Afghanistan

I would guess that the mountainous terrain in Afghanistan would actually make for some fairly difficult communications problems.

The other side of the coin..

"Thus it seems difficult to escape the conclusion that the £114m Cormorant system is simply not up to the job for which it was designed"

Or, it could be that the system (which would have been speced up nearly a decade ago) is already obsolete, as it's unable to cope with more modern demands ?

Cormorant

Doth not ye Cormorant hath a stone within it's gullet to stop eating ye fish?? Methinks there be also a similar stone herein, nay??

:+++>

Wrong...

Quote: It seems hard to imagine any war which would require less comms than Afghanistan

You are probably wrong here. The lack of "large" targets and the highly dispersed nature of the threat results in much higher data usage. The voice usage is also much higher because of potential hostiles being acquired and assessed by front-line patrols which have to report to base and base has to coordinate all of that.

If the bases sieve through raw (or partially processed) data themselves the links are overcapacity straight away. If the data is analysed centrally, the number of potential targets in an Afganistan-like environment is capable of overwhelming any data network.

Pretty much a lose-lose situation.

Once again

like Leyland cars, UK shipbuilding and motorcycle industry...pump money at it and hope it'll get better.

Cormorant was overpriced from the start, what cost in lives to keep 330 jobs?

eurofighter next big drain on UK taxpayer for little return and years of extr "modification costs" to do the job it was supposed to do from the star

proud to be british....not for 30 years now

Buy Blitish !!!

So once again the British Armed Forces have been made to buy British products that are quite frankly inferior, when the non-British alternatives available to them have been far superior. We've seen this with all sorts of equipment the UK Forces use, the SA80 being the most well known and infamous one. The alternative to the SA80 at the time was an Italian made rifle that was excellent and precisely what the Army wanted but they were told they HAD TO have the SA80 as it was British made. Whilst the SA80 has many fine qualities, the rifles themselves were utter pants until Heckler and Koch (the famed GERMAN weapons manufacturers) got hold of them and fixed them in the SA80 A2.

Thing is that its the Politicians who tied the Armed Forces hands with inferior products, and lacking equipment. Probably so there's plenty of cash so they can get their overly inflated expenses paid.

And this isn't a new thing......I used to date the daughter of one of our Admiral's, and his job was to procure what the Navy needed. He was basically told to STEAL fuel and munitions from the Army and RAF so as to equip our warships which couldn't leave Portsmouth as they had empty fuel tanks, and nothing to shoot.

Im not saying that we should not use British items, just that if they are not the best then we shouldn't use them. Maybe that will force the British firms to buck their idea's up and improve the products so that they are the best again. Because this isn't causing downtime or delays, this is our boys LIVES that are on the line because of these crap items !!!!

Again and Again

Nimrod, Blindfire, SA60, Chinooks. The list goes on.

It would be cheaper more often than not to give these UK workers half a million and tell them to go home.

Too many incompetent people in the supply chain and none of them have to take responsibility for their actions.

£114m?

And how many British jobs did that "save"?

Let's say it was 1000 for the sake of argument. So they could have given each of those workers £50,000 and said "Go and find another job or take a year off" and still have over half of that £114m left over which would probably have paid for the Israeli system...

Tut tut Lewis,

you're slipping into your old ways.

Quote "It seems hard to imagine any war which would require less comms than Afghanistan"

Why imagine - look in a history book. Wars have been fought and won with less comms than that in Afghanistan today. Therefore either less comms were required or the winning side was just plain lucky in every case.

Quote " and one could plausibly suggest scenarios which would be a lot more demanding. "

So it's fair to use imagined scenarios to support your argument? I'm sure if you had any interest in doing so you could equally well imagine scenarios that required less communication. But you have no interest in doing so as it would undermine your point.

Quote; "Thus it seems difficult to escape the conclusion that the £114m Cormorant system is simply not up to the job for which it was designed.:"

Read the requirements document have you? Cormorant was designed to meet a written specification, a set of performance characteristics agreed between the developer and the customer. Normal practice in every area of real world industry. Have you read the test reports that validate performance against those documented requirements? Can you quote the lines of the specification Cormorant fails to meet? No? I thought not.

I have little doubt that Cormorant fails to meet the spec Lewis Page would have written. But the MOD did not try to buy the Lewis Page spec, that I hazard would have been rather more expensive.

Maybe they just needed a bit more bandwidth. Maybe more Cormorant kit could have perfectly well provided that but was not available off the shelf. Perhaps we should applaud the MOD for fulfilling a requirement in the most timely fashion rather than propping up more Welsh jobs with added delay.

Having two independent and complimentary systems backing each other up is such a terrible idea too.

Baaa

The Welsh on the other hand are good at doing things with sheep. Comms they are abviously not so good at........

What no Bowman references?

Surprised nobody has taken the excuse to slag Bowman off again - or is that just cos it's made by a "British" firm rather than those dashed unsporting Jerries who own EADS? (even though GDUK is technically American...)

AC @ 11:51 has it right - it's not the fault of the designers, or the manufacturers that the kit is too old-fashioned and outdated to work properly - so how about putting the blame where it really lies and having a go at the Ministry of Dunces who keep fracking up the Requirements and procurement? They expect a finished product to test (almost) to destruction, then turn round and ask for more bells and whistles to be added even though it doesn't help functionality and rarely benefits the end user - the fightin' men and women who put their lives on the line for our continued freedom. Then, when the MoD finally get around to ordering the kit it's already superseded, but it then takes as long - if not longer - to test the new version so the manufacturers don't usually bother (and they can always make more profit when it's ordered as a new project instead).

And I do so love it when people who don't have a foggy clue about how the military work start spouting bullshot about how they obviously don't need so many boats, tanks or aircraft since they did so well last time without having to use them all, or that Service A should be disbanded and their kit - and BUDGET - given to Service B because they would make *much* better use of it... and it's really annoying when the complainer should know better (looking at you here, Lewis...)

How many of the people who keep slagging off Eurofighter actually know enough about modern combat aircraft and the environment they work in to be able to offer well-founded criticism rather than just quoting something they read or heard somewhere else? Same applies to other military systems too - don't bitch about stuff unless you know what you are talking about.

Pure speculation

I love how many people seem to speculate about things they clearly know nothing about. I bet not one of you are involved in the MOD or said Comorant system in any way.

Another thing suprising or unsuprising (im not sure which) is the complete lack of research by the author, also seems to be lots of speculation with no backup to claims.

I didnt mind Lewis' often satrical and obscenity ridden articles but im starting to go off them in a big way.

ATM over radio. That's 155mbs?

Which would have been impressive 10-15 years ago.

And ATM is (IIRC) a world wide ISO standard.

But can you say Gb Ethernet? VoIP?

It does look (once again) like an MoD procurement SNAFU.

EaDS?

EADS - how'd that 'A' get in there? Can't have imposters stealing EDS's thunder now can we?

And Paris because she could probably do with an A if it's going spare.

A simple solution

We supposedly have 100,000 defence secretariat and boffins for 200,000 armed servicemen. Let the boffins work on saving the planet, and pay off most of the secretariat with the £50 billion or so we will save in not having the 7-10 years lead time spent in research, design, build, test, throw away, start again & late deployment of obsolete kit designed for previous theatres of war.

Unless we have a world-leading UK version debugged and ready to roll we should simply buy the best available from around the world. In a first-world economy this is normal practice for all other consumer goods, so why not for Defence?

I worked in a technically excellent Defence supplier as well as in the RN some thirty years ago, and nothing much seems to have moved on since then. One difference is, however, that the Government seems less able or willing to try to plug the gaps now than during the Falklands or Gulf Wars, costing soldiers' lives and global credibility.

@Dan 7 H&K

If I remember correctly H&K is now owned by BAE, as is Smith and Wesson which makes your point silly.