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Defence Review - where to cut the costs 
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Point A)
Normally I'd agree, but since they have just one job to do, ie launch Trident missiles, how can they not meet our needs.

Point B) I actually agree with, I was just playing devil's adovcate from a cost point of view.

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Wed Sep 29, 2010 12:58 pm
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For the record, I personally think Trident is irrelevant and a massive waste of money. My point was, there's no point in proposing we get rid of it, because nobody will ever go for it.

As for the top heavy thing, fair enough. But we could stop recruiting COs, as they're the ones that move away from field ranks to be bloated deak jockeys over time. Field commissions are extremely rare these days and besides, I'm sure good leaders in the field are hard to come by. But a lot of the bloaters, to coin a phrase, are likely to be retiring in the next 10yrs or so, surely?

I've been out a fair few times in Helston. A town that is next door to the largest helicopter base in Europe. The navy grunts (or Matlows as they are referred to here) are some of the most arrogant, troublesome, assholes I've ever had the misfortune to encounter. I don't really fancy laying off a whole ton of them and then expecting someone else to employ them. Their only portable skills are fighting (which they're not terribly good at) and shouting abuse, drinking and treating women like [LIFTED] (which they're VERY good at). Flooding the market/job centre/Jeremy Kyle show with a glut of these people is not a prospect I look forward to. This needs to be gradual IMHO.

Paul, you may be right (and I believe you are) but talk sense. Of the 65 million of us, how many are actually sensible enough to understand the lack of need for large standing forces and the need for adaptable, smaller forces. People like to go and watch their little Johnny pass out etc. I have a friend a sail with who is a Major General in the Army. His son just graduated from Sandhurst and is going to be an Apache pilot. Now who wouldn't wanna do that, rather than sit in an office in London for similar money?? It's a tough sell to a lot of people to get rid of the forces.

Besides, most of the work done to counter these new threats is carried out be elite special units worldwide. Another idea would be to scrap "regular" forces and just have more people trained as SBS or SAS or more recently SRR, Paras and Royal Marine Commandos etc. The requirements are tougher, thereby making it easy to cut the "average" recruits. That could maybe work....


Wed Sep 29, 2010 12:58 pm
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okenobi wrote:
For the record, I personally think Trident is irrelevant and a massive waste of money.
+1
We need the carriers. I'd also like to see a few more Astute class subs being built.

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Wed Sep 29, 2010 1:31 pm
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I wonder how much will subsequently be spent on the likes of Blackwater, cuts or not :|

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Wed Sep 29, 2010 2:16 pm
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Linux_User wrote:
l3v1ck wrote:
Why waste money designing a new trident sub? The Americans are due to have a new class in service by 2029. Just buy a couple of them.


For the same reasons we don't buy a lot of "off the shelf" stuff.

A) Off the shelf equipment might not meed our needs.

In which case they should not be buying it. Simples.

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B) By buying foreign equipment the British economy doesn't see the benefit of British defence spending (both the initial purchase and subsequent maintenance costs).

Yes but a wasteful program here barely benefits our economy either. Also why cant much of it be UK made under license? or from UK manufacturers?

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Wed Sep 29, 2010 4:25 pm
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Linux_User wrote:
l3v1ck wrote:
Why waste money designing a new trident sub? The Americans are due to have a new class in service by 2029. Just buy a couple of them.

For the same reasons we don't buy a lot of "off the shelf" stuff.
A) Off the shelf equipment might not meed our needs
B) By buying foreign equipment the British economy doesn't see the benefit of British defence spending (both the initial purchase and subsequent maintenance costs).

A) I can go for, but B) Is spurious and always has been.

Take the Eurofighter as an example. Take the money we have already and are going to spend on it. Then subtract the bill we would have to have paid to buy the same number of off the shelf aircraft that would do all the jobs the Typhoon will actually be required to do just as well (say a Super F18 maybe) THEN subtract a million pounds for every employee BAE has in the UK (which is less that you'd imagine, since they're generally a US based company now) we would still have tens of millions of pounds left over. The fact is we could pay all the UK defense industry workers to live in luxury and NOT work for less than it costs us to buy the over budget, over deadline, occasionally non-functional equipment the UK industry and MoD procurement department end up foisting on us.

Another example - the SA-80 rifle. Quite a nice design in fact in general. However, once in service they realised you couldn't actually use it if you were left handed because the breech could only eject shells to the right hand side - which meant if you were left handed it would eject red hot brass cartridges right into your face. They had to recall the entire production run and redesign them so the breech was swappable. As a result the cost of each SA-80 is three times what the US Army pays for their rifles and it's not that much better.

The amount of overspend on British defense procurement is insane. Over the next five years it's something like £31 billion. That's without Trident. And that's overspend, not total budget. Do you really think we're better off spending that to keep a few thousand people in jobs, or do you think we can think of something better to do with that humungous pile of money?


Wed Sep 29, 2010 4:29 pm
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I was just about to say that MoD procurement should be one of the first things looked at here :)

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Wed Sep 29, 2010 5:33 pm
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jonbwfc wrote:
The amount of overspend on British defense procurement is insane. Over the next five years it's something like £31 billion. That's without Trident. And that's overspend, not total budget. Do you really think we're better off spending that to keep a few thousand people in jobs, or do you think we can think of something better to do with that humungous pile of money?

They should tackle that £31 Billion first then look at the structure of the MOD to make huge savings.

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Wed Sep 29, 2010 5:39 pm
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Anyone see Dispatches last week? On this very subject.

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Wed Sep 29, 2010 7:38 pm
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davrosG5 wrote:
Anyone see Dispatches last week? On this very subject.


Yes, and I thought the same thing then - "off the shelf" equipment doesn't necessarily meet our requirements and buying American equipment is of no benefit to the British economy.

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Wed Sep 29, 2010 7:44 pm
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Linux_User wrote:
davrosG5 wrote:
Anyone see Dispatches last week? On this very subject.


Yes, and I thought the same thing then - "off the shelf" equipment doesn't necessarily meet our requirements and buying American equipment is of no benefit to the British economy.

I did see it as well. I think that the off the shelf would probably apply only to smaller items. A helicopter or tank would probably be the normal upper limit. Maybe maritime patrol craft would be easy to adapt. Though buy allowing units to do their own kit procurement would solve many problems.

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Wed Sep 29, 2010 8:26 pm
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Linux_User wrote:
davrosG5 wrote:
Anyone see Dispatches last week? On this very subject.


Yes, and I thought the same thing then - "off the shelf" equipment doesn't necessarily meet our requirements and buying American equipment is of no benefit to the British economy.


I guess it depends on which off the shelf equipment you are talking about. I'd reckon that firearms would be perfectly acceptable 'off the shelf', helicopters not so much perhaps (certainly on recent experience).

Part of the problem is the entrenchment of the British arms manufacturers. If they don't really have to compete against the competition because they have preferred supplier status then we're very unlikely to get good value for money.

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Wed Sep 29, 2010 8:27 pm
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Linux_User wrote:
Yes, and I thought the same thing then - "off the shelf" equipment doesn't necessarily meet our requirements and buying American equipment is of no benefit to the British economy.

I'm sorry, this remains a completely spurious point.

Firstly, The MoD will spend billions and billions of pounds over the next few years on military tech. A big chunk of that is American technology, being built in America by Americans, even though the complete products in question are ostensibly 'British'. While the likes of the Eurofighter, Apache Longbow and Type 45 destroyer are assembled in Britain, they are stuffed full of American tech that will be assembled in the US then shipped over to be slotted into place by British workers. Given the amount of money spent on these items, the amount which is 'fed back' into the British economy by paying the assembly workers is paltry.

Secondly, every time the British armed forces need something quick, they can call on special dispensation to avoid the procurement regulations and buy off the shelf tech. This is quite often American, because most military tech is. So whenever we actually need anything in a hurry, we're buying foreign anyway. So a large chunk of our military spending simply doesn't contribute to the UK economy at all. That's why the SAS in Iraq have M4A1's rather than SA-80s and why the Eurofighter flyboys have French breathing apparatus; because the stuff BAE built for them didn't work and led to test pilots getting borderline hypoxia, so it had to be replaced sharpish.

Thirdly, as I pointed out, MoD procured tech is often hugely late and hugely over budget. That extra money goes into the coffers of BAE, a private company largely based and owned abroad - i.e. it goes out of the British economy. If that money hadn't been wasted - if we'd bought off the shelf tech in the first place - then we'd have that extra money (like the £31 BILLION pounds I mentioned earlier) to spend on other major capital projects like hospitals, railway stations, whatever. Given these are more local, more of that money would have stayed in the British economy if we'd bought off the shelf. Because we bought 'British', it didn't.

Once, we had a defense industry. We had Hawker and Vickers and Webley and Land Rover and we built planes and tanks and rifles and jeeps and... We don't any more. We have several - actually very good - small companies owned by foreign investors and BAE, who take the piss. BAE lives in the US and uses the idea that some people still think of it as 'British' as political leverage to get scandalously preferential treatment during procurement exercises. We actually make (as in from the design stages to being in the hands of soldiers) hardly anything and what is made by the ostensibly 'British' BAE almost inevitably costs massively more than it should, is titanically late and occasionally gets British service personnel killed. What we have is an industry which actually sucks money out of the British exchequer - and therefore the British economy - at an utterly stupendous scale and the sooner we're shot of it the better.

The fundamental point is this : we could often buy off the shelf tech much cheaper and give the money we'd saved to the people who were out of a job because we did and they'd actually be better off. They'd have more money than their wages would be and because they'd be spending it locally to them, it would go back into the British economy in some sense, even if in the end they bought German cars and went on Spanish holidays. As it is, this bizarre notion that we have to 'buy British' actually means that less of the money we spend actually stays in the UK than if we didn't. It's counter intuitive, but only assuming you're ignorant (in the non-perjorative sense) of how the UK 'defense industry' is organised.

Note: At no point have I mentioned Trident. Where do you think the vast majority of the £100 billion it's going to cost to make that will actually end up? Do I need to give you a clue?

Jon


Wed Sep 29, 2010 9:54 pm
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