM-FFR) – or to you and I, the Landover Wolf with Bowman. There has been much support on in comments on previous posts for the use of the Fennek wheeled armoured recce vehicle to provide a ‘close recce’ element. This could be provided by replacing the soft skinned Landover’s in this role. However although my father was Household Cavalry (the Blues) and I have a good friend from the TA who was regular Army Blues and Royals, I have to admit I am not sure how the Landover’s are used. If they are not being used by close recce teams, but are just general purpose runabouts for the HQ staff, then a Fennek procurement is not appropriate. Perhaps Panther CLV would suffice in this role (it has room in back to throw bergens) with its roof mounted RWS conferring additional sensor capability. Otherwise even the Husky would provide 4 under armour seats, radios and some load carrying space in the back.

Note that unlike the original FRR article, I am not suggesting the use of Jackal / Jackal 2 – I would equip the recce platoons of Mechanised Infantry Brigades with these vehicles, or keep them available for FRR use ‘as required’.

Should Combat Engineers be added as standard element ?

Combat Engineers have their own recce troops, we might expect some to be attached to the ‘dismounts’, however in a highly asymmetric battle space, with fluid manoeuvre warfare do we need a little more embedded capability ?

How about a single CV90 APC, fitted with a dozer blade and perhaps a roof mounted “Mini-Python” minefield breaching system, attached to each Recce Squadron HQ ?

The alternative Formation Recce Regiment, vehicles summary:

• 36 x CV90 FRES Scout in 3 x Recce Squadrons
• 12 x CV90120T Medium Tanks in 3 x Anti-tank Troops (1 Troop per Recce Sqdn)
• 6 x CV90 AMOS in 3 x Support Troops (1 Troop per Recce Sqdn)(plus 3 x CV90 APC for ammo)
• 6 x CV90 AA in 3 x Support Troops (1 Troop per Recce Sqdn)
• 48 Recce Scouts (“dismounts”) in 6 x CV90 APC in 3 x Support Troops (1 Troop per Recce Sqdn). This equates to 6 x 8 man full sections or 12 x 4 man ‘brick’ Recce teams for close recce.
• 4 x CV90 APC with mast mounted EO / Radar (in Command and Support Squadron)
• 4 x CV90 APC ‘Combat Engineer’
• 14 – 18 x CV90 Command Vehicles (to replace Sultan in HQ elements)
• 6 – 8 x CV90 APC (to replace Spartan in HQ elements.)
• 4 x CV90 Ambulance (to replace Samaritan in HQ elements)
• 4 x CV90 Armoured Recovery Vehicle (to replace Samson in Fitter Sections)
• 8 x Fennek / Panther CLV / Husky as required (to replace TUM-FFR)

Approx. 111 CV90 variants, plus 8 wheeled vehicles !

A powerful and flexible formation, whadya think ?

The RFA carries out these important logistical tasks with a very old and dwindling fleet. The 4 Bay Class landing ships and the two Knight class ‘Fast Fleet Tankers’ are the only ‘new’ ships in the flotilla.

The official RFA pages on the RN web site provides some nice info on the current flottilla including a summary page which shows the launch date, nicely illustrating the average age of these vessels:

http://www.royalnavy.mod.uk/operations-and-support/royal-fleet-auxiliary/rfa-flotilla/rfa-fleet-today/

The lot of the RFA was to be improved under the Military Afloat Reach & Sustainability (MARS) programme. There was a MARS Tankers ‘industry day’ at the MOD Bristol facility on the 4th of November 2009, as tankers are most pressing need as the current tankers do not meet modern international legislation that requires all tankers to have double hulls.

Once again I refer the reader to the excellent Navy Matters site for a good overal history of the MARS programme: http://navy-matters.beedall.com/mars.htm

Personally I think BMT Defence Services Aegir class seems to be a good “off the shelf” purchase to meet the tanker requirements, see: http://www.bmtdsl.co.uk/?/309/865/

• 2 x Aegir 10 to replace the Rover Class small fleet tankers
• 4 x Aegir 18 to replace the Leaf Class support tankers

To increase flexibility I suggest replacing the two 40,000 tonne Leaf class with four much smaller Aegir class vessels of around 18,000 tonnes. If this is too expensive, then maybe we should just go to the biggest ship builders in the world, South Korea, and pick up a Hyundai !

Replacing the two AOR’s or multi-role replenishment ships of the Fort Victoria class (at 31.5K tonnes, bigger than the Invincible class carriers) is more complex. These very large ships are tankers, dry stores (food etc) and armament ships. They were originally planned to have VL Sea Wolf and can carry 4 large Merlin or Sea King size helicopters. So in this case largest vessels of the Aegir class the Aegir 18R are considerably smaller at 17,000 tonnes, but they might be big enough.

Also, and this is my only space to get contentious in this article, the two dry stores support ships RFA Fort Grange and Fort Austin and the additional capacity originally planned by the MARS programme (the ‘sustainability’ part) could be financed via an unusual route.

Let me explain.

Soft power, or the use of the military forces for diplomacy is key element of the RN and has been for years. Whether its the Caribbean hurricane season, or less common events such as the massive tsunami of five years ago, RFA’s (as well as the warships themselves) are invaluable for providing first on scene type aid, and for delivering additional relief supplies in the aftermath of an event.

The Italians have a model whereby other ministries finance vessels such as San Georgio class LPD’s or ocean patrol vessels, which are then operated by the Italian Navy.

So, my modest proposal would be to get the Ministry of Overseas Development (if its still called that) to pay for at least 2, but preferably 4 ‘stores support’ ships. OK then, I will settle for them paying for 2 and the RN budget paying for the other 2…..

Sticking to the theme of buying proven, off the shelf products, I would go with the Damen Schelde design picked by the Royal Netherlands Navy as its Joint Support Ship (JSS). These 28,000 tonne vessels are actually part of the same family as the Bay class landing ships. See this link for details: http://www.damennaval.com/nl/news.htm?item=11

The two ships funded by the civillian ministry might have features such as a larger hospital onboard, to facilitate further use in the ‘soft power’ role, with 1 one of them always available to fulfill the requirements of said ministry.

There might still be time to make it a joint endeavour with the Dutch, and the Canadian’s also have a requirement, which they also call the JSS which has been in limbo for years, this page is from August 2008 (and they still have not ordered anything): http://www.casr.ca/bg-joint-support-ship.htm

So, 1 for the Dutch, 2 for Canada, 4 for the UK, all procured as part of a single project – gotta be some savings in that approach surely ?

Buying 2 of these vessels with bigger hospitals means the RFA Argus could be retired from its role of Primary Casualty Receiving ship, and the JSS certainly has a large flight deck and a hanger for 6 helicopters, so maybe they could also be used in the deck landing training role.

The RFA Diligence (an old ship of mine !) continues to provide sterling service as the fleet repair ship, and although she is getting on a bit, its possible that we dont need to replace her just yet, and could hang on until better times (does anyone remember when we even had a Diving Support Vessel – HMS Challenger ?)

So, once again, if we divest our requirement for some political desire to provide jobs for shipyards, we can probably revitalize the RFA by buying off the shelf designs at reasonable prices, but that would just be too logical and easy wouldn’t it ? !

SSN fleet

As is well known the the SSN fleet will shrink to 7 with the delivery of the Astute class boats.

I would argue that if we give up the carriers and their expensive F35 JCA air group we should invest in an 8th boat, because the Astute’s with their Tomahawk cruise missiles become our strategic land attack force, which we can stealthily position to ‘reach out and touch’ anyone who annoys us!

This number has dropped drastically from 29 boats in 1990 (including conventional diesel-electric boats) to 12 in 1997 to the current projected force level of 7.

Although BAe ran into issues with the design and build of the Astute class, leading them to be over budget and late, they are apparently very good subs. I would invest a little in making the last 4 of 8 a little longer and incorporating VLS cells (between the pressure and external hull as on USN SSNs). This has apparently already been investigated, and although I can see why they did not progress with this, adding additional cost to the programme, as these now become our primary force projection asset, it might be a good idea.

I don’t think I really need to defend the number of 8 all that much.

SSN’s are the primary ASW platform in wartime, and peace time can be used to clandestinely keep an eye on the prospective enemies submarine movements. They are superlative intelligence gathering asset and a delivery vehicle for special forces (SBS). Of course they are also an Anti-ship platform too, and although the RN no longer ships sub-Harpoon, the SpearFish torpedo, like any modern large calibre torpedo is a fearsome anti-ship weapon – just search for “sinkex” on YouTube!

However, they are rather large and costly, so fitting a small precision weapon such as the German-Norwegian Triton fibre-optic guided missile might be a good idea for ‘operations other than war’.

In truth we could probably do with more boats, but in the current financial climate there is no way we are getting more than 8.

For lots of good info on the Astute programme see the Navy Matters page at:

http://navy-matters.beedall.com/astute.htm

SSBN fleet

Apparently the current SSBN’s were built with a quite finite useful life, as there is no current discussion about life extension, but plenty of discussion about replacement, and whether we could make do with 3 ‘bombers’ instead of 4.

This is where things get contentious because we are talking about the future of the nuclear deterrent. There are many arguments that say what we spend on the independent nuclear deterrent is not all that much in the big picture , and that it is money well spent. Of course counter arguments exist that it is wasted money with no relevance to the global war on terror.

I am going to take a position in the middle, and suggested a much simplified and cheaper deterrent force.

However first, let us examine the threat.

Of course I do not posses the skills of Nostradamus, nor are my balls crystal, but I think its safe to say that neither the USA or France should be considered a nuclear threat. Nor personally do I think China is. If they nuke us, who is going to buy all their stuff ?

See, we can thank globalisation for something !

The same argument applies to Russia, although Putin seems to verge on lunacy at times, again if they nuke us, we can’t pay them all that lovely hard currency for their natural gas can we !

There are many reasons why I don’t think we have to deter India or Israel either. Nor Pakistan at the moment, but how secure are their weapons ?

And so that leads us into the real debate. What good is a SLBM with a reduced payload of ‘tactical’ optimized Nuclear warheads against non-state actors ? Or for that matter even against Iran or North Korea. Do we really think that if the Great Leader, or the ‘Great Lunatic’ (in Tehran) wanted to nuke us, that they would do it be easily identified missile launches from their own countries ?

No, seriously……

They would use / pay proxies, and the simplest way to nuke the UK would be to sail a crude dirty bomb into London, Hull or Liverpool on a merchant ship. Or maybe manage to get the bits into the country via the same route and take out Bradford. You can easily imagine all the global jihad organisations like AQ throwing up their arms in shock at the suggestion that they had blown up a large amount of the UK Muslim population…….

So, the unthinkable has happened, now who do we rain down our devastating SLBM delivered atomic revenge upon ? Mmmm’ thats right, the deterrent has not deterred and we can’t go throwing around ballistic missiles in this scenario.

In fact that defence against this scenario is a decent Coast Guard, an armed Border Police force and a well funded and competent intelligence service.

However, as is often pointed out to those who suggest dismantling the deterrent capability, these are todays threats, and new threats may materialize in the future. Yes thats true, and Britain could have good politicians and once again become the centre of innovation for the whole world, but don’t hold your breath……..

If you followed my link above the Navy Matters page on the Astute programme, at the very bottom of the page you will see that two variants of the Astute have been suggested as replacements for the current ‘bombers’ – one with 16 VLS cells for nuclear cruise missiles, and one with an extended sail structure with silos for 4 SLBM’s.

Despite the fact that you will all shout at me that they are easier to shoot down, etc etc I personally would go with the VLS and nuclear armed cruise missiles – but I expect plenty of discussion on this point ! Of course we could give up the ‘independent’ deterrent all together, but then what about our much vaunted seat on the worthless institution that is the UN Security Council………..

Nuclear and submarine building industry

We have discussed before on Think Defence the link to shrinking of the armed forces below a ‘critical mass’ to the retention of industrial design and manufacturing abilities. The fact that the Astute programme ran into difficulties which resulted in the most U.S. content in a British submarine class since the 1960′s is a direct result of the government not keeping up the ‘drum beat’ of orders, allowing knowledge, experience and expertise to be lost at Vospers at Barrow in Furness.

The state of the budget, the resolve of the politicos and lack of orders in the past, does not bode well for the future. Really it is time to come and clean and admit that we can’t / don’t want to pay to retain this expertise anymore, and in future we will buy our SSN’s from the U.S. or from France, or at least take their designs, add enough UK content to bump up the price (like a different sonar or torpedos) and licence build the boats in Barrow.

If we are going to be really cheap skate in the future, perhaps we should be buying AIP powered conventional patrol submarines instead?

What I will attempt to do in this article is explain why I think it would make an excellent basis as an “off the shelf” design for the UK Royal Navy’s Future Surface Combatant’s “mid tier” C2 requirement.

Background reading and viewing

For an introduction to the Absalon class, rather then me recounting all its excellent features here, see the following:

Absalon page on Naval Technology

Absalon page on Wikipedia

Canadian American Strategic Review (CASR)

Danish Naval History

There is also an excellent set of external and internal photographs on the Photobucket site at:

http://s296.photobucket.com/albums/mm200/fsorensen/Ships/Absalon/?start=all

Finally, dependant upon your country, go to the Discovery Channel site (.com, .ca or .co.uk) and look for the episode of Mighty Ships about the Absalon when she was acting as Commander CT150 in the Gulf of Aden.

Context

In my own personal fantasy masterplan for the future of the RN surface fleet, an Absalon based C2 would sit between a T45 based C1 and a C3 multirole OPV / MCMV / survey ship that would be at the lower end of the spectrum for such a vessel.

I have chosen the Absalon as the basis for C2 because:

• It is “off the shelf” – a proven design that is in service
• It fits the bill – find me a more flexible design (for the price) !
• It is relatively cheap – well the Danes managed to build them cheaply, doesn’t mean we would not screw it up of course…….

In line with this philosophy, I would purchase 12 of these vessels (at least), with some kit being transfered across from T23′s as they are retired, but other kit being based on that of the current Danish vessels to kept the costs down. If the Danish MOD transfered the rights to be the “UK Design Authority” to the UK MOD, I would either compete the procurement, so that any capable dockyard could submit a bid, or spread the build among the originating Danish dockyard, and capable UK facilities / companies.

However one thing is key, gold plating is out. I am trying to be pragmatic by suggesting this vessel, but I will immediately contradict myself, and introduce a small amount of risk by suggesting some ‘small’ changes that would make the vessel more suited to the RN role.

Change number 1: Smaller Flex deck

The Flexible Support Ship has a large ‘flex deck’ which is a ro-ro deck, capable of carrying multiple 70 tonne Leopard 2 Main Battle Tanks.

See the schematic diagram below, which shows the flex deck in yellow, clearly showing its size

The RN has dedicated amphibious shipping and I don’t think we need this full capability to carry large vehicles, or a larger number of smaller vehicles, or a 100+ troops in containerised accommodation. So I would cut the flex deck of at the forward bulkhead of the hanger, removing roughly a third of its length.

The space freed up would be used for additional modular C4I space for USV / UUV / UAV operations, or towed array sonar ops (see below). Also some additional communal space (a gym ?) would not go amiss on vessels designed to spend a lot of their time at sea. Perhaps an extension to the sick bay would be useful too. Take a look at the schematics in some of the photos at the Photobucket link above, and of the internal space. There is no doubt that the space would be used in interesting and useful ways !

The remaining flex deck would be used to facilitate various capabilities, providing the RN’s answer to the U.S. Navy’s LCS. The flex deck could for example house boats, unmanned surface vessels or containerised towed array sonar equipment. An enhancement would be a electrical scissors lift, or a hydraulic lift from the flex deck to the hanger, this would allow additional UAV’s to be carried on the flex deck (at least Schiebel S100 Camcopter sized aircraft, any maybe even MQ8 FireScout sized) – an idea stolen from the LCS.

Change number 2: Diesel electric propulsion

The T45 is an ‘electric’ ship, and so would be any T45 derivative C1.

So it seems sensible to change an Absalon based C2 from direct shaft drive diesel to diesel-electric. In this case the ships may even use the same “propulsor” pods as on the T45 / C1. An added benefit in removing the shafts and gear boxes would be in reduced vibration and radiated noise – very useful for a ship with an ASW role. It should be noted that the Iver Hutflelt class Patrol Ships (AAW Destroyes) currently being built, are a derivate of the Absalon, and they have bigger diesels for higher speeds.

Detail changes

The Absalon has a core crew of approx. 100 and it has ‘good’ accommodation for another 70. However its “hotel services” – galley, laundry, sewage plant (!) are sized for a total of 300 (based on those soldiers living in containers on the flex deck). We could scale this down in the RN variant. The standard crew numbers and accommodation would do nicely for the envisaged roles, with the additional 70 including perhaps any of the following:

• ships flight for 2 x Merlin HM1,
• a platoon of RM (approx 35),
• a command staff,
• additional RN sailors for Visit Board Search and Seizure (VBSS or “boarding party”) teams, etc.

As noted above, some additional accommodation or communal space might be added.

As can be seen in many of the excellent photos, the Absalon carries two Combat Boat 90 E fast boats which are deployed and recovered via a stern door. The RN could procure a number of similar boats, or just use the facility for deploying armed 11m RHIB’s (which would be cheaper).

Some modular kit might need to be developed to allow this facility to also deploy and recover Unmanned Surface Vessels (USV) and Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUV) for ASW / MCMV use.

The Absalons also carry 4 RHIBs, in port and starboard ‘hangers’, 2 larger ones for boarding ops etc (which are seen in the Discovery Channel show, with a bow mounted MG) and two which look smaller , possibly akin to the ‘Gemini’ inflatable used as general purpose boats by RN ships.

Sensor, Communications and Combat System fit

The communications fit would have to be standard RN comms fit, including Integrated Communications System, radios and satcoms as carried by T45 / C1 etc.

The main sensors would include the Artisan radar (new or taken from retiring T23′s) in place of the Absalon’s SMART-S, but the same surface search set carried on the after mast could be retained. With no need for the fire control radars, the electro-optical ‘turrets’ carried on port and starboard sides of the bridge roof on the T45 would be carried ‘fore-and-aft’ on the C2 in place of these radars.

The Command System could be the exact same Danish C-Flex system as fitted to the Danish vessels, or for maximum commonality, it could be the same system fitted to the T45 and T45 based C1 (giving through life support costs benefits, including reduced training costs).

Similarly the C2 could retain the Absalon’s Atlas Electronic hull mounted sonar, or the T45′s MFR7000 set for maximum commonality.

The main gun could be the MK8 4.5inch lifted straight off the retiring T23′s, the BAe Naval 155mm, or my preference, the OTO Melara 5 inch. However to be pragmatic, lets stick with the 4.5 inch gun.

In place of the Absalon’s Oerlinkon 35mm “Millennium” gun based CIWS, it is likely that the C2 would mount a Phalanx MK 1B. As well as the cannon the Danish ships mount 4 x .50 cal MG’s, 2 on the ‘bridge wings’ and 2 on the aft superstructure. I would fit 2 x IAI Typhoon remote weapons stations with the CTA International 40mm Case Telescoped Ammunition gun on the after superstructure. In Israeli use these mountings also have an MG over the cannon barrel, and up to 3 Spike missiles. If we wanted to go this route, that could be 3 x Starstreak missiles.

2 x ‘Mini-Typhoon’ RWS armed with .50 cal MG’s would be mounted on the bridge roof. The bridge wing MG’s would probably be the RN’s new 7 barrel 7.62mm Mini-gun (although I would prefer the 3 barrel GCAL 50).

The Danish ships can carry up to 3 modules of 12 VLS cells (the MK6 VLS) for ESSM,  for a total of 36 missiles. In the RN case these would be replaced by 36 to 40 Common Anti-Air Modular Missiles (CAMM) when it eventually enters service. If the ships are ready before the missile, it would not be the first time an RN ship has gone to sea operationally, while being less than fully equipped !

As their surface-to-surface battery the Absalon’s can carry up to 16 Harpoon SSM’s. On C2 that could be Harpoon or preferably the Norwegian Konsberg NSM3 Stealthy anti-ship / land attack missile.

So, no gold plating, no developmental items, all “military off the shelf” equipment, either already in use by the RN or by allied navies.

However, I suppose the one capability I would add, that may not currently exist, is a palletised / containerised towed array capability, being loaded via the Flex deck stern door and stream via ports built into the stern on the starboard side of that door. The Thales CAPTAS-Nano might be configured for this “role on role off” ASW capability enhancement.

Also, to add a little ‘blue sky thinking’ – the main midships armament deck, and the deck below it are also ‘modular’, if you remove the Harpoon launchers from the Danish ships, you can also remove the power and control systems modules that sit beneath them. For littoral combat scenarios, or other ‘asymmetric’ operations, how about fitting vertically launched LM P44 missiles, or Patria NEMO or AMOS automatic mortars (don’t be fooled by the size of the AMOS turret, it has been trialled on a CB90H).

Aircraft

The Absalon has a flight deck sized for Chinook operations and a hanger big enough for 2 Merlin sized helicopters. That provides a lot of flexibility for carrying all current and projected RN helicopters; 1 or 2 Merlin HM1 for ASW, 2 Lynx, 1 Lynx and 1 Merlin etc If we eventually get round to purchasing more Merlin’s to replace Junglie Sea Kings, one ASW equipped Merlin HM1 and one ‘utility transport’ would provide a great deal of flexibility on a 6 to 9 month deployment. Add the  possible VTOL / helicopter type UAV’s mentioned early into the mix, and the flexibility just continues to increase.

Summary or roles and capabilities

The various incredibly flexible attributes of this Absalon based C2 design might be illustrated by a number of potential mission loads:

• Peace time maritime security ops:  2 x Lynx, 2 x Combat Boat 90, 30 naval VBSS personnel
• War time ASW escort  – open ocean: 2 x Merlin, containerised towed array, additional sonar operators and damage control ratings.
• War time ASW – litoral: 2 x Merlin, up to 4 RHIB based USV with dipping sonar, USV operators and damage control ratings
• Time of high tension MCM ops in distant waters: 2 x Lynx, 2 x USV, up to 4 UUV, unmanned vehicle operators and Mine Clearance divers.
• Littoral strike operations: 2 x Merlin transport 2 x CB90E, up to 40 Royal Marines or special forces

So, our highly flexible, and hopefully relatively cheap, but highly cost effective C2 Frigate may look something like this:

Based on a Graphic of the Absalon by M Conrads from PhotoBucket

Equipped to be useful in a ‘real shooting war’ – but cheap enough to be built in numbers, and cheap enough to run and flexible enough to take on the pirates, drug runners, people smugglers and maritime terrorists, as required – the Absalon based C2 Multi-role Frigate, as envisaged by the fertile imagination of Jed :-)

I wrote the majority of this piece early last year, before the current Think Defence articles, however as FSC seems to be still on the go, I think this article fits well with what ‘Admin’ has said so far about the C3.

Some comparisons.

The exact nature and size of the vessels depends on whether the programme omits the mid-size (5000 tonne) C2 frigates or not. If the C2 goes ahead the C3 / OPV’s could be between 2,000 and 2,500 tonnes but if it is decided to build more slightly capable OPV’s then they might grow to around 3000 tonnes / 100 metres.

To put this in perspective, lets look at some older RN ‘escorts’ and various international OPV type vessels (as these are generally bigger than MCMV):

As can be seen above there is considerable spread across the size range of what have been called OPV’s by their manufacturers or users, with the Dutch ships being bigger in displacement than previous RN frigates. The French Floreal class ‘patrol frigates’ are the most heavily armed of this group, but there are plenty of ‘light frigates’ or Corvettes which are far more heavily armed. However these vessels are generally about long patrol ranges, ability to carry embarked forces or rescued ‘victims’ and generally are not fitted with anything bigger than the ubiquitous OTO 76mm, but also note that many carry an embarked helicopter. The very large US Coast Guard vessel is not heavily armed, but can carry 2 helicopters !

In the RN context, if the C3 is to be built to replace HMS Clyde (and the other River Class) as a patrol vessel, HMS Enterprise and sister ship as ‘ocean going’ survey vessels, and Hunt Class ‘deployable’ MCMV’s, plus take on the ‘long deployments’ required for the maritime security operations role required by the ‘global war on terror’, then they will need to be at the larger end of the scale to provide the multi-purpose capabilities required. Further more, as these vessels will be a mainstay of the RN surface fleet, not an addition, they will need to be able to take on a ‘major war’ role such as ASW escort or MCMV in a medium to high threat environment.

The Spanish Navy’s 2500 tonne BAM patrol vessels provide one model of what is required for a long range patrol ship:

The BAM is sized a round the hanger and flight deck for the NFH90 helicopter, and the 76m main gun. They have a multi-purpose working deck aft, with cranes and the ability to carry a number of containers:

The Dutch navy vessels are considerably larger than the Spanish ones, although they will carry a similar size helicopter and have the same main armament:

The French manufacturer DCN has a number of designs (which look very similar to VT’s designs)

Since I originally wrote this article the shipbuilding company known as Vosper Thornycroft (VT) has ceased to exist and has become VT Group Plc and their new website does not appear to give much details on their product portfolio. [ED: I think VT are out of the shipbuilding game now]

However VT have along history of building patrol vessels, and have recently built the River class OPV’s, including the ‘batch 2’ helicopter capable HMS Clyde. They have also designed larger vessels for Malaysia and Oman. VT have previously shown a design based on an enlarged Omani OPV, which includes a larger stern multi-purpose working area, a helicopter deck (and Lynx sized hangar ?) and the standard 76mm gun

The Ideal design for the C3 ‘Multirole OPV’

The C3 can itself sit somewhere in a spectrum between 2000 tonnes to 3000 tonnes, between UAV capable and full Helo capable, between “cheap and cheerful” and “more capable”. The features below describe what might be considered as the ‘high end’ for C3.

There are a number of possibly conflicting requirements for the C3 OPV:

• Primary peace time ‘global constabulary’ maritime security patrol role
• Primary ‘major war’ ASW escort role
• Secondary peace and war roles such as MCMV and survey

There appear to be a number of main features which can provide the desired flexibility:

• Helicopter capability
• A flexible deck area able to be configured for a particular role
• A base sensor fit good enough for the ‘major war’ role
• Long range / endurance with small basic complement and low running costs

Basic design

To achieve the basic long range requirements, a direct drive diesel, or diesel-electric power plant is required. To keep the complement down the latest ship control automation mush be used, including automated damage control sensors and systems. All equipment must be COTS / MOTS and non-developmental to both keep costs down and ensure programme viability.

Aviation capabilities

A key to multi-role flexibility is the aviation capability. The Spanish vessels show what is possible with a 2500 tonne ship fitted with a hanger and flight deck sized for the Eurocopter NFH90. An RN vessel would probably carry a Lynx, but could ideally have hanger sized for a slightly larger future replacement (for example the AW139), providing additional space for alternative roles.

The helicopter is also key to ‘major war’ roles, carrying Sea Skua (or its eventual replacement) anti-ship missiles, or lightweight anti-submarine torpedoes. As such a major element of the design should be a flexible main magazine space, capable of storing Stingray torpedoes, Sea Skua, HellFire, or other munitions.

The magazine should ideally be constructed of armoured steel with Kevlar spall liners, even if the vessel overall is constructed to “civillian” merchant marine standards.

Sensor fit and Major War capabilities

The main ‘fleet’ role for these vessels in a major operation is ASW, however they should have sufficient self defence capability against air attack, including sea skimming missiles. For the ASW role a bow mounted active HF / MF active sonar should be fitted. This might have a secondary obstacle avoidance / MCM capability. Additional capability would include passive surveillance towed array, active / passive towed array, and anti-torpedo systems fitted on the ‘flex-deck’ aft.

The vessels should be fitted with integral hull mounted dual torpedo tubes port and starboard, fed from the main magazine. Of course the torpedo carrying helo is also a main ASW weapons system.

Anti-air capability is restricted to self defence, including the latest version of the 76mm gun with radar-guided sub-calibre ‘darts’, with its anti-missile capability. The main anti-missile system however might consist of either a Phalanx gun CIWS, a Phalanx SeaRAM or a MK49 RAM launcher, the later giving the largest amount of ‘rounds’ (21) carried.

The main radar surveillance fit would probably not stretch to the ‘integrated mast’ fit of the Dutch vessels, even SMART-S MK2 might be ‘over the top’, however the smaller MPR3D, 3D surv. set with its 180KM (90 nm) range is probably a good compromise. An EO sensor set will also be fitted. A missile based CIWS is better for a decent kill distance against hi-tech (supersonic) threat, the MK49 launcher weighs in at 5.7 tonnes and carries 21 rounds that have a similar range to SeaWolf (RAM Mk1 about 7.5km).

Two launchers (hanger roof, bridge roof ?) would give 42 rounds, pretty good ‘combat persistence’. Perhaps standard fit would be one launcher, the second being ‘fitted for but not with’, until required for a major war scenario ? However it may even be possible to fit the new, under development Common Anti-Air Modular Missile (CAMM) system, especially as it appear this is to be developed with a ‘cold gas’ (or soft launch) VL system.

A commercially available command, control and communications fit should be employed, with modular consoles which can be re-roled (i.e. depending on the towed array, or MCM fit). The system should however be able to take the radar (and data linked provided) data and cue the anti-air weapons fast enough (30 to 20 seconds) to deal with supersonic anti-ship missiles.

A full fit of multi-barrelled SeaGnat or SRBOC type decoy launchers should be employed to launch chaff, flares, active ‘off board jammers’ , anti-torpedo countermeasures and even IR smoke ‘obscuring’ rounds.

Secondary armament might consist of port and starboard cannon, with on mount sensors for remote operation, preferably with the new 40mm Case Telescoped Ammunition gun in an IAI Typhoon mounting. If the main 76mm mount was fitted in an Danish Stanflex type ‘containerised’ fashion, then this gun might be replaced by a third 40mm for ships acting in the survey role or on ‘West Indies Guard Ship’ etc. There would probably be at least four .50 cal MG / 7.62mm “mini-gun” mounts for close in defence against ‘asymmetric’ threats.

The base complement might be around 70, with an additional 40 berths to include the ‘ships flight’, embarked military forces (RM boarding parties or SF) or ‘war’ augmentees (extra sonar operators and Damage Control parties).

Flexible ‘mission fits

It is suggested the VT design provides a good basis as what provides a flexible mission specific equipment area on the Quarterdeck aft of the flight deck, similar to the Spanish BAM, it has a crane, space for two 20ft ISO containers, an over the stern launch well for boats and what appears to be storage for additional boats, the low res graphic below has been enhanced with my ham-fisted attempt at outlining some of the major features:

1 – boat on over the stern slipway

2 & 3 – 20ft ISO containers

4 – Crane

5 – x 3 additional large RHIB type boats under covers ?

This would appear to provide plenty of space for different equipment fits, in fact if midships boat provision is port and starboard as other photos of models and artists impressions suggest, then with this fit there is a total of 6 RHIB’s (of varying sizes ?) available for ‘fast pursuit’ and boarding activities.

So what might the different equipment fits be that would utilize this area ?

• Patrol Ops – 2 x 20 ft IAO containers with various stores plus the 4 extra boats mentioned above
• Littoral ASW – Thales CAPTAS-NANO active/passive towed array, and possibly Spartan USV’s with FLASH dipping sonar
• Open Ocean ASW – Thales CAPTAS / Type 2087 towed array and SeaSentor torpedo defence system
• MCMV – Unmanned Surface Vehicles with side scan sonar, acoustic and magnetic influence arrays, Unmmaned Underwater Vehicles with sonar, TV and demolition charges (and FireScout UAV with ‘MagicLantern’ mine hunting sensors ?) or containers containing the kit for Clearance Diving teams, plus a 1 man emergency decompression chamber etc.
• Anti-ship – two quad Harpoon or NSM3 launchers in place of containers ?
• Anti-air – Based on information released so far the new VL Common Anti-Air Modular Missile (CAMM) being developed to replaced SeaWolf and Rapier as a point defence system.
• Land attack – containerized VL silo’s in place of the standard containers could contain vertical launchers for Lockheed Martin’s new 7 inch diameter, 220lb P44 precision attack missile (Inertial-GPS guided rocket with tri-mode terminal guidance; semi-active laser, MMW radar and imaging infra-red seekers and a 28lb metal-augmented charge warhead) with a 70km / 43 mile range. A standard HIMARS / MLRS pod can carry 10 of these missiles.
• In fact if VL is not developed then a HIMARS type launcher on each quarter (where the containers are) would provide 20 rounds, with additional pods carried where the RHIBs are stowed in the photos of the models.

So, it might be possible to give a enhanced anti-air and even a littoral land attack role as expansion options to the basic patrol and anti-submarine roles.

So the C3 OPV version by VT may look something like this:

Key

1. 76mm Oto Super Rapid in low observable mounting
2. Space above bridge for MK49 RAM launcher, Phalanx or SeaRAM
3. SMART-S MkII (?)
4. 4 x rocket launchers (chaff, flares, off-board active jammers etc)
5. Hanger between funnels,
6. Lynx helicopter on flight deck
7. flex deck including over the stern launching arrangement
8. Bow mounted sonar
9. port and starboard 40mm CTA gun mounting
10.port and starboard RHIB’s
11. 3 x RHIB for patrol role

Fleet numbers

So how many C3 OPV’s would we need, and how many could we get?

Well it depends on price, but if we say that we need to replace 4 x Type 22 and 13 x Type 23 Frigates in total, plus 6 MCMV’s, and that we might have 10 of the C1 highly capable Frigates then that leaves us with a requirement for say 16 hulls.

If we actually get 8 Type 45 destroyers, that still leaves us slightly short of the identified requirement for ‘surface combatants’ in the Strategic Defence Review.

So add on a couple more, plus two more later to replace Enterprise and Echo and we could see 18 – 20 of these multi-purpose vessels in service alongside 8 AAW destroyers and 8 – 10 multi-purpose Frigates, so its probably going to depend on what the price can be kept down to.

However I am also been a soldier, and as a life long plane spotter I am also a proponent of air power, so hopefully I can provide a balanced, although maritime centered viewpoint.

Threats

I started to cover the potential threats to the UK’s maritime interests already in my comments to this posting: http://www.thinkdefence.co.uk/2009/12/fdr-all-at-sea/

If the future defence review proceeds in a logical and sensible manner, the threats to UK interests should be discussed and determined and integrated with stated UK foreign policy.

OK, now we have the ‘fairy tale’ scenario out of the way, I will integrate some discussion of the threat into this paper, which is really based around of a view of capabilities and assets.

Major capabilities

What 2 major capabilities do we provide that most if not all of the NATO allied navies (except the USN of course) do not currently have ?

* Strike Carrier with fixed wing aircraft (only France has this capability)
* Major amphibious group including the Royal Marines (although France, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands have amphibious capabilities, they are all smaller)
*SSN

All three of these major ‘capabilities’ are actually ‘systems of systems’ in that they facilitate the provision of multiple different effects as required by the ‘war fighter’ or in support of diplomacy.

So, if they are all expensive, which one should be cut ? Although I have made many arguments about why fixed wing air is good, and why the CV(F) would provide a great capability (flying Sea Gripens ?) I am also of the opinion that if money can still be saved by NOT building these carriers then they should be cut.

If contractual penalties would actually make it more expensive to NOT build them, then they should be completed, but some serious effort should be put into selling the hulls to India (!)

See http://www.thinkdefence.co.uk/2009/12/fdr-supporting-articles/

Why cut the carriers ?

Well because the US has them, the French has one, the Italians and Spanish have STOVL carriers, so in the NATO context we can rely on others to provide the naval air group. However other than the U.S.M.C.  in the shape of the Royal Marines, and the RN’s amphibious ships, the current amphibious capability is a far greater than that available to any other European navy, so we should nurture this capability, and develop it further as it is some thing ‘special’ that we bring to the ‘party’.

Also the FDR discussions on Think Defence so far seem to have a slant towards ‘strategic raiding’ versus long term ‘nation building’ campaigns, amphibious capability appears to be key to such ‘strategic raiding’.

The SSN’s are also a scarce capability, with only France sharing it within Europe. SSN’s are a major weapon of sea control in a major conflict and an very valuable intelligence gathering tool in ‘peace time’; and of course as the preferred launch platform for Tomahawk land attack cruise missiles, they now have a valuable role to play in “limited conflicts”.

Finally of course, as long as we have SSBN’s then we need SSN’s to protect them, but more on that later.

So, to recap before proceeding, the CV(F) programme and its related JCA programme (F35) should be cancelled and the savings channelled back into the ship building programme, so lets examine that next:

Surface combatants

The work horses of the RN (or any ocean going Navy) are the frigates and destroyers. How many of them do we need ? Well if we have no carrier strike group to escort, we need ships to do the following:

* Escort the amphibious groups
* Fulfil global presence requirements – Caribbean, Persian Gulf, South Atlantic
* Fulfil NATO task group requirements – e.g. Anti-terrorist/people trafficking/anti-piracy
* Homeland security

Homeland security is a wide category, this could even include integrating T45′s into air defence (or even missile defence) of the UK, down to security of nuclear subs berthed alongside, nuclear weapons etc.

Instead of laying out a huge amount of analysis on this set of requirements, instead I will lay out what I think can or should be done on a limited budget in the context of what we have, and what we know of existing plans:

Type 45 is our primary air defence ship class

The programme various known at one time or another as the Future Surface Combatant is aimed at replacing:

* T22B3 with a highly capable vessel termed the C1
* T23′s with a less capable unit called termed the C2
* A multi-role vessel to replace MCMV’s / OPV’s and Survey ships termed the C3.

Lets examine each of these in turn:

Type 45 Air defence destroyers

The sunk costs are done and dusted, the building of the hulls is apparently now a very efficient process, so I would like to see at least two added to the build as an outcome of having no carriers, for a grand total of 8 – the current buy of 6 is just not enough.

If you have 1 in long term refit, 1 in short term maintenance, 1 on deployment,  1 on enroute to or from a deployment, then you might have 2 available to provide air defence of a major amphibious task group – not enough !

So a modest increase to 8 would ease things while not breaking the bank.

T45′s should be fitted with Phalanx mounts as T42′s are retired (preferably with SeaRam) and fitted with 8 x Harpoon’s as T23′s are retired.

T22B3 replacement – FSC C1

To lever the sunk costs of the T45 programme, the C1 highly capable ASW focused ship should be a T45 with different sensor and weapon fit. 8 ships without the expensive PAAM’s but with the same VLS suite for the shorter range Aster 15 missile (SAAM system)  with a cheaper radar such as the Thales APAR or the newer Herakles. Also there would be no need for the SM1850 (SMART-L derivate ) 3D surveillance radar.

The Navy Matters site has a page showing past suggestions of either shortened or lengthened variants of the T45 hull (see http://navy-matters.beedall.com/mvd.htm) however I would keep the hull identical except for any tailoring of the fan tail / quarter deck area required to fit the Type 2087 towed array sonar, as this would keep the manufacturing costs down.

As well as the standard fittings for the Merlin HM1 and the above mentioned towed array, I would fit a battery of 8 Harpoon missiles where the 3D surveillance radar is currently fitted. These missiles would again be taken from retiring T23′s.

T23 replacement – FSC C2

OK, time to get a little contentious, I would suggest licensing of the Danish Absalon Support Ship design to build the C2 ‘general purpose’ frigate. I would make some minimal changes to the design of the ship, getting rid of at least half of the ‘flex deck’ probably ending the flex deck at the forward end of the hanger.

The extra space could be used for a large and well equipped sick bay, a small ‘flag command’ area and additional communal spaces for the crew, as these assets are going to be ‘sweated’ with lots of long deployments !

The rear part of the flex deck would be retained, but to save money I am not suggesting the RN buy two Combat Boat 90E for each C2 frigate, but the rear boat launch and recovery facilites could still be used with large RHIBS (or for RHIB based MCM or ASW Unmanned Surface Vehicles.) The Danes have kept the costs of these ships and their Iver Hutfeild class ‘cousins’ down very well, by not gold plating them.

So the RN version would stick with the SMART-S as the main radar and could even use the same combat system as the Danish vessels. I would add the new Common Anti-Air Missile that is being developed as a Sea Wolf and Rapier replacement as the main anti-air and anti missile system, plus two Phalanx / SeaRam mounts, and 16 x KDA NSM3 missiles for anti-ship and land attack.

These ships have Chinook sized flight deck, a hanger sized for 2 Merlins and we could probably add a lift in the hanger down to the flex deck, so maybe additional small UAV’s (Scheibel Camcopter for example) could be carried.

The Absalon has a crew of 100 plus accommodation for an additional 70 crew, while I am not sure that the ships flight is included in that 100, if carrying two Merlins equates to a ships flight of 25, then 45 extra’s might include an platoon of RM, an RN ‘board and search’ team, a ‘Flag Command’ staff, additional medical staff etc, whatever is required for the mission at hand.

So, hopefully staying away from any gold plating, we could afford 12 of these ships.

FSC C3 – the ‘everything else’ replacement…….

The C3 is envisioned as a multi-role vessel that can do deployed MCM, take over the role of survey vessels such as HMS Enterprise, and also replace the OPV’s. The BMT Venator is an interesting design for this type of ship, and you can go and read up on it here: http://www.bmtdsl.co.uk/Documents& Resources/?/188/2642/2642

Even if you don’t like this particular design, it does show what might be possible, and it also shows that the decline of the specific MCM ship is complete. This appears to be OK, as there no longer seems to be a discernible mining threat to the UK’s ports and waters (?). We might be able to afford between 9 and 12 of these ships ?

One note on these vessels – I would not equip them with a folding hanger and capabilities to operate the Lynx helicopter – I would buy MQ8B UAV’s instead. This would allow us to retire the Lynx and have a single type fleet based on the Merlin, as all the major surface vessels are big enough to carry and operate them. This would include buying new Merlins to be fitted with the radar from the SeaKing AEW & C aircraft.

Surface combatants totals

So we would end up with:

* 8 x T45
* 8 x T46 C1
* 12 x T24 C2

For a total of 28 major surface units – still less than the previous SDR mandated 32, but hopefully with no carriers, no F35′s and the use of existing designs, this could be affordable. It would certainly be a highly flexible force, with excellent accommodation facilitating long deployment cycles.

Amphibious shipping, 3 Commando Brigade and Support helicopters

To keep the budget down I don’t make any suggested enhancements to the amphibious flotilla, other than to ensure they are all fitted with better defensive armament capability. As noted at the beginning of this piece the amphibs and the Commando Brigade are a key capability that we poses that others don’t and in order to fully support the ‘real word’ use of these assets we must invest in helicopters, specifically in replacing the Sea King MK4 ‘Junglie”.

For commonality this should be a folding tail Merlin HC3 derivative.

It will obviously be declared to the Joint Helicopter Command and thus does not just impact on amphib ops, but on all deployed UK forces operations. However there must always be enough of them on hand to have at least 14 available to fly from HMS Ocean as required. As for the Ocean, I would ensure she gets the ‘service life’ extension or refits required to keep her in service.

Maybe we can replace with 1 or even 2 vessels when the budget is less constrained.

The one blue sky element I would suggest, is a little investment in hovercraft.

The UK has to major manufacturers of diesel hovercraft that are exported all over the world. Griffon Hovercraft provide the small Griffon 2000TD craft as used by the Royal Marines already.

However they have also supplied Sweden with the larger Griffon 8100TD wich has ballistic protection, NBC filtering, can carry a Viking armoured vehicle or around 80 fully equipped marines. See http://www.griffonhoverwork.com/products/8

Griffon have recently purchased (or merged with) British Hovercraft, so on the same site you can see their craft such as the BHT160 which are available in well deck configurations able to carry up to 20 tonnes, see: http://www.griffonhoverwork.com/products/11

So I think a modes investment in these vehicles would vastly improve our over the horizon amphibious raiding capability, our general littoral abilities, and even our ‘brown water’ ops if required.

In part 2 and 3 of this series I will examine the submarine fleet and the RFA support flotilla respectively.

JED CAWTHORNE

Editors note

In this post Jed pre empts many of the issues in the ThinkDefence FDR series, more to follow