Demise of British tank industry foretold admitted

[SUBMAN1]

Ah oh! Crap Europe! WTH are you good for anymore? The UK is the last country over there with any decent know how on weapon technology. What else you got? That POS Rafeal fighter? Eurofighter puts it to shame.

And Skybird wonders why we spend so much on defense. No one is left to watch our back, and if we fall, Europe falls harder and faster. Maybe that is why he harps on our credit issues. He knows what happens if we go down.... Then again....

-S


Can't make flintlock muskets any more, either

Oh woe! The country which invented the tank (Blighty) may soon no longer have a tank industry! The end of yet another era is at hand. It's just like Concorde! And the Vulcan, Lightning, etc. Let gloom be unconfined - Santa won't be bringing any more British tanks for Christmas in years to come.

Or so says the British tank industry, anyway. The last fortnight has seen several reports in the business press on the possible imminent doom of UK tank-making, following a recent MoD budgeting announcement by Defence secretary John Hutton. In addition to pushing back any serious spending on the Navy's planned new aircraft carriers, Mr Hutton also effectively kicked into touch the long wrangled-over Future Rapid Effects System (FRES) "Utility Vehicle" (UV).


The FRES UV was to be something of a miracle: an armoured off-road ride tough enough to keep our soldiers safe, yet light enough to be air freighted.


Given that even 60-tonne Main Battle Tanks like the current Challenger - too heavy for realistic air freighting - can be opened up by basic roadside bombs or buried mines, this was always going to be difficult to build.


But a lot of money was going to be spent on it. Overall, the whole FRES programme was expected to see £14bn or more of taxpayers' cash handed out in the next decade or two, producing the UV and accompanying miracle-tanks to replace much of the Army's current, embarrassingly aged combat vehicle fleet.


In addition, needless to say, that £14bn could also have made the British tank industry bloom like a rose. At the moment, this industry is effectively moribund. The various grand old names of yesteryear - tank-builders Alvis and Vickers, and the former government cannon factories, Royal Ordnance - are nowadays amalgamated as BAE Land Systems. There are at least five massive, decaying old sites still open - Newcastle, Barrow, Leicester, Telford and Wolverhampton - but nowadays fewer than 2,000 employees left working at them, mostly maintaining and supporting existing vehicles.


Now, with FRES UV kicked into touch and no consolation bar a vague assertion that the Army will focus first on FRES Scout, the rump UK armour industry can see no certain income ahead of it. On cue, the usual suspects push the industry line:


"Tanks for the memories", says the FT. "Threat to Britain's last tank maker," thunders the Mail. "A bitter blow to Britain, particularly because the country invented the fighting vehicle". Bloomberg says "Britain, where the tank was invented during World War I, may be unable to build armored vehicles".


It's true that Blighty invented the tank, but in strict point of fact our tanks have never done us much good. World War I was won without making any serious use of them. The most successful British tank of World War II was actually a US import, the Sherman. Perhaps as soon as 1944, close air support was beginning to elbow tanks and artillery off the battlefield throne, before the armoured juggernaut had even properly come together.(Self-propelled artillery and proper armoured infantry vehicles were still rare then. Even more so were logistics chains which could extend fast enough to keep up with them.)


Certainly by the 1970s, just as fully-equipped armoured warfare was starting to become a reality, it was becoming more and more obsolete. General Sir Rupert Smith, commander of the last division-strength armoured force ever put into the field by the UK in 1991, stated in his recent book The Utility of Force that the last ever battles to be settled by tanks - as opposed to air support - took place in 1973. Not in the Iraq invasion of 2003, nor under his own and Norman Schwarzkopf's command in 1991: but in the Sinai and the Golan Heights, nearly four decades ago.

Tanks proper - specialised Main Battle Tanks, designed to fight their own kind - are finished, as dead as the all-big-gun battleship (another British innovation). Fighting tanks can't survive under hostile skies, and under friendly skies they have no purpose.


But armoured vehicles are still a big deal, as the past several years have shown. Buried mines and roadside shaped charges can blast through just as much armour as a tank cannon's hypervelocity penetrator. Thus, British and allied troops still prefer to ride behind heavy protection if they can. They also like the ability to get about offroad.


But how much mobility, and how much armour? In Afghanistan, there are lots of places where nothing much but a mule can get along. Often enough, troops operating in these places choose to have no armour whatsoever on their vehicles - quad bikes, Wolf Landrovers etc - if they even use ground vehicles at all. By contrast, there are places in Iraq where the choice is all armour and almost zero mobility - there are vehicles in service there which can't really go off road at all.


It might just be that there is no one-size-fits-all-wars solution, even in counterinsurgency fighting.


Then, apart from the real world, there are the demands of the possible future worlds, usually closely related to the needs of certain service communities to carry on existing. If all you had was FRES UVs, operated by ordinary Tom-Dick-&-Harry soldiers, people might question the need for specialist tank units. So in fact there is talk of FRES Scout and FRES Heavy: in order that the present British cavalry, now mounted in antique Recce tracks and Challenger battle tanks, can have a distinct future to look forward to. No matter that robot surveillance-planes would seem to have stolen the Scout's job as conclusively as air support has stolen the Heavy's, we nonetheless plan to have both.


And while one may beg leave to doubt that we really need Scouts and Heavies as such, it is fair to suggest that more serious ground threats can still appear. Portable guided missiles, able to launch from afar to blast through any practical thickness of armour from above or aside, are already common in Western armies. Our soldiers will need an option for dealing with this threat, which will start to become more and more common - the Israelis are already encountering it.


Frankly, this isn't a debate which is going to be solved in a hurry. There almost certainly isn't any one design - or even any vaguely-related series of designs - which could sort the British Army out even for the counterinsurgency wars it will definitely fight in the next decades. Even if there was such a solution, the Army's squabbling subcultures could never agree to adopt it - their separate existences very largely depend on the differences in their present vehicles. The cavalry are no more likely to admit that tanks are outmoded than the navy is to admit that a surface warship is mainly useful for carrying aircraft. (The big-gun battleship mindset is far from dead, in fact.)


One thing's for sure, though. Our armoured-vehicles industry is actually pretty much moribund. Our defence-electronics and subsystems business is sound, but far from comprehensive - and it needs to use overseas bits. As a result, we cannot build the fighting vehicle of tomorrow on our own - certainly not the proper one, able to track incoming guided weapons and frustrate them somehow. We couldn't even build a jazzed-up old style main battle tank on our own; not that it matters. Nobody needs frontally-armoured flat trajectory hypervelocity guns able to shoot sideways going over cabbages at 60mph any more. Nobody should really worry about the loss of that particular set of design skills.


So it's pretty foolish to mourn the lost era when mighty Blighty could make its own tanks, the more so recalling that our best ever for-real combat tank was the Sherman.


The other thing to remember is that the present state of the UK tank industry is a matter of conscious choices made over the past eight years and more by its owner, BAE Systems plc. The money which might have allied BAE Land Systems with Europe to build a real contender (imagine a British/German tank, now) was spent instead in the States. So it hardly becomes BAE Systems to blame the government for the passing of Blighty's (nonexistent) tank superiority.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12...out/page2.html

[fatty]

Originally Posted by SUBMAN1

Ah oh! Crap Europe! WTH are you good for anymore? The UK is the last country over there with any decent know how on weapon technology. What else you got? That POS Rafeal fighter? Eurofighter puts it to shame.

[SUBMAN1]

Hey man - Eurofighter is a good aircraft! It may not be an F-22, but it will beat any other production plane out there at the moment. It is sadly looking like the last decent bit of hardware Europe will put together however.

-S

[UnderseaLcpl]

Originally Posted by SUBMAN1

The UK is the last country over there with any decent know how on weapon technology.

What? You are aware that our own M1A2 uses a Rheinmetall 120mm smoothbore, right. Our primary infantry small arms are manufactured by Fabrique Nationale, and our most advanced military radios are built around components designed by Siemens. And that's to say nothing of the latest generation of Leopard tanks, which might be the only tank in the World that could give the Abrams a run for its' money.

Besides, it isn't as if the U.K. has a history of superior tank design. Besides making the first tanks, their only other real success was the fitting of the 17-pdr gun to the Sherman, which was a crappy tank in its' own right. The Chieftain, Challenger and Conqueror tanks certainly weren't paragons of good tank design, either.

What is this "decent" know how that only the British have, and what does it have to do with their tanks?

[Letum]

I agree. It is hard to think of a really origional and innovative British weapon that proved
it's self in combat after 1900.

[joegrundman]

the hedgehog

[Lurchi]

The Spitfire & Mosquito with Merlin engine?
How about the 15inch Mk. I gun and the Spearfish torpedo also Trafalgar submarines?

I think the Brits (or Europe) just don't boast so much - that doesn't mean that there is no adequate technology available ...

[A Very Super Market]

I thought the Challenger 2 was a fine tank. And the Centurion. Sea Harriers are the only successful VTOL aircraft in history.

[Letum]

Originally Posted by Lurchi

The Spitfire & Mosquito with Merlin engine?
How about the 15inch Mk. I gun and the Spearfish torpedo also Trafalgar submarines?

I think the Brits (or Europe) just don't boast so much - that doesn't mean that there is no adequate technology available ...

The Mosquito, maybe, but it was only any use as an idea for the few years between
it's invention and the invention of the jet.

The spitfire had plenty of counterparts.

[A Very Super Market]

The FW 190 comes into mind...

Britian really didn't have to care about making aircraft after the US came in, why build Spitfires and Hurricanes when you can have P-38s, 51s, and 47s?

[joegrundman]

I don't think that is true - Britain's war economy remained in overdrive right up to the end

[A Very Super Market]

Sorry, I meant designing.

[AntEater]

Rafale (Can't ANYONE ever spell that right?) is about as good as the Eurofighter.
Some individual subsystems are better and there are dedicated two seat strike and carrier based variants the EF so far lacks.
Actually Rafale is an example what happens when a single european country develops a high tech very expensive weapons system today.
They got stuck with it, but it seems they might sell it to Ghaddafi

Also, EU countries, contrary to the US, have continued to develop usable land vehicles.
No MBTs, though. AFAIK only China, South Korea and Russia (though nobody has seen it yet) are developing new MBTs.
Germany, Finland and some others have developed new IFVs in shorter time recently than it takes the US defense industry to make a powerpoint presentation.
But the vaunted Stryker is based on a swiss design, of all things.
The FRES program sounds like the usual defence (its britain, after all ) contractor bull**** today.
They can't just say "we need a new generation of APCs, IFVs and MBTs".
No, it's the "Future Rapid Effect System"!
:rotfl:
Funny is that for the utility vehicle section the Boxer was originally a joint project of Germany, the Netherlands and the UK, but the UK dropped it for "unsuitability".
This was not because the design was not good but because the brits introduced new demands (has to fit into a C-130) in order to get BAE systems a solo contract!
This backfired because BAE systems was not able to produce a APC that fit into a C-130 either, so the Boxer was quietly reintroduced into the competition, this time as a foreign offer...
British arms procurement unfortunately starts to emulate the Pentagon.

[XabbaRus]

I disagree with that. The Spitfire was upgraded during the war as well as the Tempest.

The Spitfire fit the needs of the airforce at the time.

AFter the war we had many aircraft designs. It was just that economic realities and some stupid govt. decisions that got in the way.

As for Tanks the Centurion, Chieften and Challenger tanks have been very effective.

Also I often wonder about these big announcements. Could more like be scare tactics.

Ah I see where you got this article. Lewis Page of the register. There is something you should know about him. He is ex RN and from having surfed forums for RN personnel he is regarded as an ass. He commanded a mine sweeper and was then let go from the RN. Generally it is considered that he has a chip on his shoulder as wide as the English channel and knows exactly how to aim his stories. He isn't exactly objective.

The Rafale, I'm not so impressed with it. Sure it might be equal to the Typhoon but it is subject to worse fanboyism than the Typhoon. Just go to the strategypage forums to see a French guy who claims that the thing has plasma stealth, that SPECTRA makes it invisible and that it can do accurate completely passive BVR engagements.

He seems to forget that the Rafale can't self designate which the Typhoon now can with the sniper pod.

[AntEater]

What the vaunted SPECTRA is or isn't is up to speculation, as the Armee de'l Air sofar has not demonstrated these capabilities even to its NATO allies.
It may really be an attempt at active radar wave cancellation (like the Athena device in some Steven Coontz novels), but you'd need some serious hardware and software to blind old-fashioned radars this way.
Against modern frequency agile AESA radars, I am not sure active cancellation is feasible short of using a supercomputer on board.
But the french certainly have a hand for electronic warfare, both ECM and ESM and might be world leaders on that field.
Problem is, even if SPECTRA works as (not) advertised, Ghaddafi won't get a Rafale invisible to conventional radar, most likely Brazil won't either, mainly because Brazil has the capability to reverse-engineer the thing and sell it much cheaper.
The other features of SPECTRA are the same as DASS in the Eurofighter.

Re designation, integrating a targeting pod into the Rafale should be feasible.

Generally, France does everything in house, while Britain let its defence industry become full-time capitalist, and went further in privatization than even the US did, by privatizing its entire military R&D branch as QuinetiQ.
In France, the leading naval technology company, DCNS is a state owned institution, basically like the british naval dockyards of old.
Ironically, this means that large parts of the design work for the CVF project were done by nobody else but the Republic of France.