The commanders of Russia’s Baltic fleet will be rubbing their hands with glee over the government’s decision to scrap the RAF’s £4 billion Nimrod aircraft.
As I wrote this morning, for 40 years Nimrod has been central to our attempts to prevent Russia’s fleet of nuclear submarines from penetrating our defences.
But without the sophisticated maritime reconnaissance capability that Nimrod provides, we have, in effect, abandoned the North Sea to the Russians.
Defence officials insist that our Nato allies in Scandanavia, who also have a vested interest in keeping the Ruskies at bay, will be able to help us out by sharing the intelligence they collect from their own surveillance patrols.
This may well be true, but I suspect the quality of the information they provide will be inferior to that provided on a daily basis by the teams of RAF specialists who have honed their skills over many years of detecting and tracking Russian submarine movements.
I can see why the government felt it had no option other than to scrap the Nimrod programme. Once the Strategic Defence and Security Review had decided to stick with the new aircraft carriers, and that the Army must remain immune from wholesale cuts while it is still operational in Afghanistan, there were few other options left.
Nor did the RAF do itself any favours by presiding over a programme that was more than a decade behind schedule and massively over budget.
But the retired service chiefs who penned the letter in today’s Daily Telegraph are spot on. By cancelling Nimrod the government has left a gaping hole in our defence capabilities. And while we must now learn to live without the protection provided by Nimrod, the government must, as a matter of urgency, come up with an alternative, effective and cost efficient surveillance system to protect our seas from the antics of those meddlesome Russians.
Scrapping Nimrod Is A Gift Horse For The Russians
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