Miles

Bourgeois Intelligentsia | Football, History, & Politics | Civ Nat | Gaullist | Disraelite | Keynesian | Georgist | Mahananite

[Miles @pe_nng]

Common sense policies from the #SDP

[Miles @pe_nng]

Not having proper carriers (& only two of them), no escorts, amphibious capability & barely able to keep the SS fleet at sea is looking splendid chaps.

Drones though, just think about all our drones…

[IISS News @IISS_org]

The People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) carrier force is expanding, becoming a highly visible and prestigious part of China’s military modernisation under President Xi Jinping.

The latest IISS edition analyses developments in PLAN aviation, including advancements in carrier aviation. The carrier Fujian boasts the PLAN’s largest carrier air wing. Low-observable combat aircraft, catapult-assisted multi-role combat aircraft, electronic warfare aircraft, AEW&C aircraft, and anti-submarine warfare helicopters now comprise its air wing. These aircraft types form the ‘five essentials for carriers’ and share many similarities with a US carrier air wing.

✏️ @Olivia_Parker07 & Dzaky Naradichiantama

Read the in-depth analysis: https://t.co/N545UbfhoY

[Alex Luck @AlexLuck9]

If you need an illustration just how detached political thinking in UK defence circles has become from operational reality, watch this video.

Starting with drone-fied F-35s, and ending with a strange USV carrying a massive gun for the "hybrid navy".

[Miles @pe_nng]

This is a great idea, why has no one thought of it

[Britsky @TBrit90]

What if we took all these missile, radar and command ships, and just combined them in to one hull, with easier integration, connectivity and a small crew for maintenance. Maybe even call it a destroyer or something.

[Miles @pe_nng]

Portugal should be in their home kit

[Defence With A 'C' @defencewithac]

'Ukraine brain' is becoming a serious and pervasive disease. Helicopters have suffered heavy casualties since their inception. Their utility remains exceptional in spite of this.

[Matthew @Lux1090]

The history of post-war Britain is essentially the educated middle class giddily, gleefully taking a sledgehammer to every single load-bearing pillar in society in the belief that the roof will somehow stay up through the sheer force of our own cleverness.

We're now finding out.

[Matthew Warwick @mpwarwick]

Please can someone explain how splitting an air defence system over multiple hulls, using technology that doesn’t exist and in a navy that doesn’t have have CEC yet, delivers the same capability for less cost?

[Mike Jones @technopopulist]

Ignore the Orwellian doublespeak about free speech and misinformation. Labour is throwing its toys out of the pram because it's losing the online war now that Musk has de-censored the platform. To rub salt into the wound, Labour's uber-woke allies on Bluesky are largely ignored by everyone else and increasingly mocked as a gaggle of creepy sex pests.

[Miles @pe_nng]

@defencewithac QE’s *should* be able to carry ~53 B’s each. We currently have 47 without further orders. At least an extra 12 B would allow us to fly a full airgroup with attrition/training B’s for one of the carriers

[Zaphod Beeblebrox @Zaphod2042]

The Royal Navy is so committed to robotics, even the ships are now designed by AI....

[CJ @UnderSneege]

Asylum seekers accommodation like the below is paid for by the Home Office while the asylum claim is being processed. This can take many forms but is paid for by the taxpayer. As egregious as it is, it is also easy to monitor and track.

Post-asylum claim they frequently (if not the majority of the time) declare themselves homeless and move to local government funded temporary accommodation. This is a less understood but much bigger scandal.

From there on, as homeless people with a right to be in Britain, they are often a priority allocation to move to permanent social housing. Even if they are not moved to permanent housing, the cost of temporary accommodation is so high that it makes purchasing almost any house available on the market a cheaper alternative for the local authority.

The cost of direct asylum accommodation is estimated to be £1.5BN per year for the next 10 years but NO ONE knows what the lifetime cost of the claimant is running at since post-asylum claim it is amalgamated into hundreds of other Local Government budgets and general welfare bills.

[John Foreman CBE @John_ForemanCBE]

'If the nuclear enterprise is removed from the calculations, the RN’s core funding is actually far below that of the Land and Air domains, a curious imbalance for a maritime nation...The DIP falls short in many areas and the maritime capability has absorbed a disproportionate share of the trade-offs. Whether 2026 will be seen as a positive turning point or a disastrous misstep for the RN will very much hinge on whether the high-risk hybrid navy vision is achievable'

Yep. We're still trying to do everything and can't prioritise to save our lives.

[Miles @pe_nng]

@ItsTaz1989 Tbh the MRSS is a terrible design, at least the ATS will be able to complete the task at hand

[Miles @pe_nng]

Has been the case since 1945. Managed decline

[Jennifer Parker @JAParker29]

I generally avoid dramatic takes. But I’ve found myself wondering over the past 24 hrs whether we’ll look back on these announcements as the point the Royal Navy really ceased to be a credible navy. I say that with the deepest respect for the RN.

What has been announced is still largely theoretical. They hope to have it operational in around 10 yrs, based on platforms, designs & capabilities that don’t yet exist. While Russia continues to press, harass & the prospect of conflict sits on the horizon.

To me, this looks less like making the hard spending decisions and more like managing the Royal Navy’s decline. I genuinely hope I’m wrong.

[Adam @AdamJoseph]

England are forcing Elliot Anderson & Declan Rice together the same way they did Lampard & Gerrard. It is not the right blend of profiles.

[Britsky @TBrit90]

AI slop video.

[Armchair Admiral 🇬🇧 @ArmchairAdml]

Huge mistake not to buy more of each. The P-8s are being worked like dogs too.

[Miles @pe_nng]

Well said

[Maxi @AllForProgress_]

After the Second World War, anthropologists found islanders in the Pacific building airstrips out of nothing. They had watched American servicemen clear runways, put on headphones and wave paddles, and watched the cargo planes come down out of the sky with riches in their holds. So when the Americans left, the islanders built their own runways of packed earth, their own control towers of bamboo, headphones carved from wood, and waited for the planes to come. They had copied everything about the miracle except the part that made it work.

We call it a cargo cult, and this week the British state built one out of the Royal Navy.

The Defence Investment Plan cancels the Type 83, the destroyer that was meant to replace our ageing handful of Type 45s and give the fleet a serious air and missile defence for the 2030s. In its place we are promised six "Common Combat Vessels": smaller, cheaper ships that will serve as motherships for swarms of drones, on the surface, in the air and under the water. Drones are the cargo these planners have watched descend from the sky elsewhere. So they have started building the runway, and they are waiting.

Drones are a real revolution in the places where the expensive, vulnerable thing is the human being - the pilot in the cockpit, the man walking the minefield. Take the person out and the whole arithmetic changes. But a destroyer is expensive because of its radar, its missiles, and the magazine of vertical-launch cells that fire them; the crew is close to the cheapest thing aboard. Swap the ship for a budget mothership and a cloud of drones, and you have saved your money in the one place there was never much to save, while throwing away the very thing the ship existed to carry: a deep magazine of high-end interceptors, and a radar strong enough to see the threat coming. It is innovation aimed with perfect precision at the spot where it does the most damage.

And the timing is the part that ought to make a serious person despair. We are doing this in the same year a real missile war has been running in the Middle East, and the clearest lesson of that war is that air and missile defence is now the capability everything else depends on - and that the scarce resource in it is magazine depth. Israel, with some of the finest air defence on Earth, has been burning through its interceptors faster than the factories can replace them; the Americans' stocks are badly drawn down; and the people who know will tell you it takes years, not months, to build more.

Our own Type 45s already carry one of the smallest magazines afloat - 48 launch cells, against 96 on an American destroyer and 112 on a Chinese one. The Type 83 was our chance to fix that. We have cancelled it. You cannot play this game with cheap drones; magazine depth and high-end interceptors are the one thing a drone swarm cannot give you, and it is the thing we have picked this exact moment to stop building.

We have McNamarred ourselves again - can't afford the real ship in annual budgeting terms, so the real ship was dressed up as obsolete, and a fashionable word, autonomy, was wheeled in to make the retreat sound like a leap forward. At the end of it Britain, an island that once ruled the sea, will not have a proper navy. It will have a flotilla of motherships and a slide deck full of drone designations - the bamboo control tower of a country that remembers greatness as a set of costless gestures.

[Britsky @TBrit90]

As we expect by now. Storm Shadow will be rapidly offloaded to Ukraine, and we will do without a cruise missile for 5-10 years.