Latest Navy carrier madness: 'Sell 'em to India'
Grauniad has lunch with BAE
What you need to know about cloud backup
Analysis Yet another scheme by the MoD for cutting costs on the Royal Navy's new aircraft carriers has surfaced in the media, with claims now being aired that one of the two ships might be sold to India.
The Guardian reports that India "has recently lodged a firm expression of interest to buy one of the two state-of-the-art 65,000 tonne carriers" and that an unnamed "defence source" has told the paper's Tim Webb that "selling a carrier is one very serious option".
As Webb is the Graun's industrial editor, and glovepuppeting of biz correspondents by big companies is the most common way for such stories to appear, we can probably take it that the tale emanates from someone in the industrial consortium building the ships, led by BAE Systems. This is the more so as the article repeatedly states that contract penalties would make it impossibly expensive for the government to cancel one or both of the ships, which is probably the main message that Webb's industry informant was trying to push.
As contract details on big defence bids are kept secret ("commercially sensitive"), it's always easy for the companies involved to make such claims, usually without any great fear of the MoD actually mounting any counter-argument. BAE claimed for many years that the government was firmly locked in to buying 232 of its horrifyingly expensive Eurofighter jets, a claim which has now been exposed as hollow following involvement by Treasury lawyers.
The Graun claims that BAE is "currently drawing up a formal estimate of the cost the government would incur from cancelling the order", and one can be sure, as BAE are building the carriers, that the company's own estimate will indeed state that it would cost even more to cancel than it would to build the ships.
But that's not to say that the Treasury, having read the same contracts, would take the same view. So in fact it may well be financially feasible to cancel one or both of the ships - especially once their running costs into the future are taken into account.
If the government were to sell one to India, of course, it would avoid those running costs - and brilliantly from BAE's viewpoint, it would still pay to build the ship. Hence the firm is naturally keen to push the idea and at the same time spread the notion that cancellation would be desperately pricey. It's to be hoped that the Guardian's Webb at least got a good lunch out of it.
The only people who would get nothing in this scenario would be the Royal Navy, who would miss out on the year-round carrier capability they have already accepted massive cuts to get. The other people who might come out worse off are the taxpayers - it would be very unusual in a deal of this type for India to pay full price, so the taxpayers would lose money in addition to losing the national clout that a carrier always on patrol confers.
Next page: It seems India must have written to BAE. Well, fair enough, BAE does run UK foreign policy
COMMENTS
What Carriers?
Collectively, Whitehall is either barking or has a supremely twisted sense of humour. Who else could come up with a project that is designed by Frogs, built by Jocks, managed by Yanks and fucked up by gin soaked cretins in blue uniforms with shiny buttons?
There you go again...
...using common sense and even logic in the face of politics. Silly, silly Lester... ;-)
build a big enogh army and no one will bother you....
....but defend everything and you defend nothing.
Presumably we only needs these things for holding on to far off British holdings in places like the Falklands/etc/etc because lets face it the real big wars against the likes of China/Russia/USA are economic/resource ones and Britain has already lost and looks unlikely to recover any time soon. So maybe some one should really sit down and calculate what it's really worth holding on to those lands apart from prestige/pride(always comes before a fall).
And whilst we're at it maybe it's time Britain/the British tax payer stopped stepping in to fix the world and started concentrating on fixing the problems at home. No one thanks Britain for it and our smug allies can stop sitting back and criticizing whilst not having to do any of the dirty work themselves.
IT infrastructure monitoring strategies
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
Steps to Take Before Choosing a Business Continuity Partner
Enabling efficient data center monitoring
Requirements Checklist for Choosing a Cloud Backup and Recovery Service Provider
