Thin Pinstriped Line

The National Audit Office has published a report into the ability of the MOD to successfully deliver Carrier Strike capability. The report, published today focuses on the fact that while the carrier project is proceeding well, there are concerns around the many enablers that underpin it to make it transfer from being a ‘show force’ to a credible carrier strike group. Given that the Royal Navy has effectively ‘bet the farm’ on acquiring the Carrier Strike Group concept and buying into it in a significant way, this report does make for challenging reading. The purpose of this article is to assess it and ask ‘how bad is the problem’ and ‘should we worry’ and ‘was it all worth it’? In many respects the report focuses on much of what has gone well – it notes that the project has delivered to within 3% of final budgeted costs, a variance of costs for a project that has now been running for 20 years that is not unimpressive given the many changes that have occurred during this time...

The MOD has reportedly spent £900k repainting an RAF A330 Voyager jet to have a new paint scheme. The jet, which was modified internally some years ago to act as a long range VIP transport is now to have an external paint scheme that is separate from the rest of the core Voyager fleet. This has caused the perfect storm of headlines, with the news breaking on a day when all manner of other damning headlines about free school meals were making news. It is the perfect sum of money to write about – its small enough to be comprehensible, big enough to seem large – people can look at £900k and go ‘but that’s three times my mortgage on a lick of paint’. This makes it a great story to write about – the combination of scandal, comprehensible sums of money and the hint of wasted public funds. Is it something that we should worry about though? To be honest, no, not it is not. All aircraft need to be painted – it is a fact of life that if you don’t paint an airframe, it will qui...

The Prime Minister has announced that the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) and the Department for International Development (DfID) are to merge to form one super department charged with overall co-ordination of the UK’s overseas policy. To some this will be welcome news, many commentators on this blog and more widely are inherently distrustful of foreign aid spending and Humphrey has lost count of the angry comments or twitter responses he gets about it. But others will be concerned that this may represent the loss of development aid at the heart of UK planning and spending and may have longer term implications for how the UK is seen around the world. From the outset it is important to be very clear. Public spending on international development by the UK is not wasted money. It is a vital part of a long term strategy intended to improve life, increase prosperity and decrease the likelihood that British troops will need to deploy into a conflict zone, or that our securi...

The Falklands War ended 38 years ago this week, which means that the war is now as far away from us as D-Day was from the forces of 1982. The war was arguably the only occasion in British naval history in which the aircraft carrier force represented a strategic centre of gravity, and highlighted the ability of the Royal Navy to work in effective large task groups. While it is a perennial easy headline to write about how the UK has less warships than in 1982, and how the islands are at risk of attack / invasion and occupation by Argentina (presumably given the much denuded state of the Argentine forces via the medium of particularly aggressive mutated ill-tempered penguins), it is helpful to reflect on how far the Royal Navy has come in the intervening four decades. This is particularly visible in the recent news that the strike carrier HMS QUEEN ELIZABETH is now at sea off the UK coast conducting fixed wing flying operations with RAF and RN F35 strike fighters. The ship has, ...

The Ministry of Defence has announced that it is conducting a review into the future function and role of the Reserve Forces, intended to provide a clear idea of the role of the reserves until 2030. The volunteer reserve is an integral part of the British Armed Forces, and one which has a long history of providing volunteers to step up and support operations across the globe. In WW1 it was the Territorial Army and Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, serving in the Royal Naval Division, who held the line in 1915 after the destruction of the regular Army ahead of the arrival in significant numbers of Kitcheners volunteers (Humphreys great grandfather was one of them). In the Cold War the Territorial Army was significantly larger, growing to some 70,000 personnel by 1989, with an aspiration to enlarge up to 86000. With clearly defined roles in both the UK and in Germany, the TA represented an extremely large force, relatively well equipped, and one which knew the roles expected of i...