Another nutty diatribe from Lewis Page

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/30/frigates_wag_the_dog/

So an armed container ship would be better in a combat situation than a proper full blown warship...the man has totally lost the plot..........

 

The fact that LP has never served in a frigate and experienced its versatility and wide range of capabilities (speed of reaction, balanced fit of weapons and sensors, C3I, speed, range, endurance, manoeuvrability, seakeeping, NBCD, disaster relief, ability to 'park' almost anywhere, etc) shines out.

 

I'd also be interested to hear Mr Page's views on how a container ship or carrier would be able to overcome it's own acoustic signature in order to detect and track the latest generation of SSNs and Ks without virtually stopping or employing a towed array on a cable longer than the M1.

Regards,
MM

 

Simple, build it with ultra quiet machinery, pack it full of senors and design the hull in such a shape that it makes minimum noise through the sea. This would have to be done by getting rid of the bits of the ship that aren't totally neccessary for carrying out it's war-fighting role(s).

Starting to look a bit like a Frigate now Mr Page? :roll:

 

Let the oh-so-well-informed Mr Page live on his capital ships. I'll be quite happy knowing he's providing a much better target than my little frigate

 

May I suggest somebody places a comment with a link to this or the other recent Lewis Page thread here?

 

At the end of the day people like Page will always have an audience, and regratably will be paid for satisfying their need for such rubbish.

 

Lewis Page at his finest. :roll:

I wonder if he knows how well armed merchant ships fared against proper warships in WWII?

 

He does have a point about the tail wagging the dog though as i do believe BAE wag the government (in every sense).

 

While we all have a beef with Big And Expensive, they did produce an excellent design in the T45 despite the Governments best efforts and the T26 looks like another well balanced and very competent design that will be vastly more capable than the US Navies extremely expensive and fatally flawed great white hope, the Littoral Combat Ship… a Frigate sized ship without the range to cross the Atlantic and armed to the teeth with a Bofors gun and stern looks.

 

There's nothing wrong with stern looks - when Mrs Broadside gives me one of her stern looks it is more than enough to put me firmly in my place!

 

I dont understand the despite the governments best efforts bit.
and also when one fcuks something up big style and then proceeds to throw more and more money at it eventually it will work(ish)

 

I work on an armed merchantman, called an RFA, but no matter how many bulkheads are angled for radar reduction we still look like a big fat target, and our self defense consists of a few stewards when not in the bar firing 20mm at a 300mph target and getting no where near it. And as for the noise I'm sure anyone on here will know, you only have to put a glass to a ships hull and you'd hear us coming from the Falklands. I remember doing a towed sonar thingy for RN helicopters to track but we made so much noise that they couldnt hear the sonar and in the end they just used the racket we were making. This Page sounds like sour grapes, did he not get his promotion on time?

 

"This Page sounds like sour grapes, did he not get his promotion on time? "

No - he left in a huff because apparently the RN didnt recognise that his genius at being an MCMV diver didnt translate into the ability to command ships. Apparently they wanted him to do boring things like career courses and broadening tours and staff college - clearly a man of Lewis character and experience is far to clever to do something like that, so toys went out of pram and the RN lost his skills.

It must have taken the appointer at least 10 seconds to get over his grief at the loss of Lewis from the plot...

 

Having spent a few years working for the Messy Beast in the past that is not always true. There have been quite a few times that I can remeber when things have very much gone the other way.

In reality I think very often MOD-PE or what ever they are calling themselve today blaim the likes of the Messsy Beast for their own failures. As it stands they have lost the latest armoured vehicle contract (which may or may not be a good thing) and will have to seriously consider the viability for their UK tank factories.

You also have to remember that they are not just the biggest of their kind in the UK, by annual billing they are also the 4th in the good old USA.

 

Were to start? I've seldom read such poorly informed, blinkered drivel, stand fast Gordon Brown's excuses for the shit the country is in.

Has anyone read Page in a broadsheet recently or is he now an internet 'journalist'? Just what is 'The Register' and what is its audience? I wonder if he has tried to get face time / column inches recently in fora outside the internet. Probably not.

 

The register is an online tabloid, mainly covering IT but also politics and anything else which takes their fancy.

some of the articles are ok, others are total and utter kack to be honest, LP's articles are starting to descend into total and utter lunacy of late (well more so than usual)

Previously he may have made 1 or perhaps 2 relevant points in an article of utter drivel, but lately...its just all drivel.

Really....a containership hunting subs...is just THE daftest idea I have ever heard, especially since as others have mentioned the ship makes on the whole a horrific din, stands out like a sore thumb on radar, is slow to move and manoeuvre, and has no real protection from attack.

Plus if the helo misses the submarine, then the ship is dead, at least a proper ASuW frigate has a chance of getting the submarine before the submarine gets the frigate.

 

Ignored best advice to go for Mk41 VLS and a 5" gun, wouldn't fund all the shiny bits that would have made T45 an outstanding warship and then incrementally slashed the order from 14 to 12, to 8 to 6 so we saw none of the efficiencies and improvements during build that could and should have come to bear on the class and driven the unit cost down to sensible. Thanks to the Governments best efforts we have a class of 6 with a limited capability for not much less than we could have had a dozen.

 

Please excuse the ignorance of the specialisation but can some one tell me if he is correct when he says that the towed PA sonar "only detects at short range, stc...". I had always understood RN frigates to be very good AS platforms. Is this as well informed as the facts that frigates sp land ops with their helo(wtf) and that NGS isn't much cop (obviously hasn't seen the effect on the ground!)?
On the subject of using container ships, noise, etc. I seem to recall that Lusty and co were originally commercial hulls (or perhaps constructed on civvy not RN lines) fitted with big rubber blocks for the engines, etc?

IMD

 

Why 5 inch gun? Dont you mean the 155mm upgrade that is on the cards and that the T45 gun mounting was strengthened for it?

As for MK41 im not sure that it would have been better or worse and cutting numbers i agree with you 100%.