Why 50 is the new 30 - Thoughts on the RAF Puma force

 

This week marks the 50^th anniversary of the Puma helicopter entering front line service with the Royal Air Force. This milestone event confirms the Pumas place in the history books as the (to date) longest serving UK military helicopter type.

The Puma is an odd helicopter, and its career has perhaps been spent without the attention, glamour or glory sometimes afforded to other helicopter types or which it deserves. You rarely hear people speak affectionately of it, nor does it have the attention or interest placed on it that other types get. Yet despite this it remains an invaluable workhorse that is central to British military power.

Deployed around the world over many decades on a variety of operations, from Belize to Northern Ireland to Germany, the Puma has never been far from the action. The author has fond memories of repeatedly using the RAF Puma force to fly from Baghdad Airport to the Green Zone many years ago, an experience which can best be described as ‘the most exhilarating adrenaline high one can legally partake of in their life’ – the memory of flying through downtown Baghdad and gaining altitude to fly over road bridges will not fade quickly.

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

The Puma has provided vital troop lift and support in a range of operations globally and provided support to generations of troops. Given its length of time in service, we’re probably at the stage now where the great grandchildren of the original aircrew and passengers are now its regular users.

It is hard to overstate just how long the Puma has been in RAF service. The worlds oldest independent air force is now 103 years old. The Puma was selected for use in the RAF when it was 49 years old and has now been in service for just under half the existence of the RAF and had been in service for 16 years when the current Chief of the Air Staff joined up.

That the airframe remains credible after all this time is testament to the ability of the RAF, MOD Civil Service, and the defence industry to continue to develop and support constant through life enhancements and updates to keep the airframe relevant, credible, and most importantly safe for ongoing use.

Incredibly though Puma is due to keep on flying for several more years at the very least. On current plans it will remain in service until at least 2025, and its entirely possible it may stay longer still.

This long service life is an increasing trend among military assets, as cash strapped armed forces seek to extend the life of their platforms rather than buy new ones. There has been a marked increase in the service life of many UK aircraft and helicopters recently, with the Chinook passing its 40^th anniversary, and the Merlin now well into its third decade of service (and likely to remain strong until at least 2040).

On the one hand this is a positive move – if you have large fleets of aircraft available and are able to run them on for the long haul, then it makes sense to keep them going. If you have crews trained and ready to operate the platforms, and a large force of trained groundcrew and maintainers to keep it airworthy, as well as all the assorted supply chains and logistics support in place from the military, civil service and industry, then life extension is a good idea.

You can squeeze more life out of an airframe and avoid many of the costs of bringing new facilities into service or putting pressure on personnel numbers as you draw one fleet down and bring another one up to speed.

For example, look at the introduction of the P8 force in Lossiemouth – this has called for crews to train on an entirely new aircraft type, as well as associated training courses for ground crews and so on. There has been extensive refit work to the base done to build new hangars and support facilities and a lot of capital investment required to ensure that the site can operate the aircraft.

If you are trying to deliver a credible force, then losing people to learning how to work on the new aircraft or helicopter type poses a real long-term personnel challenge and could potentially impact on operational capability.

This is entirely normal (and used only as a good example of the work required), but it does highlight that sometimes it makes a lot more sense to run forces on rather than bring a new one in.

Downtown Iraq (Author)...

On the one hand then this makes a lot of sense, but equally it also poses a range of interesting challenges for wider defence policy makers. If you choose to run on an existing helicopter fleet in service (for example), then what impact does this have on other areas? For example, if you choose to extend Puma by another 10 years or align its replacement with Merlin (again entirely hypothetically), then the challenge you have is firstly ensuring the funding is available to do this.

Ringfencing money now for the defence budget of the early 2030s is a pointless task. We have no idea what the world will look like, what the priorities will be or where funding will have to go. Therefore, while it may sound good to nominally say ‘funding in 2030 to secure Puma replacement’, current financial planners ego is essentially writing cheques that future financial planner will not necessarily be able to cash.

This means deferring replacement runs a risk that deferral can eventually mean deletion without replacement, or cancellation of a successor project due to a lack of funds, even if this hurts wider defence. All because of a desire to do the right thing in the short term, the medium term could potentially take a hit.

At the same time, not placing orders now means asking how you can be certain that there will be a domestic military aviation industry in 10-15 years’ time to design and develop a replacement airframe. Assuming you want to remain with a largely UK design then you need a healthy defence industry capable of designing an aircraft that meets UK needs.

The risk is that if there is a dearth of orders, then the ability to do this will vanish and be lost forever or could only be regenerated at very substantial cost and time implications (as anyone who recalls the building of the early ASTUTE class can no doubt remember).

 

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

The result is that you may end up having to buy a foreign design and licence build it here in the UK or accept that future capability may need to be based on designs that the UK has not got the same level of control over. This is arguably the situation that the British Army now finds itself in, without an indigenous ability to design and build tanks or major APCs here in the UK, it is essentially reliant on both foreign design and upgrade work to keep UK armour dreams alive.

For the MOD and wider Government, the challenge is to work out which of these capabilities matters, and which risk can be taken on. There will always be areas where industry can secure work from third party countries or can be kept going through smaller sustainment contracts and other business. But equally, there will also be areas which the UK needs to determine if they are vital to core national industrial capability or not, and if not, be prepared to let them fall.

The challenge for Defence is working out a long-term view on the capabilities and industrial areas that really matter, both now and for the next 20-30 years. This requires difficult decisions and prioritisation and may result in the loss of some key areas to protect others.

The UK is not alone in this – every nation needs to decide what it is prepared to protect and ringfence, and what it can take risks on when it comes to defence industrial capability. For many the challenge is trying to balance off the desire to keep a credible and capable military with the need to protect certain key industrial areas, while also trying to keep their Treasury happy.

All around the world platforms are serving for ever long periods of time. This week it has emerged in the submarine world that the Royal Australian Navy will need to run on upgrades to the COLLINS class to ensure that they fill the gap due to delays with their successors. The new class of ATTACK class will now hit FOC until 2054 – well over 30 years from now, and this raises real challenges about the sustainability of the submarine force in the medium term.

Flying into the Green Zone (Author)

Meanwhile in Canada, the cost of running on an ever-older submarine fleet (the oldest of which is now over 30 years old) presents significant budget dilemmas. Do you spend money to upgrade elderly equipment and eke out a few more years of life, but maintain a credible submarine capability, or do you reprofile the money and spend it on acquiring new Canadian built frigates and other ships instead that could run for many decades to come?

This desire to run platforms on for longer than ever raises real challenges about the ability to keep military capability going on for ever long periods of time. Ships are now entering service and may serve for 40-60 years or more. This requires enormous vision and foresight on the part of the designers, who have to imagine what the world may look like nearly three quarters of a century from when their design is being built and ensure the ship can still do the job.

In many ways we are living with military constraints imposed on us by planners from decades ago. In the US the NIMITZ class carrier is based on a design from the early 1960s, yet the last NIMITZ class is unlikely to leave service for at least another 30 years. The constraints of ship design known in the 1960s will influence all manner of naval operations for decades to come, while the ability to even mildly correct this took decades to bring about a new design (the FORD class).

It gets even more challenging with the B52, which first flew 69 years ago and will almost certainly hit one hundred years of flying. There were still veterans of the American Civil War alive when the B52 first flew, and it will be nearly 200 years since that war ended when the last B52 shuts its engines down for the final time.

All through this time the crews, maintainers and industry have had to keep an airframe going which is based on, at its heart, the technology of the late 1940s and try to update it and keep it relevant for modern use. That they have done so is testament to their skills and ingenuity, but its also a reminder about how costly and difficult it can be to introduce new aircraft into service too, that the B52 will outlive both of its successor types (the B1 and B2).

When brought together what this all means is that trying to plan for defence is incredibly complicated. Planners, designers and budgeteers today need to constantly balance off the ability to bring equipment into service with the need to keep to a budget, and also preserve industrial capability too, to ensure that they can keep a capability running for the long haul.

There are really complicated issues around national sovereignty, the long term credibility of defence industries and trying to work out how to prioritise what matters for funding now, and the impact that this has on long term budgets, medium term capability and short term operational delivery – and all this has to be done in a way that reflects all priorities, both political and military, even when the two may be at odds with each other.