UK Defence Spending

Doon frae Troon said:
I am certainly not as experienced as the man in the pretty uniform with ribbons but I can truthfully say that the UK would not have been able to match the strength of the Russian Army since around 1900.


http://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...pending-general-sir-nick-carter-a8170996.html
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I thought it doesn't need to. As long as the UK is part of the NATO and continues to spend their agreed percentage of GDP (4%?) on defense budget than the whole of NATO will e enough to keep the USSR out.
 
larmen said:
I thought it doesn't need to. As long as the UK is part of the NATO and continues to spend their agreed percentage of GDP (4%?) on defense budget than the whole of NATO will e enough to keep the USSR out.
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Which should be true - except NATO cannot protect UK services, banks, communications etc from cyber attack; denial of service etc. And separately if the UK is to contribute an effective component to NATO combined forces the UK has to decide what component that that will be. The Army Chief mentioned how the UK is lagging behind Russia on the air defence side of things. What this means is that our air defence systems are becoming obsolete in their ability to detect, track and intercept land, sea and air launched missiles targeted at NATO land or sea-based key military or government assets. What makes air defence systems obsolete is that modern surface attack missiles are either very fast and highly manoeuvrable - making them difficult to intercept; and have very low radar cross-sections and/or fly under the radar - 'terrain hugging'- making them difficult to detect and track. As a result of the complexity of the problem AD systems have to solve - they are very costly to develop and manufacture - with long lead times into service,

Note also that air defence systems include Ballistic Missile Defence systems. Bottom line is that the UK does not have an independent BMD system. The closest we have is PAAMS - a system installed on our Type 45 Destroyers - however this is an aging system based upon the French Aster 30 missile. The UK does not (as far as I am aware) have a land-based BMD missile capability of our own (which is probably OK as long as our Naval BMD assets are located appropriately around the coast) - and we depend upon the French for our Naval BMD. And as for all AD systems BMD systems are very costly to develop and produce. IN fact the UK could probably not be able to afford to develop an independent BMD system.

Note that the US have the Patriot BMD system and I suspect that in a time of very heightened international tension that might result in a BM attack on a UK target, then the US would deploy Patriot in the UK under it's NATO responsibilities (Trump's views on NATO notwithstanding). But that wouldn't much help the UK were a rogue state or terrorist organisation to acquire ballistic missile delivery mechanisms capable of hitting the UK and that could be deployed with minimal warning.
 
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And as soon as the Government say they are going to spend more on Defense R&D and increases in men and equipment the normal suspects will be screaming that we should be spending it on welfare, the NHS and social housing.
 
Having worked closely with a lot of NATO forces over the years, I can safely say that they are on the whole useless.

In the event that the Russians ever decided to up the aggression, nato would get a royal spanking. Assuming they actually decided to reach any kind of agreement.

The Dutch, French and Germans (from my experience) are very good operators. The yanks obviously have strength in numbers. I dread to think of us saddling up with the Greeks, Turks, Italians would achieve thought. Massive recipe for some blue on blue action.

Honestly they were beyond useless.

The Uk armed forces are in a pitiful state currently. I know that the moral within the RN right now is shocking. I know many, many people still serving and they are stretched beyond belief. Genuine worry about the future of us being able to project force for any kind of sustained period of time.

Major Ships are mothballed or sold, the RFA are struggling, the green death are looking at further cuts and the amount of short sighted forced redundancies in the RN has greatly impacted operational performance.

The volume of public cash that is squandered on hairbrained projects, whilst the armed forces, nhs and emergency services suffer is sickening.

We will return to the Cold War in the next decade and when we do we will rely totally on the US to prop us up.
 
SocketRocket said:
And as soon as the Government say they are going to spend more on Defense R&D and increases in men and equipment the normal suspects will be screaming that we should be spending it on welfare, the NHS and social housing.
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Yes indeed they will. So who do they listen to? We give the Army and other services increased funding it will have to be taken from existing budgets unless borrowing is increased (austerity for ever) or taxes are increased.
 
tugglesf239 said:
Having worked closely with a lot of NATO forces over the years, I can safely say that they are on the whole useless.

In the event that the Russians ever decided to up the aggression, nato would get a royal spanking. Assuming they actually decided to reach any kind of agreement.

The Dutch, French and Germans (from my experience) are very good operators. The yanks obviously have strength in numbers. I dread to think of us saddling up with the Greeks, Turks, Italians would achieve thought. Massive recipe for some blue on blue action.

Honestly they were beyond useless.

The Uk armed forces are in a pitiful state currently. I know that the moral within the RN right now is shocking. I know many, many people still serving and they are stretched beyond belief. Genuine worry about the future of us being able to project force for any kind of sustained period of time.

Major Ships are mothballed or sold, the RFA are struggling, the green death are looking at further cuts and the amount of short sighted forced redundancies in the RN has greatly impacted operational performance.

The volume of public cash that is squandered on hairbrained projects, whilst the armed forces, nhs and emergency services suffer is sickening.

We will return to the Cold War in the next decade and when we do we will rely totally on the US to prop us up.
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I suspect so. But meanwhile in order to try and maintain some semblance but pretence that the UK remains a major player in global defence and military matters (and or permanent place on the UN Security Council) the UK will make piecemeal improvements to pet aspects of the services - see under new carriers - that in the great scheme of things are largely fairly useless, because they are not part of a UK integrated whole - a whole that the UK neither requires nor can we afford.

Why was, and is, there EU talk of an EU 'army'? Perhaps because systems are very, very expensive and any single country does not need everything. And even where we do joint operations and exercises with such as the Netherlands, Germany and France - interoperability of systems is poor if not largely non-existent.
 
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