I'm not fond of multi-national design partnerships, they rarely end well
I'm not fond of multi-national design partnerships, they rarely end well
Especially European ones.. Too many people in the game all wanting the most out of the pie rather then being happy with a slice of it.
If they can get a working prototype built before we make a decision then it should be considered but waste of time and resources jumping on board from the get go. Not enough time and resources to join every program around that may be of use, Some times just need to be happy with what exists already and make it work for us.
Redlands18
Well-Known Member
Tiger ring any bells, i doubt the Australlian Army would go anywhere near a French-German collaboration anytime in the next 1/2 dozen decades or so.
So we should just junk the investment in M1A1 at approximately 1/3 of the way through it's service life for an unproven project that lime similar attempts at European multi-nstional tank programs may not even get off the ground?
The Abrams is a world-beater. We should upgrade it to M1A2 SEV3/4 level and flesh out our full 3 tank squadrons (90 odd tanks as suggested by the good Colonel) and we will have all the tank capability we are likely to need for the forseeable future.
The 30 odd extra tanks we need have already been offered to us at $150m. Say roughly $500m to be remanufactured to M1A2 SEV 3/4 standard and another $200m for the breacher, bridging and extra Hercules variants we would need and it will be less than $1b very well spent.
Boagrius
Well-Known Member
Add to this the fact that we are already going to have to take a punt on European gear for LAND400 (potentially quite a big one if Lynx gets up), sticking it out with Abrams strikes me as something of an insurance policy? It's not like it's going anywhere in the US either - I am sure there will be a vast US support base for the tank over the duration of its career in Australian service.
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Tiger has been a hot discussion point across a few Oz threads. most of us are well aware that its a polished turd....
And the problem with military kit is that you cannot, nor should you, roll it in glitter.
Though they've tried.
Regards,
Massive
Back in the day we had
90 gun Leopards 1's, 5 bridge layers with 8 recovery Leo's.
They were good numbers back then and probably suggestive of what would serve plan Beersheba today.
Regards S
It's interesting to see Colonel Duus talk about the augmenting the tank fleet, as though it is a done deal. I haven't seen any of that officially acknowledged before, so it hopefully indicates that a decision has been made.
Also interesting to see Colonel Duus following the official Army IDI themes - comparing Army procurement programs to Navy and Air Force programs ('the Navy need a million submarines in service to maintain a small number active - its the same with tanks' etc) and maximising Australian industrial participation (witness Army leaders visiting the Holden plant in Adelaide - get parochial politicians on side, and Army can benefit the same way the Navy have).
The article also hinted at the new/upgraded tanks being delivered with DU armour as well. That may be testing the waters to see if anyone actually cares (we're forbidden by law from having DU weapons - nothing says we can't have DU armour).
His numbers on subs are way off though, they tend to cycle numbers at 3:1, not 6:1 (assuming that in the next acquisition cycle we don't go through the same Collins availability and build problems)
RAAF also tend to rotate 3-4:1
I'd suggest that is the journalist misquoting the Colonel - there are a number of errors of fact in the article (like Leopards deploying to Vietnam...)
I've seen the comparison with submarines in full in briefs - it is far more detailed than the 12/2 quoted (and I imagine sourced directly from the Navy).
The detail is irrelevant though. The point being made is that the justification for Navy and Air Force spending tens of billions of dollars on kit apply equally to Army. The only difference is an Abrams can be bought for about the same cost as a new Land Cruiser from the local Toyota dealership.
While much of the Tiger program is a clusterf**** for being much too late and way over budget there are several problems in Australian service which are blamed on the platform but to me seem rather like bad procurement decisions.
I read in the RAN thread that the Strix sight can only designate targets for the Hellfire II missiles within 2km. Apart from that sounding a bit fishy as I haven't read about Spanish or French Tigers being range restricted for their HOT 3 or Spike-ER, there would have been the Osiris mast optic available which has put PARS3 atgms in salvo fire onto targets 8 klicks away.
The same applies to communication equipment. Shouldn't one decide how a new platform integrates into the force wide communication network before placing a comlntract instead of moaning about lacking capabilities after putting it into service? German Tigers for example got additional comm equipment as part of the ASGARD upgrade for Afghanistan.
I for one would have loved to see us putting all that money into procuring Longbows but at least we supported our industry. What is the Australian reason for the procurement desaster? That the vendor claims everything is shiny and awesome (aka cheap MOTS solution) shouldn't be a surprise nor an excuse for bad procurement decisions.
I read in the RAN thread that the Strix sight can only designate targets for the Hellfire II missiles within 2km. Apart from that sounding a bit fishy as I haven't read about Spanish or French Tigers being range restricted for their HOT 3 or Spike-ER, there would have been the Osiris mast optic available which has put PARS3 atgms in salvo fire onto targets 8 klicks away.
The same applies to communication equipment. Shouldn't one decide how a new platform integrates into the force wide communication network before placing a comlntract instead of moaning about lacking capabilities after putting it into service? German Tigers for example got additional comm equipment as part of the ASGARD upgrade for Afghanistan.
I for one would have loved to see us putting all that money into procuring Longbows but at least we supported our industry. What is the Australian reason for the procurement desaster? That the vendor claims everything is shiny and awesome (aka cheap MOTS solution) shouldn't be a surprise nor an excuse for bad procurement decisions.
A bit hard for me to be specific as it starts crossing into territory around bits of my job
but in really broad terms, you can centre on a number of issues around the tiger selection
not the platform of choice by many and came as a surprise to many when it was selected over others
an indecent push by the state govt to counter the success of the Defence Teaming Centre in SA, and Tiger was their first big attempt to take ground - so they were pushing hard on having a rotary air industry set up to do "all" of australian rotary avoation support, maint and development. They over egged the capability by some margin, but they had strong legs into the Fed Govt and played that hand ferociously
fundamental C2 problems - compounded by the fact that Army selectors seemed to completely ignore the NCW issues around joint warfighting future fighting concepts that were taking hold
a directly related issue of not being able to be deployed on the phatships, and thus if they couldn't communicate with the maritime commander then they by default could be considered a threat and ran the risk of getting hit blue on blue
being fitted with a C2 system that couldn't talk to anyone or anything else outside of their own rotary fleet of type - that was just sheer lunacy and then flowed on into a need to get an expensive solution set to assist in resolving. eg BACN
not nec tiger specific, I would add the general comment that there have been a number of times where I have seen invested uniforms articulate forcefully that they would push back on any selection that ran counter to their own - even though the selection team was comprised of suits and uniforms, so they were taking a service specific focus against the purple selection process. Ultimately thats an argument that needs to be managed by CoA, VCDF and other vested interest senior stars, suits can't afford to get dragged into uniform turf wars
Nope, other way around
Govt didn't want them to have a gunship, calling it an ARH was meant to soft sell an armed capability.
Army wanted a proper gunship as it would have been far better as a result of lessons learnt from ET
The Tiger was a compromise selection
Thanks for the reply.
The good old inter service and inter government rivalries in conjunction with the usual bypassing of the future users. Sounds familiar...
What is interesting is that the Tiger UHT version started out as a PAH2 successor to our Bo105 AT helicopters. Thus no chin gun and only Stingers on the outer pylons. But a Longbow would have been superior in this role, too.
And the French tried to get two versions (gunship and AT) into service which would have been well and good covered by a single Longbow version, too.
So in the end several nations got a helicopter for several different roles each of which would have been better occupied by Longbows...
I am all for retaining national industry capabilities but some of the recent results are awfull...
The good old inter service and inter government rivalries in conjunction with the usual bypassing of the future users. Sounds familiar...
What is interesting is that the Tiger UHT version started out as a PAH2 successor to our Bo105 AT helicopters. Thus no chin gun and only Stingers on the outer pylons. But a Longbow would have been superior in this role, too.
And the French tried to get two versions (gunship and AT) into service which would have been well and good covered by a single Longbow version, too.
So in the end several nations got a helicopter for several different roles each of which would have been better occupied by Longbows...
I am all for retaining national industry capabilities but some of the recent results are awfull...
None of it. AH-64D was even down-spec'd (no Longbow radar etc) to compete on an equal cost basis with the Tiger. Tiger won on the basis of a humungous under-bid on the upfront cost and support cost (which has come back to bite us repeatedly) and over-sell on the capability and development risk of the platform.
Airbus, the then Eurocopter flat out lied about the platform to us and in my opinion if we were in Europe they'd be facing the same sort of judicial inquiry they are in Austria and elsewhere at present.
But there are far too many reputations tied up in the project for us to go down that path, so I suspect we will quietly move on from that particular platform and leave it in the past.
If I recall correctly they didn't tender at all. I am not sure but I believe it was because they weren't in a position to deliver a compliant design at the time as the defender was due for replacement but it wasn't developed at that point.