Britain’s next-generation fighter jet is a disaster in the making

 The defence of the realm is in terrible trouble. The long-delayed Defence Investment Plan – the costed follow-up to last year’s uncosted Strategic Defence Review – will have to contain many massive cuts and savings if it is to match up with planned funds.

The Government has made it clear that there will not be any more money, because welfare.

This means we need to find defence things to cut. They should be expensive things that we can do without, thus freeing up money to save the useful things and maybe even get some new things – such as serious drone forces, for example.

As it happens, there is a very expensive thing that we can do without. This is the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP), a joint multinational project in which Britain will partner with Italy and Japan to produce the Tempest fighter.

Tempest is to follow the Typhoon, currently in service, which we developed in partnership with Italy, Germany and Spain. Typhoon followed the preceding Tornado, which we developed with Italy and Germany.

It is worth remembering the history here.

The Tornado GR bomber, aka the “Tonka”, was not a success. It was good at one thing only: flying fast and low, the idea being that this would let it stay below enemy radar to reach its target.

Unfortunately this tactic didn’t actually work: when it was tried against the Iraqis in 1991, eight Tornados from a force of 48 were shot down.

What would have happened to our Tornado fliers if they had ever gone in fast and low against serious opposition hardly bears thinking about.

The later fighter version of the Tornado wasn’t good at anything and basically didn’t work at all for much of its service: it was a laughing stock.

Both types cost huge amounts of money to buy and to fly, in large part because of their complicated variable-geometry “swing wings” – an idea long since consigned to the dustbin of engineering history.

Then came the Typhoon, originally known as the Eurofighter, which finally went operational with the Royal Air Force (RAF) in 2007 following an almost unbelievably lengthy and expensive gestation. The Typhoon, in fact, had taken so long to arrive that it was literally an entire generation behind the state of the art.

The initial Typhoons are assessed by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) as “early fourth-generation” in capability and technology terms. The first fifth-generation jet, the F-22 Raptor, had been in US service for two years when Typhoon finally arrived.

At the end of the 2000s, we had three fleets of combat jets: the Harrier jump-jet, the Tornado bomber — although the abysmal fighter was already on its way out — and the Typhoon.

Then came the 2010 Strategic Defence Review, in which it was decided that the Harrier and the small aircraft carriers it had been able to fly from – the old Invincible class – would be cut, leaving the Tornado as our only ground-attack plane.

It had been claimed by the RAF that the then-new Typhoon, originally intended as a pure air-to-air fighter, was already able to do ground attack in 2008. However, it turned out that was not true.

This mattered, because at that point ground attack was the only air combat mission being carried out: by our forces in Afghanistan. The Harrier had been very good at ground attack. A group of retired senior officers wrote to The Times after the decision to scrap the Harrier and keep the Tornado.

They said the move to cut the “entire Harrier force is strategically and financially perverse”. 

The retired officers listed the many advantages the Harrier had over other combat jets, writing: “The Harrier could still use Kandahar runway if half of it were blocked by Taliban action; can use any makeshift landing site; has a response time of less than 10 minutes, as against 30 [for the Tornado]; performs better in hot weather; requires fewer ground crew; and has better availability.”

They said the Harrier would “not require a further £1.4bn to re-engine in 2014; and can remain in service until 2023 without significant investment”.

Meanwhile, “the existing Tornado force will cost, over 10 years, seven times as much to keep in service as Harrier”, the letter argued.

From there, things got worse. Just months after the Harriers and their carriers had been retired, Britain found itself conducting Operation Ellamy against Muammar Gaddafi in Libya.