Steady As She Sinks!

thats great news for the naval ship building industry.
I note that the Clyde will be receiving a fair share of the work.good on yea Big Gordon.

Anyway there is bugger all you can do against nature.why throw money at an unsolvable problem?when nature goes for it there is not a lot that can be done anyway

Vessels and Vassals

Another free gift to the corporate sector from Mr Fiscal Prudence, which will have the added benefit of letting empire enthusiasts indulge in militaristic fantasies at the expense of the rest of us. With the world on the brink of mutual destruction the genius of 'new labour' has triumphed again, with another destructive and fundamentally useless project. Of course, theres nothing like towing a floating town full of daft kids and overpriced technology to the middle of the Persian Gulf to deter domestic terrorism. And of course such blatant displays of unbridled power will also encourage likely targets to abandon their wicked nuclear ambitions and welcome our liberating cruise missles. 

There's no need for alarm from the Stock Market or the rich, either. They no longer suffer the vulgar indignity of paying even insignificant taxes.  So only the poor will be obliged to finance Brown's grotesque meglamania. I understand they're to be named after Lucky Liz and the slobbering Dauphin. How appropriate. It is because these stupid  vessls are fundamentally  useless, out of date and grotesquely expensive, too...?

Actually, there's a lot you can do, like building levees. What happened was that DEFRA loused up the single farm payments so badly, Brussels fined them 350 million pounds, and Gordon Brown told DEFRA that he would not make up the shortfall--that they would have to do it out of their existing budget. So DEFRA promptly slashed its flood defence budget and--presto! Britain is flooded.

Computer generated images give an idea of the size of the planned new aircraft carriers

Well, they're blatantly too small for a start!  Just look at the plane next to it - you'd be lucky getting two of those on the top deck!  What a waste of money.  You could get a better one down Hamleys.

big ships are obsolete thanks to these.

The 3M82 "Mosquito" missiles have the fastest flying speed among all antiship missiles in today's world. It reaches Mach 3 at a high altitude and its maximum low-altitude speed is M2.2, triple the speed of the American Harpoon. The missile takes only 2 minutes to cover its full range and manufacturers state that 1-2 missiles could incapacitate a destroyer while 1-5 missiles could sink a 20000 ton merchantman. An extended range missile, 9M80E is now available.

When slower missiles, like the French Exocet are used, the maximum theoretical response time for the defending ship is 150-120 seconds. This provides time to launch countermeasures and employ jamming before deploying "hard" defense tactics such as launching missiles and using quick-firing artillery. But the 3M82 "Mosquito" missiles are extremely fast and give the defending side a maximum theoretical response time of merely 25-30 seconds, rendering it extremely difficult employ jamming and countermeasures, let alone fire missiles and quick-firing artillery.

so what you have nowadays are huge floating expensive coffins.Obviously the politicians are blind to today's tech

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMqyWotOUz0

How is this high-tech rubbish - obsolete since the end of the Cold War - going to stop bombs going off on the London tube? It might indeed provide some employment for people in Barrow and on the Clyde and enormous profits for the CEO's of BAe and Vickers etc and handsome divis for members of the Carlyle Group - my application to join got turned down - but it has nothing to do with low intensity, lo-tech C21st 4th Generational warfare.

What do we need? Lots of squaddies. Quite intelligent squaddies. Squaddies that speak different languages. Armouries and equipment that can be assembled at the last moment to cope with the peculiar circumstances of whatever scrape it is we've just got ourselves into. Not these vastly over-inflated inflexible companies who're about as manoeverable as oil tankers. I remember that story from the Falklands where GEC had spent 15 years on a grossly over-inflated programme to supply computers to the RN. They were years behind in their delivery and the price had been constantly upped and still not ready when the Fleet were about to sail. So the Navy simply went down to their local stores, bought several hundred computers, and jury-rigged them on the voyage to the South Atlantic. They didn't have automatic backup as the GEC ones would have had, they simply took out one computer and stuck in another pre-programmed one.

This is a scam.

Perhaps these carriers will be of use in assisting the US to continue its 3rd World War.

i.e. war on the 3rd world, who lack retaliatory ability. -

see - ://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18028.htm

It's a 2hr. vid. but interesting. esp. Philip Agee's 1991 talk at 58mins. in .

The new aircraft carriers will indeed be generically obsolete before they are launched. Arguably, indeed, they are obsolete now. The old saying has it that generals always prepare to fight the last war. In 1939, the UK was all ready for a repeat of 1918, down to the squadrons of (admittedly elderly) battleships. The great revelation of WW2 was air power, one aspect of which was the rise of the aircraft carrier to unchallenged supremacy in fleet-scale naval actions. By 1945, in the Pacific theatre, battleships were no longer regarded as capital ships in anything but name. Carriers were the only capital ships.

In the intervening 62 years (yes, what a long time it's been!) the US Navy has been encouraged to go on building huge, expensive carriers by the fact that it has never had to fight a real naval war. In Korea, and much later in Iraq, the carriers could stand off undefended enemy coasts and bombard pretty much at leisure. While the aircraft occasionally caught it from enemy fighters and missiles, no one ever presumed to attack a carrier. In spite of their many obvious shortcomings, the movie "Top Gun" and Patrick Robinson's thriller "Kilo Class" give a clear idea just how vulnerable those lumbering waterborne mammoths really are. The USA's CVNs cost about $4.5 billion each to build, $250 million a year to operate, and close to 1 billion to decommission. With a 25-year active lifespan, that's an annual depreciation of over $400 million and a total cost of over $10 billion. A typical CVN's crew numbers over 6,000.

"Top Gun" illustrated how intensely vulnerable these ships would be to a really determined attack with state-of-the-art weapons. No matter how good the defenses, you would still be trying to shield an immense floating box from missiles and/or torpedoes coming from any and all directions - conceivably including ballistic weapons coming in from above. It's hard to think of a single military or naval target that would better justify the expenditure of a nuclear warhead. "Kilo Class" features a scenario in which a near-silent (hence undetectable) ex-Soviet diesel submarine attacks a CVN with a nuclear-tipped torpedo.

The US CVNs remind me a lot of HMS Hood, the last and biggest of the Royal Navy' battlecruisers. Completed (mercifully) too late to see action in WW1, she spend the interwar years cruising the world as a representative of Britain's naval power. Everyone was awed by "the mighty Hood", with her immense length, sweeping curves, snow-white decks and polished brass. When a shooting war began, however, it took the German squadron of Bismarck and Prinz Eugen just a few minutes to destroy Hood totally; like her ill-fated predecessors at Jutland, she blew up in a huge explosion and was gone forever. The CVNs have spent decades sailing around looking impressive, and flying off missions to bomb or shoot up defenceless enemies. (Well, if they weren't enemies before they certainly were after). If they got into a shooting war against a properly-equipped enemy, they might quite plausibly vanish like pricked balloons, just as Hood did.

So now we decide the time is ripe to join this exclusive club? Look at it this way. Blair and his friends are always on about how old-fashioned and inefficient the Victorians were, and how much faster progress is today. From the end of WW2 to now is 62 years. From the American Civil War to WW1 was just 53 years. Going to war with scaled-up versions of 1945 carriers today would be like sending Merrimac and Monitor into battle against the German High Seas Fleet of 1945.

As a former inhabitant (but not, I hope, "a daft kid") of one of the UK's floating towns I speak with a certain amount of experience - although it was 40 years ago. Perhaps the biggest problem with an aircraft carrier is the re-supply chain. Even though the ship itself may be nuclear-powered, its aircraft are not. Jet aircraft use huge amounts of fuel which, in intensive flying operations, means that the replenishment at sea (RAS) has to be carried out every few days and that is not counting the re-supply of weapons and the simple basics of life like food. When RASing, the carrier is sailing in very close formation with a supply ship and the combination is totally unmanoeuverable and therefore vulnerable. Worse still, the supply ships themselves have to re-supply and en route between the carrier air group and the land-based facility are completely unprotected. A cunning enemy merely has to interdict the supply chain (without having to encounter a defensive shield) and the whole shooting match very quickly comes to a grinding halt.

Military usefulness is a sort of  tenth order consideration to government planners - they know the ships are functionally redundant, but just don't care. The real purpose of the project is to keep the system of state capitalism functioning by ensuring a steady flow of money into corporate coffers. And to provide photo opportunities for senior politicians to pose manfully on the poop deck. Welcome to Britain's welfare state for the rich.

The Russians abandoned the aircraft carrier idea many years ago, these are just gunboat diplomacy penis extensions.

I suspect that war in the future - and I pray that there isn't too much of it - is going to be low-tech and people intensive, not hi-tech and people exclusive. American wars are run by groups of generals in bunkers in Florida. And it shows.

Incidentally, Craig Brown has a great article he wrote for the Mail - available on his website - about the connections between heroin and the West in the Afghan War. Good discussion afterwards - especially on the links between intelligence agencies and funny money and governments and criminals.

Has "The Mail" been the most consistently antiwar paper since 2001 - and why?

remember the Falklands war.One of those old fashioned Exocet missiles sunk a Brit ship.

Ponder this.

Note: If the frequent unexploded bombs (1-13) had detonated on striking some of the ships listed below, the Royal Navy's additional losses might quite possibly have put the eventual success of the British Task Force in doubt.

www.naval-history.net/F62brshipslost.htm

"...the German High Seas Fleet of 1945".

Sorry about that; I meant to write "1914".

Plus Ça Change, Plus C'est La Même Chose, looks like Gordon has not learnt any lessons recently. Nasty addiction that.

Whoever is in possession of the Falkland Islands, South Georgia own a part of the South Pole.
The agreement...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Antarctic_Territory

A recent survey (a few years ago) of the potential off mineral and oil wealth of the British/USA sectors was carried out at the South pole.Details of this report as far as I know were never published maybe because of sensitive information?.I did read that the USA were none to pleased at the report on their sector?but British officials had a big smile on their faces on the reports findings on there sector?. We could be talking off HUGH amounts of wealth?.I know that some big names in the financial world have been seen boarding planes in Tierra del Fuego to fly over the South pole.As climate change has taken place it has become MUCH more habital,many parts now have no snow or ice for miles.

This was the reason Thatcher was so keen to hang on to the Falkland Islands, South Georgia. It was known even back then that there might well be mineral and oil reserves there.

South Pole...

The ice road to the South Pole was built by U.S. contractors between 2001-2004 to enable the National Science Foundation to supply its science base at the pole using crawler tractors and sleds, cutting back cargo airplane flights.

http://www.usatoday.com/travel/news/2007-04-26-south-pole-tourism_N.htm 

I know the South Pole very well.

Lived and worked there for nearly 2and half years.

Real nice stuff. I like it. Keep it up !!!

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Arry

There was me thinking it was because she was the least popular Prime Minister since WW2 and had the choice of fighting or being thrown out of office.  No way would she have won in 83 or 84 coming off the back of British territory being seized by force.

There have been suggestions that the Falklands themselves have some of the black stuff around them, in fact, but I'm not sure what's been found, if anything.

Have you got any sources for the 'who-owns-the-Falklands-owns-a-bit-of-Antarctica' idea?  I thought that it was just divvied up between the big boys a while back.

Perhaps we need a discussion on what sort of defence policy we DO need in the C21st?

Who are our opponents going to be? Hardly the Europeans. I can't really see the Russians - too many other Europeans are too friendly with them. Something in the Middle East - to try and deal with the incredible instability we've wrought in the area. Third World fourth generation wars. (Would we need to be involved in these at all? Perhaps on a Commonwealth level) China. Could be. But I can't really see us putting on a big naval display in the Pacific. It would be 1941X10. India? Brazil?

Are the big threats in the future going to be "military" at all? Cyber wars? Attacking installations. Economic sanctions against us - its not just moslems with oil, China could cut off most of our consumer products, India has huge inroads into our cyber world and sales and call centres and just about everything. Diseases and viruses? Heathrow Airport must be just about the biggest open goal for this in the world.

I don't wish to sound paranoid. I just want to stimulate discussion. No one in this nostalgia-laden society seems interested in the future any longer.

Hi Tom

What I have read and heard is this. Any country that is directly facing the South pole gets a sector off it. The tip of Chile cuts Argentina off from directly facing the South pole that was the real reason they invaded the Falklands. As for...

"I know that some big names in the financial world have been seen boarding planes in Tierra del Fuego to fly over the South pole.As climate change has taken place it has become MUCH more habital,many parts now have no snow or ice for miles."

This I read on a web site I came across a few years ago, it was called something like `Letter from South America`  `Letter from Chile`  `Letter from Tierra del Fuego` . I had to wipe windows off and reload and never found the web site again, I had it booked marked along with a lot more, lost the lot.

Tom you try and find out things about the mineral and oil wealth of the South Pole you will hit a brick wall. You can bet on one thing deals are already done. To even think that the oil companies have not carried out surveys beggars belief it`s just they don`t want us to know. Maybe something to do with the enviromentilists?.

Tom

Found this...

http://foresight.stanford.edu:3455/SouthPole/685

http://foresight.stanford.edu:3455/SouthPole/690

Tom

To save you looking...

http://foresight.stanford.edu:3455/SouthPole/839

The North Pole...

"The Arctic's untapped resources include huge reserves of fuel and minerals. Now Moscow has raised tensions by dispatching an expedition to annex a vast expanse of the ocean."

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,2137048,00.html

The theft of the 'Irish Crown Jewels...

Frank Shackleton brother of Sir Ernest Shackleton...

http://homepage.tinet.ie/~seanjmurphy/irhismys/jewels.htm

http://www.sydenham.org.uk/frank_shackleton.html

http://www.doyle.com.au/order_st_patrick.htm

In the village I grew up in we knew a man who'd been on Sir Ernest Shackleton's expedition, amongst various other lantern-jawed early 20th century escapes (Russia during the Civil War, IIRC).