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Stardate
20020820.1046 (Captain's log): This keeps happening. I end up responding to someone's email, and just before sending I realize that it would make a good post. Kieran, who describes himself as "an Irishman living in London", asks:
How do you rate the UK military?
In brief, "Small, but damned good."
Ship for ship, the Royal Navy is as good as the US Navy, and arguably better in some ways. Of course, the UK can't afford all the toys we have, and as a result the Royal Navy is getting left behind technologically, which would be the only reason why it might not actually be quite our equal any more. For example, our LA-class attack subs all carry a large number of Tomahawk cruise missiles and thus have the ability to make land strikes if need be. The RN recently bought a small number of Tomahawks from the US for their attack subs, but this remains a rudimentary capability. (And they expended a lot of those on the first day of air strikes against Afghanistan last year, though presumably they've since been replaced.)
But we've got five times as many ships, and most of ours are larger.
There are no soldiers in the world better than the Royal Marines or the ColdStream. Our best are as good, but no better. But our best formations which are their equal are five times as numerous, if not more.
The Royal Air Force pilots are just as good as ours. They are just as well trained and get just as much active flying time. There are no better anywhere.
But the jets they're flying may not be as good as our best jets; I'm not sure I believe that the UK has anything home-built as good as the F-16. By the same token, when you talk about naval aircraft, the Harrier is a fine jet, but it's no match for the F-14 or F-18. In future that difference will vanish because the UK and US will both be using the Joint Strike Fighter.
The Royal Navy is the only navy in the world besides our own to actually try to operate aircraft carriers as anything other than a trophy (like the French). But your current generation of carriers are really not too impressive by our standards. HMS Ark Royal operates 8 Harriers, which is damned well better than none at all but really isn't enough to fight a major war. One such carrier really isn't enough to even provide air cover for a fleet. The US Navy is capable of winning an air war with all but the very best of the world's land-based air forces. The Royal Navy can't do it, and the UK must rely on land-based air power to support any foreign military operation.
When your two new carriers come on line, they will be magnificent. But since British naval yards have never built anything like them before, they'll take a long time and cost a lot more than equivalent ships built here. I believe that the budget for each of them is about the same as for one of our Nimitz-class carriers. And I won't be surprised if the first of them hasn't gone into active service by 2010.
And though they're going to be extremely fine ships and quite formidable, they'll still be small by our standards. They're going to be about half the size of one of our Nimitz-class carriers and operate about half as many aircraft. Given the relative sizes of the UK and US economy, they're what is possible, and they will be a massive improvement over the current ones. A carrier operating 40 JSF's is nothing to sneer at, and nobody will be able to criticize the quality of the crew.
The UK is the only other nation in the world besides the US which actually has the ability to project militarily significant forces into theaters far from the home nation, and I'm very glad we're not the only ones. The Australians have a small capability in that regard, but it's at the level of "large raiding party" (battalion strength) rather than "invading army". The UK can land a brigade.
All in all, I'd much rather have the UK by my side than opposing me, so I'm glad they're friends.
In the extraordinarily unlikely case of an actual war between the US and UK which didn't go nuclear, there can be no question of who would win. But unlike most such wars I can hypothesize about (i.e. the French), in this war we'd get badly hurt. The USN could take the RN, but it would lose a lot of ships and men doing so. The US Marines could take the Royal Marines, but they'd pay a high price. The 101st could take the ColdStream, but there wouldn't be a lot of them left afterwards. Royal Navy attack subs would cause the US Navy an incredible amount of grief. We'd win, but only because of numbers. The only way we could take out the UK's military in a non-nuclear war is by attrition, trading man for man and ship for ship. We'd have no quality advantage to give us an edge. Only a fool would think it would be easy.
The UK's military is the only one outside the US that I really respect. It's the only other one in the world that I think of as being "first class". All the others are either too small, or give away a lot in quality or training or equipment or readiness or command incompetence.
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