I refer the right honourable gentleman to the deal made not so long ago between the US administration and Israel in which Israel would get the F-35 at a darn sight cheaper price than the UK was. :O:

Of course we gave them a deal! You guys spend 5 times more on defense so can afford full price! :O:

Well yes, but the Israelis don't have the over inflated bureaucratic monster of a system we are lumbered with, so we need the discount more than they do! :O:

http://img228.imageshack.us/img228/548/uscapitol.jpg
You were talking about over inflated bureaucratic monsters... :O:

TLAM I disagree.

We have to retain the ability to create and develop our own systems to maintain our technological base.

Why do we have to use NATO standardizes systems.

Sea Dart was good for its time, now being replaced by Aster on the Type 45. A system which is arguably as good as Standard.

Seawolf will be replaced by CAMM.

Both the above old systems aquited themselves reasonably well in the Falklands war which I know as 25 odd years ago but still.

Lewis Page seems to be very selective in what he chooses to present. It seems amongst current and former RN officers who post on Navweaps he is not held in very high regard.

I'm for maintaining Britain's technological base. But that doesn't mean they don't have to use NATO weapons. The US and UK have jointly developed weapons before, look at the Harrier or the Skyflash AAM. Or the Exocet (UK and France).

Now I think quite a bit about how the Falklands would have went if the UK task force was armed with NATO standard weapons. The SM-1ER Standard has around twice the range of the Sea Dart and is about the same age (SM-1 is was in service a number of years earlier), as a plus the SM-1 launchers could handle Harpoon and ASROC making a Type 42 armed with those a real multipurpose warship. The Sea Sparrow much like the standard is a design that predated the British equivalent (Sea Wolf), and has better performance

The Standard-ERs were much larger rockets than Sea Dart, so it is not fair to directly compare them. Despite this, while the later SM-2ER rocket has a much longer "catalog range", the SM-1ER is cited at only about 70km (the good old "MR" is about 37), about the same as Sea-Dart. So they were getting ER class range performance on a MR class size, thus making it possible to fit more rockets on the same size hull.

Overall, the decision to install Sea Dart rather than Standard was quite reasonable.

Harpoon probably wasn't even on the radar when they had to make the call in the 60s.

That's also IMO, an understandable decision. Though Sea Sparrow is a more multipurpose missile (being evolved from "Air" Sparrow) as a point-defender, Sea Sparrow is semi-active homing while Sea Wolf is ACLOS.

With anywhere close to comparable computer technology, especially in the 60s and 70s when they had to make the call, because it does not have to force a tiny, cheap seeker computer to sort out the sea returns, at close range and low altitudes a command guided missile works more reliably.

Indeed, when the Soviets had trouble getting S-300/SA-10's seeker head to work, they just downshifted to command guidance to maintain a 25m bottom while they debugged the seeker.

As for how substituting American weapons would go for the Falklands, I'll put my coins on, "Probably no better". The main advantage that SM-1 and Sea Sparrow would have in such a debate is that they didn't get a historical chance to fail, so one can cite their trials result, but if one looks at history and how real combat generally disappoints compared to trials, I'll say that it is unlikely that substituting US (or Soviet, or French for that matter) systems of similar vintage will make the result much prettier.

But ASROC was already in service. The Brits when with the arguably better weapon but only built one ship to use it. They back-fitted a half dozen older frigates to carry the weapon.

ACLOS has its drawbacks, just look at the engagement on 25 May 1982 in which HMS Coventry was sunk and HMS Broadsword was damaged. Sea Wolf's computers failed to lock on and track properly the attacking Skyhawks and had to be reset. With out the ship's computers to track the planes the missiles can't fly because the radar beam's data that is fed thought the computer and retransmitted doesn't guide them. With Sea Sparrow the missiles can be fired down the bearing and the missiles themselves sort the situation out, the 1st model Sea Sparrow just had a guy with a pair of radar dishes who pointed at the bearing of the target. With Sea Sparrow if the search radar or other sensor is tracking the target and you can slew a FCR on to it the missiles can fly.

In that era though I think even the US systems had problems, I know the CIWS was quite unreliable when it first came into service, but like with all systems it has been improved over time.

I see your point in a joint unified armaments system, it would be a good idea and would make resupplying a doddle in wartime, which is what the idea behind the NATO standard is I guess, and in some respects I agree that we should order some equipment from the US, F-18s for example rather than the F-35s which will no doubt be late, too expensive and break down a lot. However the nations heart is no longer in building our own equipment, there is little national pride, and so things always wind up late or broken and take more money and time to fix them. In the odd rare occasion like Astute they manage to shake the fat out of the system and get a proper production line going, but I think half the time the people working on the weapons systems are just waiting for the government to pull the plug on the project so there's little point in getting too heavily involved.

When the Falklands happened CIWS was very new; it had been in full service for only two years plus two years at sea development at that point. But at that point the Sea Sparrow BPDM had been in service 6 years with 16 years testing before that.

What's the Sparrow like with sea skimmers and valley walls though? I mean, most of the surface to air action took place in Bomb alley and the Argie pilots had steel balls on their terminal runs.

As I said in an earlier post, one of the problems with Sea Wolf was that the computer on board ship couldn't handle such situations and locked up because it was tracking a spurious contact. If the computer can't find the solution the missile can't fly. With Sea Sparrow the missile finds the contact, all the computer has to do it point the FCR in the direction of the contact and turn it on, the missile flies to the contact and either finds it or it doesn't.

Although one of the major faults I've found in the UK was that they apparently didn't deploy any of their Blowpipe or US supplied Stingers aboard their warships. I think one of the transports had it and all the rest went ashore. I know the Stinger has been used to shoot down ASMs (although that happened after the Falklands, but it was with a missile built before the Falklands). I'm not sure how many Stingers we gave to the Brits but those really should have gone to the RN and not the SAS, sorry to the ground pounders but on an Anphib op small groups of troops are expendable, warships are not.

But you have to remember what Sea Wolf was inititally designed to protect against. High diving ASMs coming straight at the ship.

Apparently Sea Wolf can intercept an artillery shell.

In the falklands the Argies were coming in at wave top height and moving across rather than towards a Sea Wolf equipped ship.

Given the height the argies were coming in I would have been surprised if Sea Sparrow worked any better, given that even with it being a SARH missile the amount of clutter would have meant that the Sparrow wouldn't have received a good enough return to home on.

Please delete this

If a CDS controlling a Sea Sparrow system was tracking a spurious target, the illuminator will be pointed in the wrong direction (a automatically aimed illuminator would optimize range performance, and thus likely have a much narrower beam than the early manually aimed version) and won't be shining the target.

And that "leaving it up to the missile" idea probably was disliked. Remember how weak computers really were back then.

There weren't that many Stingers globally in 1982. As for Blowpipe, it is MCLOS, and that guidance type has enough trouble hitting relatively slow moving tanks, let alone planes.

BTW, re ASROC, the lack of any ASROC/Ikara even on dedicated antisub designs is probably reflective of the British deciding to go with helicopters as the distant delivery system. Under such circumstances, to use a less effective (at the time) antiair system just to install a system of tertiary importance probably won't sell, especially since they had just shafted Carrier Aviation and needed all the missile air defence they can arrange.