Editorial

The Sound of Silence
16 February 2005

The silence is starting to become ominous. 

There was a hope that 2005 would open with the  critical Future aircraft carrier (CVF) Main Gate investment decision, a decision originally expected way back in December 2003.  Clearly it did not. 

Instead we were thrown a small, and rather dubious, crumb of comfort in the form of an announcement by the Defence Secretary on 10th February that Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) had been selected as the preferred “Physical Integrator”  - a selection made after several months of pubic controversy about the leaked choice.  BAE Systems added fuel to fire by making plain that they don’t understand why there’s a need for a PI at all.  The next  3 months will now be spent deciding the small print of the contract about what KBR can and can not do – cost to the taxpayer – a mere £5 million.  

The whole Physical Integrator issue is just one example of the re-emergence of issues in regards to the CVF Project that had been thought to be settled or nearly settled back back in January 2003.   We remain in the situation were, publicly at least, CVF Main Gate seems further away that it was in January 2003, when far more seem to be agreed than it is now. 

Even the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Alan West, seems to be losing patience with the ever lengthening delays, he is quoted in a recent interview with International Fleet Review magazine as saying: “The key ... is to get the the order for the new carriers in place.  We need to order the carriers and start cutting steel.  There have been statements from Ministers to the effect hat they will be ordered and it is Government policy to build them.  Even so we have still not got there. ... There is is no doubt that we have taken some hits on the current fleet in order to enable that to happen.  The structure we are creating which includes cuts in the short term. does not make sense without the new carriers."  If he's saying that in public, there can be little doubt of the battles being fought by the Royal Navy within the portals of the MOD to finally get CVF funded and approved.   

Interestingly there are reports that a shrinking of the CVF design to fit within the original (year 2000) £2.9 billion construction budget has been definitively rejected, the MOD seems have concluded that a small CVF makes no sense because the aviation facilities would be so much reduced that the ships become very poor value for money, but it is still playing brinkmanship on whether it will pay the £3.5-4.0 billion needed for the larger design (60,000 tones, 280m and 40+ aircraft) that the Royal Navy has set its sights on.  A comprise of a £3.5 billion programme, fitted “for but not with” a mass of equipment seems likely.  Exactly were the RN will make the cuts to fund the subsequent Incremental Acquisition Programme remains to be seen, particularly as FSC has already gone.

There are also persistent reports that the MOD is seriously considering completing the new carriers in a conventional (CTOL) configuration with catapults and arresting gear, carrying E-2 Hawkeye's and F-35C JSF's.  The additional costs for the carrier platform would be met by savings realised by switching from the F-35B to the F-35C, unfortunately its unclear exactly what these savings would be! 

It appears that the CVF design has now finally been matured to the stage where when all other factors (cost, budgets, schedules, work allocation, project management, industrial structures, ...) have been resolved, then Main Gate and entry in to the Demonstration and Manufacture Phase is possible.  MOD sources are hinting that Main Gate is now likely to occur in the Summer, a few months after the General Election widely expected in early May, but that's assuming that there's no new Defence Secretary who wants to review the project.  Just for the record, the CVA-01 design displaced about 56,700 tonnes and was 928ft long (excluding bridle catcher) when cancelled in February 1966 by Denis Healey after his Defence Review.

Elsewhere, Swan Hunter seems to have done itself no favours with the delays to the its two Bay-class LSD(A)’s, and blackmailing the MOD in to paying it an extra £84 million with the threat (real or otherwise) of bankruptcy.  This time round its chairman, Mr Jaap Kroese, may have calculated correctly that the MOD couldn’t afford to end up with two half completed LSD(A)’s in the hands of a receiver, or the loss of shipyard capacity with CVF and MARS still in prospect towards the end of the decade, but as an institution the MOD has an elephant like memory and one day… .

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