“An Ill-Informed View from Howard Wheeldon”.

1. In his latest spiel, Howard Wheeldon closes his attempted denigration of Lord West and the Royal Navy with the following statement (his penultimate paragraph):

“The military as a whole needs champions and those that can inform and educate. But it does not need one sided single service champions who may well be out of touch with rapidly changing defence circumstances, requirement and need. Challenge government on the need to spend more on defence by all means but not solely on the Royal Navy.”

2. Within the body of his text, Wheeldon shows his true colour as a one-sided single service champion that is out of touch with rapidly changing defence circumstances, requirement and need. He does not inform and educate honestly on the way ahead prescribed by last year’s Integrated Defence and Security Review. This indicated firmly that the Royal Navy needs much more investment to satisfy Britain’s new Strategic Defence Policy and its global commitments. There was no suggestion of increased funding for the Army or the Royal Air Force.
3. He ignores this new path completely and attempts to divert attention away from the lack of global utility and deployability of the RAF’s tactical fighter, the Typhoon, with an unjustified attack on Lord West:

“Yet another insane broadside from the Lord West of Spithead and that sadly, is once again aimed firmly at the Royal Air Force and which one can be forgiven for thinking that he might prefer didn’t exist.”

4. Wheeldon complains most about Lord West’s informed view of the Typhoon program:

“… which has cost billions for a handful of aircraft: sitting ducks on geographically fixed bases, already targeted by Russian missiles”.

But Lord West’s comments are entirely correct.

5. A review of the Typhoon Project by the Public Accounts Committee in 2011 concluded that
   1. the Project had already cost £35 billion and
   2. its cost was likely to increase to at least £55 billion.

Recent estimates indicate a program cost of more than £80 billion has been realized which, for the 160 fourth-generation Typhoons equates to £500 million per fighter aircraft.

6. This extraordinary figure is for a land-based tactical aircraft that does not even have the combat radius to defend our Island base from the Russian bomber/missile threat that could round the Northern Cape in times of conflict. The Russian aircraft would be able to launch their long range, air-to-surface missiles (16 state-of-the-art weapons per aircraft) well out of range of intercept by the Typhoon. The only realistic defence available against such a threat is provided by strike carriers of the US and UK navies creating a physical air defence barrier between the threat and its targets – as in the Cold War.
7. Wheeldon appears not to understand this. The Quick Reaction Alert (QRA) Typhoons based in the North of the UK are unable to oppose this threat effectively and are only useful for intercepting aircraft intruders at much shorter range. Nor does he address the question, “Why do we need 7 squadrons of Typhoon aircraft based in the UK for this task when the same task used to be satisfactorily carried out by a single squadron of Phantom aircraft in the 70s?” Further, he pointedly omits to mention the lack of combat utility of the ill-fated Tornado Air Defence Vehicle (the predecessor of Typhoon) which in the 80s and the 90s did not have a working weapon system to support the QRA task – thereby contributing nothing to the air defence of the UK homeland base. This serious indeed scandalous lack of capability was carefully hidden from Parliament and the UK public.
8. He attempts to divert attention away from the RAF’s continued inability to provide effective air defence of the UK homeland base by referring to a letter from an equally uninformed retired RAF Group Captain Ferguson that suggested:

“The crisis in Ukraine will, one way or the other, demonstrate the true strategic value of Britain’s hugely expensive aircraft carriers, HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales.”

9. This is shameful propaganda at its worst. Ukraine is a landlocked problem causing major disagreement between NATO and Russia. It does not represent in any way the intent of our commitment to a Strategic Maritime Policy. Further, “hugely expensive” is a ridiculous way to describe the cost imbalance between the Typhoon program, £80 billion plus, and our new carrier program, £6 billion. The global operational utility of these 2 programs is inversely proportional to their cost. Ferguson and Wheeldon know this, and their comments reflect a lack of fidelity and authenticity.
10. Wheeldon’s rant, much of which must be regarded as ill-informed and inaccurate, continued unabated: even having the gall to denigrate the recent deployment of HMS Queen Elizabeth to the South China Sea as part of a potent Allied Carrier Strike Force. This represented effective Geopolitical Power Projection in the Indo-Pacific region – something that is far beyond the capability and aspiration of the land-based Royal Air Force. Without carrier decks to operate from, RAF F-35B fighters would have been unable to contribute. And the Typhoon did not even enter into the equation, limited as it is to operating only from airfields on terra firma.
11. That he points to the small number of RAF Typhoon aircraft that have been operating in Lithuania, Romania and other Eastern European States is not unreasonable. These limited deployments must be considered a token example of Political Power Projection. What is unreasonable is the suggestion that such insignificant deployments represent effective Military Power Projection. In the face of overwhelming Russian air power, these excursions must be considered as little better than a last-ditch attempt to justify these ultra expensive aircraft and provide some sort of raison d’être for the RAF.
12. One of Wheeldon’s final comments represents further blinkered thinking. He reflects as follows:

“The pity is that Lord West chooses to ignore remarks made by the likes of Winston Churchill such as ‘the future of our nation is forever bound up in the development of Air Power.’”

13. In today’s world, Churchill would undoubtedly have said “… the development of Naval Air Power”. And what Wheeldon didn’t mention was Churchill’s overarching comment about our armed forces:

“Nothing, nothing in the world, nothing that you may think of or dream of, or anyone else may tell you: no argument, however seductive, must lead you to abandon that Naval supremacy on which the life of our country depends”.

14. My final comment: Typhoon’s lack of effective global deployability and utility will be repeated with its planned successor, the Tempest program, unless the latter is fully carrier-capable. If it is not, the phrase, “financial and operational insanity” springs to mind.