Royal navy

It took place, as James Kirkup reminds us, on this day in 1757. As James puts it: To this day, his family argue – with considerable justification — that he was wrongly treated and should be pardoned. Every year on the anniversary of his death, bells sound in Southill, Bedfordshire, where his descendents still live. Voltaire immortalised Byng’s death in Candide with a scathing summary of the British attitude to its military commanders: il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres. Sadly, those days are gone. For the avoidance of doubt, I’m not arguing that it was right to kill Byng, or that

Photo: Eric Piermont/AFP/Getty Images Cato’s Tad DeHaven and Think Defence each have good posts on the future of the increasingly troubled Joint Strike Fighter. Costs have risen by 50% since 2001 and the plane is already looking like it will be delivered years late. Since the main justification for the JSF was that it was going to control costs this is a problem. The Americans will stick with it, but does that mean we have to? At present we seem to be heading for the worst of all possible worlds. As Think Defence puts it: It does not take a genius to work out that volumes will be reduced and

There’s a decent discussion to be had on defence priorities and on the future of both the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force. Furthermore, you can argue about the number of aircraft carriers this country might need. There’s a case for saying that the resources devoted to the new Queen Elizabeth Class carriers could have been more usefully employed elsewhere. But if there’s a case for scrapping the carriers there’s also a case for building two of them or, though this is not on the cards, three “super-carriers”. What makes no sense, however, is building just one aircraft carrier. And yet that’s where we seem to be. Actually, it’s

I hadn’t realised until Matt Yglesias pointed it out that there’s some unhappiness that the US navy’s next aircraft carrier is going to be named after Barry Goldwater and not William Jefferson Clinton. The obvious thing to do, however, is avoid naming ships after politicians at all. This is one area in which the Royal Navy, despite everything, remains vastly superior to its cousins on the other side of the Atlantic. I mean, the new Type 45 Detroyers, HMS Daring and HMS Dauntless have proper naval names as do the submarines Trafalgar, Ambush, Audacious. The new carriers being built – the Queen Elizabeth and the Prince of Wales – take

Defence procurement is difficult. It’s hard to design and build new weapons systems and predicting what kinds of equipment and force structure will be needed in 20 years time is a necessarily tricky business. Mistakes and blunders don’t just happen; they’re inevitable. Still, despite the Eurofighter and the looming problems with the Royal Navy’s new carrier class, it’s not clear that there’s anything on the MoD’s books quite so daft as the US Air Force’s F-22 fighter*. It’s not merely a matter of cost – though as nearly $200m a pop the F-22 is no bargain – but that, apparently, the average F-22 only flies for 1.7 hours before developing

TNR asks defence analysts Who Won and Who Lost in Bob Gates’s realignment of Pentagon spending priorities? One party that doesn’t get a mention is the Royal Navy, yet the curtailment of the F-22 fighter programme and the allocation of increased resources to the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter must be considered good news for the Navy and the Royal Air Force. Given the (intolerable) pressures on the MoD budget the sooner (and the cheaper) the F-35 is developed past a point of no return, the better. Granted, it seems unlikely (in the present climate) that Britain will really buy as many as 150 of the aircraft, but the development of