Il Regno Unito demolirà navi da guerra, elicotteri militari e flotte di droni per risparmiare denaro nonostante le minacce dall’estero
https://news.sky.com/story/uk-to-scrap-warships-military-helicopters-and-fleet-of-drones-to-save-money-despite-threats-abroad-13257285
di topotaul
34 Comments
[deleted]
Why are we so mind bogglingly stupid when it comes to literally anything?
couldn’t have come at a better time, what with Europe being as stable as ever.
> half a billion pounds over the next five years
That’s it? We’re diminishing our capabilities to save £100m a year?! I’m sure there are some corporate tax dodgers that could cough that up. Legalising and taxing weed could bring more income than this saves.
How depresingly short-sighted and unimaginative.
Removing a bunch of Military Assets that are outdated, had issues, costly to store, faced costly budget issues/delays/flaws, or are not really relvent to the type of Warfare that we are going to be facing, in order to make room for more budget to be spent on more effective areas of the Military… like “focus money on developing new innovative drone capabilities.”
It’s not taking money from the military, it’s saving money in the military to be spent in other areas of the military.
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Why is everyone so upset in this thread? It’s very clear in the article that all of you people that can’t read, in fact, didn’t read.
If you’re the type of person that read this headline, got mad and made an angry post like they wanted you to do, you’re laughable easy to maniplate XD Be embarased, you’re a pawn mate.
Hopefully the money can be used for something useful
>The defence secretary then spelt out what “difficult decisions” meant in reality.
The difficult decision is to tell us all that we need to pay a lot more for the upkeep of the country, yet none of them are prepared to do it.
So, what happens to the equipment/ships/etc we get rid of? Are we able to donate them to Ukraine(assuming they could use them)?
Obsolete equipment that is due to be scrapped anyway. 95% of the articles you see posted on Reddit are overexaggerated in someway or another.
Scrapping our LPDs to save £100m a year? Am I missing something here?
The Watch keeper drones part of this is scandalous. It’s not scandalous they’re being scrapped it’s scandalous they’re already obsolete. That was a £1.35bn development program (initial budget was half that, naturally), they were first declared ready in 2018 and they were meant to stay in service until 2042. They have a bit of a problem with crashing on practice flights so probably wouldn’t do great in more challenging scenarios.
Why, when we are the 6th biggest economy in the world are we constantly having to cut and being told there’s no money? Where is it? The messaging has been the same for years, “were spending more on defence”, then the next round of cuts are announced. What is going on?
How much do we spend on foreign aid? Yet we’re continue to be willing to sacrifice our own security.
One day in the far future I dream of a time when British people come to understand our declining relevance and focus on what matters: improving the lives of our citizens.
Laugh out loud that this is being framed as the decision has just been made like 10 minutes ago and its KS and Labours fault and guess what people biting as usual, critical thinking has died in this country along with half the western world it seems. These moves will have been months if not years in the planning.
Our government is run by idiots.
We have a country threatening to nuke us and we are still cutting back on our military? We should be building up, strengthening ourselves… not this stupidity.
Bulwark was supposed to take over from Albion early this year for the next 6ish years. For whatever reason maintenance wasn’t finished coupled with the struggle to generate a crew meant it was always an easier option to cut. That said it does throw the whole Littoral Response Group concept out of the window without those ships, the bays can pick up some of the slack but they’re being worked increasingly hard as it is.
The two wave tankers were all but decommissioned. Wave Knight hasn’t been to sea since 2021 and Wave Ruler not since 2020. It’s a shame to see them go but they are less capable than the 4 tide tankers and the RFA are struggling to generate crew for anything at the moment. I’m surprised they didn’t do Fort Victoria as well in all honesty.
HMS Northumberland, not at all surprised really either. A 32 year old ship that has been run hard, most recently getting smashed about in the north sea/north Atlantic chasing submarines. Uneconomical to repair it is putting it politely, even if they had a blank check to write for her the navy would likely only get another 5-8 years from her max. I suspect they learned a lot from the refit of Iron Duke and decided it would turn out similarly.
Regarding the Pumas, afaik they are in the process of being replaced anyway although no idea how far along that process is. The chinooks I can’t really comment on either only if they are still airworthy I don’t see what the issue is. Same with the drones, I don’t know nearly enough to comment.
For me it’s a bit of a non announcement really, all that has really changed is the on paper strength. For the ships at least there was very little chance of any of them ever going back to sea.
Am I the only one who is way more worried about civil war than other countries invading us? Things are getting so bad here, it wouldn’t surprise me if people full out rebelled against the government.
Scrapping HMS Albion and HMS Bulwark is actually fucking mental with no replacement anywhere close to insight. It’s possibly worse than the aircraft carrier gap we had. Wtf are we doing honestly.
Pretty wild comments from people who clearly haven’t read the article.
While I understand these are outdated assets, usually they are scrapped when the replacement arrives. Outdated is better than nothing.
But I think the UK is just cheaping out to save cash to put towards some of labours own goals and will then rely on the rest of NATO to bail us out if need be.
“UK modernises military by reallocating funds away from outdated platforms, military budget set to increase to 2.5% or £87 Billion by 2030”
Fixed your headline for you
I don’t like labour but cmon Sky News, that’s a very disingenuous headline.
Will we have anything replacing the 2 ships? Because this was an issue last year (?) and the ships were saved.
Old stuff can go, but those drones are about 5 years old
The RFA ships were needing replacement anyway and we were undertaking procurement for that.
The Drones are surplus to requirements.
Northumberland is old and it doesn’t make sense to keep her going.
Albion and Bulwark are old but I feel like they are of more use to us than those two flat tops.
The Pumas have been on the chopping block since the last labour government. But they need to be replaced.
I personally think we should focus on defence rather than force projection.
The Carriers aren’t going to be much use if we go to war with Russia.
Give them to Ukraine, cheaper and better use than just getting rid of them
The absolute state of the rage baited buffoons in the comments.
I’ve worked on both Albion, Bulwark, other types 23s and I can say they are a colossal waste of money to keep. War has changed and time has not be kind to the type 23s. These ships were designed in the 1980s! Northumberland is in such a structural state the time and cost to repair isn’t economical. It’s akin to putting a rusted out old banger from the 1980s through an MOT just for it to fail the following MOT.
Do people really think we’d scrap them just to save money at the cost of our Navy’s strength? Our Navy is seeing massive investment as it stands ship wise. If the recruitment issue is solved the 2030s will see a strong Royal Navy.
Almost all of these things were scrapped in all but name anyway, we’ve just been keeping them on life support (at cost) for the sake of trying to save face. Rip the band aid off and use the money to fix recruitment and retention, seems like a sound idea to me.
A little bit out there but I understand we cant give all public departments all the money they would like but if we decided that Department of X, Y & Z all had a fixed percentage budget of government spend as a proportion of tax intake, would that make them make smarter budget decisions I wonder?
That goes for the sacred cows such as the NHS and Social Security – including pensions too.
If you knew that your department gets X% of all UK tax spending and its on you to spend that money wisely, then surely department heads would make the wisest spending choices?
A lot of current military equipment, in service in the UK but also in places like the USA, was specified to fight Russia.
The biggest threat right now is a war with China, equipment to fight that war has very different requirements due to how far away China is, the fact China is much better equipped, can counter many of our existing platforms, the geography of where the war would be conducted and just due to the shear distances that would need to be navigated in that theatre.
As a result we need to invest and develop different equipment, not obsolete equipment that will serve no purpose against the largest threat.
Before someone points out that Russia is currently in Ukraine and we should prepare to fight that war, Russia couldn’t even take Ukraine and beat an army using our last generation tech.
We are already at war with Russia. This is Chamberlin-esque. “Peace in our time.” that horse has bolted
This definitely won’t come back to bite us on the arse
Great idea after we’ve effectively just lobbed some missles at Russia. Real Big brains running the show here.