Alenia C-27J Wins Australian Airlift Contest

It’s been a long time coming but at last we know what the incomparable Caribou replacement will be.

And I heartily approve, believing from the word go that the Spartan would be the right choice.

But it still can’t do what the ‘bou ‘bou would do as the first aircrew to try and land it on an unprepared rising strip in the3 New Guinea Highlands will discover!

The Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) chose the Alenia C-27J Spartan to replace a fleet of 14 DHC-4 Caribou STOL airlifters that have already been retired. The 10-aircraft deal will be conducted via the U.S. Foreign Military Sales (FMS) system, with L-3 acting as the prime contractor. Alenia and L-3 formed a partnership to sell the C-27J to the U.S. armed forces. The RAAF also evaluated the EADS CN-295 for the Air 8000 requirement.

The contract is worth about $1 billion, including support equipment and several years of training and logistics support. According to the Pentagon’s notice of potential sale, the aircraft will be equipped with a full U.S.-made electronic warfare suite. The notice added that the C-27Js will also help replace 12 C-130H airlifters that the RAAF plans to retire. The first C-27J will be delivered in 2015, with initial operating capability to follow by the end of 2016.

Alenia said that the aircraft will be new-build, thereby safeguarding the workforce in Italy. There had been speculation that the RAAF would be offered C-27Js being built for, or already flying with, the U.S. Air Force. That service decided last January to withdraw its fleet of C-27Js as a budget-cutting measure, having already received 13 of a planned total of 38. The decision has been challenged in Congress, and might be overturned.

May 11, 2012, 2:03 PM

Alenia C-27J Wins Australian Airlift Contest
Chris Pocock
Fri, 11 May 2012 15:10:00 GMT

BBC News - Taliban resistance 'under-estimated' by Britain

 

 

This is a Western affliction for which the evidence is strong:

• The Romans at Teutoburg Forest in 9BC
• Britain and the settlers in the American War of Independence
• Britain and the Zulu in 1862
• Britain and the Afghans 1839-1842
• Britain and the Boers in 1880-1881
• Britain and the Japanese in 1940
• The US in Vietnam
• The Russians in Afghanistan
• The US and Britain in Afghanistan

(and there are probably lots of others)

Why is this so?  Do we really believe we are better than the opposition or do our intelligence people simply not know what’s going on?  And why, in the face of this sort of evidence, do we fail to learn?

As Sun Tzu said 2,500 years ago Know yourself and your enemy and you need not fear the results of a thousand battles.

Clearly we ain’t got a clue.  And they teach military history at Sandhurst!  Maybe the cadets can’t be bothered listening.

BBC News - Taliban resistance 'under-estimated' by Britain

Stuxnet Rolls On

 

Stuxnet, the malware that infiltrates Siemens plant control software and trashes it, has come to public notice since its attack on an Iranian nuclear reactor.  Indeed one could say that it has become an Important Issue having been featured on the Today Programme this morning.

I listened with fascination as the two “experts” talked with great gravitas about it.  Unfortunately the female professor, though articulate in that BBC way of speaking to the prols, couldn’t manage anything much more enlightening than it might be serious and showed new ways that bad people could attack in cyberspace.

Now call me old-fashioned but I happen to think that an ability to trash an oppressive and lunatic regime’s nuclear weapons facility remotely without a body count can hardly be called bad.

As I have previously blogged Stuxnet and its ilk may be the future of warfare and if that is the case then we need to plough significantly more resources into research and operations involving cyber war – particularly defending against cyber attacks-if we can do it to them they can do it to us.  Probably more than buying two new aircraft carriers which already are probably vulnerable to a Stuxnet –like attack. 

There is worrying evidence that the defence review is looking in the wrong place.  Instead of bickering about the numbers of fast jets and special forces soldiers we should be going flat out to build our cyberwar capability at a fraction of the cost.  What’s needed is brainpower not kit.

Building our defence doctrine on the assertion that “Whatever happens we have got the SAS [or Trident] and they have not” (with apologies to Hilaire Belloc) is hardly a way of future-proofing the nation.

Richards new UK armed forces head

Richards new UK armed forces head: "Gen Sir David Richards is named as the next Chief of the Defence Staff - the head of the British armed forces."

This comes as no surprise given the amount of trailing that has gone on.  Whilst it is inevitable after the rather unsuccessful  CDS incumbency by Sir Jock Stirrup it doesn't make me happy.

I have no doubt that General Richards is a skilled and courageous soldier whose service in Sierra Leone and his tenure as CGS during the current war in Afghanistan give him peerless credentials for the post and thereby lies the problem. General Richards is a soldier, an armoured warfare man, a boots on the ground military commander.  He is ideal to lead a military engaged in a deadly asymmetric struggle with a dangerous adversary.  But we have larger and far more dangerous potential enemies.  Potential enemies that have nuclear capability, powerful air arms (I would remind everyone that the Taliban has no aircraft) and maritime power projection (the Taliban hasn't any of that either), capabilities that General Richards is hardly instinctively well-disposed towards.  Will he be a powerful voice in Whitehall to advocate a much wider strategic view?  Well we'll soon see with the forthcoming Strategic Defence Review.

So my worry is that we will take our eyes off the ball and throw out the baby with the bathwater (to mix my metaphors).  I am afraid that  it might be no aircraft carriers, no new Typhoons, no Joint Strike Fighters and maybe even no Trident.  Moscow, Tehran and Islamabad are probably much cheered by the appointment.

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