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Beleaguered & bewildered: Prospect of defeat looms for British Army

Those are your words, not those of the article. The Independent is focusing more on the lack of equipment for a lot of soldiers more than anything else.
 

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Beleaguered & bewildered: Prospect of defeat looms for British Army
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I wouldn't take any issue with the central point of that article, namely that British forces have been sent into combat zones without suitable equipment mainly because of the situation in government where Blair wants Britain to play a big role in the War on Terror, but Brown won't spend the money and where a sizeable section of the Labour Party detest Blair being so close to Bush, this was shown up by the case of Sgt. Steve Roberts where IMO someone in the MOD or Downing Street should be facing criminal charges.

The fact that the British Army has done as much as they have in Basra and Helmand with the resources they have been given speaks volumes about their ability. But sooner or later the crunch is going to come.It's quite simple, if you want to be a world player you are going to have to spend extra money on the military, unpopular as that may be with some people, or you don't put inadequately equipped and insufficient number of troops into some of the most dangerous places in the world.
 
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Britain is seeking to win a £2bn order from Saudi Arabia for the world's most advanced naval destroyer just three months after the Serious Fraud Office was forced to drop an investigation into claims that BAE Systems bribed Saudi officials to secure the Al Yamamah arms-for-oil contract.

The Saudis are understood to be interested in buying two or three Type 45 destroyers to strengthen their defensive capabilities in the region. One possibility would be for Saudi Arabia to take two of the Type 45s being built for the Royal Navy, which has ordered a total of six ships with the option to buy a further two.

The prospect of another huge arms deal with the kingdom, coming on top of the recently agreed £10bn deal to buy Eurofighter Typhoon aircraft, will fuel claims that the SFO investigation was dropped as much for commercial reasons as for concerns about the UK's national interest. The Government ordered the SFO to drop the long-running bribery inquiry in December on the grounds that it was jeopardising Saudi co-operation in the fight against terrorism, although the UK intelligence services have since questioned whether there was anything as explicit as a threat from the Saudis to withdraw their assistance.

Should the Saudis go through with the Type 45 order, it would be a huge fillip for BAE and VT Group, the joint constructors of the vessels. The merger of BAE's Govan and Scotstoun yards on the Clyde and VT's Portsmouth yard to create a single UK warship builder is due to be announced in the next month.

The first of the six Type 45s being built for the Navy, HMS Daring, was launched from the Clyde in January and is due to enter service in 2009. They are fitted with a Sampson radar which can track 4,000 different objects in a 200-mile radius and target an incoming missile the size of a golf ball from 30 miles. They are armed with Aster missiles fired from the PAAMs system, which is supplied by a BAE joint venture company, MBDA.

The new BAE/VT warship company will be worth about £750m and will start with an order book worth in the region of £2bn. This will more than double when the Government gives the final go-ahead for the new company to build two new aircraft carriers for the Royal Navy costing around £3.9bn.

The aim of the recently promoted Defence minister Paul Drayson is to announce the carrier order and the creation of the new joint venture warship builder at the same time. The company will be managed 50:50, but ownership is expected to be split about 60 per cent to BAE and 40 per cent to VT. There will be an option for VT to sell its shareholding to BAE at a specified date in the future. Detailed negotiations are going on at present and although Lord Drayson has said he wants a deal agreed by the end of this month, the likelihood is that it will slip into April, according to industry sources.

Meanwhile, BAE is understood to have decided to bid for the Devonport nuclear submarine refit yard in Plymouth in partnership with the US private equity firm Carlyle. BAE had been contemplating bidding alone, but the Ministry of Defence is thought to have preferred Carlyle to act as a partner because of the success the US company made of buying into QinetiQ, the defence research company floated last year. The other bidder for Devonport is Babcock, the engineering and support services group which runs the Rosyth naval yard in Scotland. Devonport is reckoned to be worth about £200m to £250m.

Devonport's current owner, the American contractor KBR, was forced to put the business up for sale by the MoD after its parent company Haliburton decided to demerge KBR.
 
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Negotiations over the price of two nuclear submarines being constructed for the U.K. Royal Navy by BAE Systems could be coming to a close. In its response to a Parliamentary Defence Committee investigation into major procurement programs, Ministry of Defence officials revealed on Feb. 27 that government negotiators and BAE Submarine Solutions had agreed on a deal, but that it still required endorsement by the hierarchy of the two sides.
Neither the government nor BAE would comment on the status of the pricing plan.

In December, the Defence Committee report expressed surprise that no price had been settled upon, particularly because that meant the financial liability to the MoD on building the boats was open-ended. The deal relates to Boats 2 and 3 now being assembled at BAE’s nuclear submarine yard at Barrow-in-Furness. If the prices are approved, a new order for the fourth of the Astute-class boats is expected to rapidly follow. The National Audit Office, a government watchdog, reported in November the forecast cost of the first batch of three vessels was 3.6 billion pounds ($7.1 billion).

BAE and the MoD have found themselves in the unusual position of negotiating the deal for Boats 2 and 3 even though construction is well advanced, thanks to severe technical difficulties that became apparent on the Astute program around 2002. The 1997 contract to build three nuclear submarines was renegotiated with the understanding that the prices of the first two subs would only be decided after the first of class had reached sufficient maturity to understand the costs.

HMS Ambush, Boat 2, is due to be launched in February 2009 and the third boat, HMS Artful, is scheduled for launch in August 2010. The first of class, HMS Astute, is scheduled for launch June 8. Despite last-minute hiccups on the reactor commissioning, Boat 1 project director Stuart Godden was quoted in the company’s Wavelength in-house magazine as saying the program was still achievable. A Submarine Solutions spokesman said the company was confident it would meet the launch date.

The in-service date for the first of up to eight submarines to replace the current Trafalgar and Swiftsure classes of submarines is scheduled for late 2009 — some four years late. But BAE’s Barrow yard has had something of a renaissance since its earlier problems with Astute. Having once threatened to sell the nuclear submarine business, BAE is now a dominant player in government-backed talks to consolidate the nuclear submarine industry.
One option BAE is looking at is to purchase the DML maintenance and nuclear refueling business at Devonport in association with U.S. private equity investor Carlyle Group. The government could order a further four Tomahawk missile-equipped nuclear submarines, followed by a new class of ballistic missile boats, providing work at Britain’s only nuclear shipbuilding yard until 2020 and beyond.

The first order is likely to be in the shape of a fourth Astute-class boat. Long-lead items have already been ordered and Submarine Solutions reported it has begun procuring combat system equipment in the shape of a towed array handling system. The spokesman said the company had completed preparations for manufacture of Boat 4 on Feb. 8.

Speaking to the Defence Committee late last year, David Gould, Defence Procurement Agency deputy chief, said he expected to make a decision about Boat 4 just after they had agreed on a price for the two earlier boats. In its response to the Defence Committee, the MoD said the approval to build Boat 4 was being sought on the basis of meeting a construction drumbeat that required a new submarine order every 22 months to ensure vital skills and capabilities were not lost to BAE and its supply chain.

However, Britain’s defense budget is under severe strain. A group of leading ex-military, industry and MoD officials in a report for the Royal United Services Institute here recently estimated the defense equipment plan over the next 10 years could be underfunded by as much as 15 billion pounds. One of the solutions should be to review the Astute program, they said, arguing that the only reason Britain needed more than three or four nuclear-powered attack boats was to retain onshore industrial expertise.

With affordability being a critical issue for the British, BAE and its suppliers have been under orders from the MoD to slash the cost of future nuclear boat construction. The MoD in its response to the Defence Committee admitted the Astute program faced significant financial challenges and work was progressing to drive out costs. Studies on Boat 4 had “indicated the potential for design simplification and efforts are focused on achieving the mean to deliver the associated costings,” it said. No figures are available to back that up, but last year the MoD challenged industry to slash acquisition costs on Boat 4 by 30 percent. By the sixth submarine, they wanted a 45 percent reduction. Wavelength said BAE had identified 40 initiatives that will save more than 60 million pounds on the combat system alone compared with Boat 3.
 
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The British military's Skynet 5A satellite has been launched into space from Kourou in French Guiana. The spacecraft is part of a £3.2bn system that will deliver secure, high-bandwidth communications for UK and allied forces. Sunday's lift-off came 24 hours after a first attempt was thwarted by a technical glitch in ground equipment.

Skynet rode atop an Ariane 5-ECA rocket, which left the ground at 1903 local time (2203 GMT).

"It was an incredibly nerve-racking but also an amazing experience to participate in the countdown and launch of an Ariane 5," said Patrick Wood, who has led the development of the Skynet spacecraft for manufacturer EADS Astrium. "We've already received telemetry from it. In fact, we had a ground station see it just 10 minutes after separation. We've even sent commands to Skynet. It's behaving itself perfectly," he told BBC News shortly after the launch.

The British spacecraft is the first in what will eventually be a three-satellite constellation designed to allow the Army, Royal Navy and RAF to pass much more data, faster between command centres.

"Skynet's going to provide five times the capacity that the previous system provided, and allow the military to do things they just haven't been able to do in the past," Mr Woods explained.

There's more to read on the link itself.
 
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Hehehe Skynet. That's the name of the evil AI network in the Terminantor movies that launches all of the worlds nukes.

Geez, like I haven't heard that one before....

Finn, that is so cheesy I can't believe you actually said it!
 
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