UK Military News, Reports, Data, etc.

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Naval Today said:

A group of Royal Navy and Royal Air Force personnel are currently at sea onboard USS WASP, joining American colleagues in the latest F-35B Lightning II fast jet trials.

Lightning II is a STOVL aircraft: Short Take Off Vertical Landing.

It will place the UK at the forefront of fighter technology, giving the RAF a true multi-role all weather, day and night capability, able to operate from well-established land bases, deployed locations or the Royal Navy’s Queen Elizabeth Class Aircraft Carriers.

The six United States Marine Corps (USMC) Lightning II aircraft are onboard USS WASP, off the coast of the United States’ Eastern Seaboard.

They are assessing the ship/air integration and effectiveness across flight operations, communications, maintenance support and logistical supply.

Operational Test activity will include carrier qualifications for aircraft take-off and landing, and air combat/air defence missions over sea.

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London
Source: Flightglobal.com - a day ago

Under a UK Ministry of Defence-sponsored feasibility study, BAE Systems has been contracted to research the possibility of adding a common weapon launcher on to the

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.

The launcher would be able to carry multiple air-to-ground weapons on one Typhoon attachment point, including MBDA's dual-mode seeker-equipped Brimstone 2 missile and the Raytheon Paveway IV precision-guided bomb. The manufacturers for both weapon types are also involved in the study.

The award is worth £1.7 million ($2.6 million) and the project is expected to take some 12 months. A decision on the potential development effort will follow.

"Developing a common weapon launcher solution could significantly enhance the Typhoon's ability to deliver increased weapons persistence and effects," says Andy Eddleston, Typhoon product development and future capability director at BAE. “Each launcher could be capable of carrying up to three weapons, providing a great deal of flexibility and persistence for the operator."

This follows a $224 million Phase 3 capability enhancement (P3E) package contract for the Typhoon, signed in February.

Approved by all four

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nations – Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK – the enhancements will include full integration of Brimstone for the UK fleet. This integration is worth £72 million to BAE, which completed a feasibility trial for the enhancement in 2014.

Full integration of the Brimstone 2 will enable the Typhoon to carry six of the weapons, which will be carried using a pair of three-round launchers.

The P3E standard is scheduled for delivery during 2017.[/URL]

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Jura said:

a promise made:
Fallon: UK Will Meet NATO Spending Target This Financial Year

source:

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Equipment programs could bear the brunt of a 1.5 percent cut to the British defense budget announced June 4 by Chancellor George Osborne in Parliament.

The MoD had to find £500 million (US $766.3 million) in savings for the current financial year as part of wider government cuts totaling £3 billion across all departments other than health, education and international aid. Cuts were not expected to kick in until the next financial year starting April 2016.

The Defence Department said the agreement will not affect the baseline defense budget, manpower numbers or current operations.

A spokesman for the MoD said the reductions to the £34 billion budget would focus on efficiency cuts and a "recalibration of the equipment program."

There are no indications of whether a recalibration of the £14 billion equipment and support budget might involve canceling programs, pushing them to the right or both.

The Conservative Party committed to increasing defense equipment spending by 1 percent per annum over inflation for the next five years starting in 2016 as part of its pledge ahead of its victory in the May general election.

The spokesman said the efficiency cuts would cover items such as civil service overtime and travel budgets. The latter has already been significantly reduced in recent years.

The MoD said Britain will meet the NATO commitment to spend 2 percent of gross domestic product on defense this year, despite the £500 million in cuts.

The government has faced a barrage of criticism over its failure to commit to the 2 percent figure beyond the end of this financial year.

Analysts and industry executives have doubted the 2 percent figure could be maintained even without the latest cuts unless the government redefined what it counts as defense spending by adding items like pension payments.

If there was any small consolation in the figures for the defense sector it is that military spending appears to have gotten off relatively lightly compared with other departments caught up in the measures to try and bring down government debt.

The Exchequer said the £3 billion cuts are equivalent to around 3 percent of unprotected departmental spending this year, while MoD cuts represented 1.5 percent of its budget.

Analysts said the cuts were likely just the starting point and further defense budget reductions could be expected when the government completes a three-year comprehensive spending plan expected later this year.

Views are mixed, though, as to the likely outcome for defense in the upcoming spending plan being undertaken in parallel with a strategic defense and security review.

Following the election win by the Conservatives, the Royal United Services Institute think tank said it expected to see a small increase in defense spending while others have forecasted potentially significant cuts.

The announcement by the government comes against a background of rising concerns among some Conservative members of Parliament and others over the impact on defense capabilities and what some say is a British retreat from world affairs.

Earlier this week, US Defense Secretary Ash Carter was the latest in a string of senior US politicians and military officers to urge the British not to undertake further cuts.

He told the BBC on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore that he feared defense spending reductions would lead to Britain disengaging from world affairs.

Andy Smith, CEO of the UK National Defence Association, said: "Osborne's announcement, even before we have had the scheduled defense review, was a disgrace.

"Conservative MPs should be hanging their heads in shame that a Tory government is, once again, preparing to cut the armed forces, at a time when threats to UK security are growing and the need for Britain to be militarily strong is greater than ever. We have already had cut after cut to our forces since 2010, with tens of thousands of servicemen and women made redundant and essential defense capabilities lost," he said.

The Business department also has sustained heavy spending reductions this year but it's not known yet whether the Defence & Security Organisation, the government's military equipment export arm, will be affected.

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Bloomberg News said:

U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron and Argentinian President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner asserted their countries rights to the

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as they traded diplomatic barbs across the Atlantic Ocean.

Cameron said he had “robustly defended” Britain’s ownership of the islands at an EU-Latin America summit in Brussels, while Fernandez used a speech in Buenos Aires to accuse the British premier of being “almost rude” when he interrupted her foreign minister during a dinner in Brussels on Wednesday.

“The prime minister robustly defended the Falklands and the islanders’ right to self-determination in response to the Argentine foreign minister raising the issue,” Cameron’s office said in an e-mailed statement. “The prime minister underlined that the islanders had expressed their view in a referendum and that should be respected. He went on to add that the waters around the Falklands were territorial waters and it was unacceptable of Argentina to threaten investors seeking to operate there.”

The two countries have continued to dispute ownership of the islands, which Britain seized back from the Argentinians after they

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. Argentina says the islands were wrongly taken from it by Britain in the 19th century. The U.K. said in March that it will spend 180 million pounds ($278 million) over 10 years to modernize its defenses of the archipelago.
Fernandez accused Cameron of talking over her foreign minister, Hector Timerman, when he used remarks at the dinner to assert Argentina’s right to the islands.

Energy companies have been seeking to exploit the oil reserves beneath the islands’ territorial waters and Argentina filed criminal charges in April against five companies it accused of carrying out exploration activity without the permission of Argentina’s Energy Secretariat.

The Falkland islanders voted by 1,513 to 3 in 2013 to stay as a U.K. overseas territory.

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Jeff Head said:

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View attachment 14722
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IMHO, this woman and her administration simply do not know when to quit.

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Raytheon Missile Systems is open to developing a powered version of the Small Diameter Bomb II (SDBII) to meet a British requirement for a mini-cruise missile it is looking to purchase for its fleet of F-35 combat jets, according to Taylor Lawrence, president of the company's missile systems business.

"We are just beginning to have those kind of discussions [internally], clearly we would be willing to look at that if the UK wanted to compare it [with the MBDA Spear missile]," Lawrence told Defense News at the Paris Air Show opening Monday.

The UK arm of rival missile maker MBDA is offering a powered solution to meet British operational requirements while the SDBII is a winged bomb.

The US executive said that so far there were no formal discussions with the British over a possible Raytheon-powered weapon.

The British are partially through the assessment phase of a program aimed at delivering a medium-range strike weapon by the early 2020s for the F-35 and possibly later the Typhoon combat jets.

MBDA has been conducting the assessment phase of the program, known as the Selective Precision Effects at Range Capability 3, as part of a complex weapons agreement with the British government that normally excludes competition from overseas rivals for missile programs in order to preserve skills and retain operational sovereignty.

In the last 12 months, though, the British appear to have softened their attitude and recently said they would consider Raytheon's capabilities before making a decision on how to proceed in 2018 for Spear Cap 3.

MBDA is proposing to develop a powered weapon known as Spear with a range in excess of 70 kilometers compared with the roughly 74 kilometers of the current SDBII.

"Rather than develop a brand-new missile from scratch, adding powered flight to a variant of SDBII is one of the things we could look at. Things like a variant of MALD with a seeker would also have the range ... there are a lot of things we could look at but we want to make sure all of those things are offered to the UK at the appropriate time depending on how they want to proceed with the development," he said.

"There are a number of things we could do for them, we just want an opportunity to compete," he said.

The cash-strapped British would have to trade capability for lower cost and maturity to buy the US weapon as it now stands.

"I am pleased to say they [the UK Ministry of Defence] have at least said there will be some consideration in trades for the capability.We are making sure they can make the most well-informed decision. We have given them all the data and the US government has participated in giving them capability. At the end of the day we have a mature capability going into production as a result of the first low-rate initial production contract just awarded by the US Air Force," Lawrence said.

"At the moment we don't have a specific customer requirement to drive us in the direction of a powered SDBII but if the UK were serious about what they needed and maybe even funded it we could certainly get there by 2018," said Lawrence.

Raytheon secured its first low-rate initial production deal from the US Air Force for SDBII earlier in June.

Lawrence said Raytheon would consider opening the SDBII's global supply base to UK manufacturing if the MoD decides to compete.

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FORBIN said:

Tornado carrying 4 Storm Shadow-SCALP EG, a nice load
.

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Jeff Head said:

... and an interesting little bit of asymmetrics on the load out with the other weapons too.

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Scratch said:

Additionally, that looks like 4 ALARM anti-radar missiles on the shoulders of the inner wing mount. And actually, so far I was not aware of that outside shoulder on the inner wing rail. From the GAF Tornados I only know of an inner shoulder carrying Sidewinder / IRIS-T.

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