UK GCAP fighter effort can only survive if more funds are allocated, expert warns

Industry and the UK MoD should be “much more honest” about the actual costs of UK military procurement programmes upfront when it comes to programmes like the triliteral Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP), a think tank expert has warned. Ensuring strict adherence to the fighter jet’s service entry date is imperative to prevent Japan, a key partner in the project, from walking away. 

A parliamentary hearing on 6 March highlighted the persistent problem of unrealistic cost estimations and delayed schedules affecting the UK's defence procurement efforts – issues that could be mitigated with more transparent planning.

Professor Justin Bronk, a senior research fellow for airpower and technology at the think tank RUSI, highlighted the UK’s historical trend in capital programmes of being “extremely over-optimistic” about the initial costs of major endeavours. This tendency often leaves the government in desperate scramble when the true costs are revealed.

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“What that tends to lead to is not just cost overruns against the estimates, but significant continuing delays because we don’t have the money in a year [budget] to keep things on track,” Bronk told the House of Lords International Relations and Defence Committee.

“Every year of delays to any programme mean you’re keeping a workforce in work, and therefore having to be paid for an additional year, even though the programme is not significantly progressing,” he explained. “This is how you end up systemically in British procurement, among other things – including changing specs repeatedly with programmes – with programmes that arrive 10 years late, massively over budget, with far smaller fleets.”

The most notable example of such underestimation would be the Royal Navy’s (RN’s) Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers. The initial cost slated for a pair of carriers was £3.9 billion (US$4.9 billion), and the first ship was expected to enter service in 2015. The programme eventually ended up costing £6.2 billion (US$7.8 billion), or £3.1 billion per ship, with the first ship having been commissioned in 2017. 

Excessive optimism in estimating the required crew numbers for the RN’s carriers has also resulted in wasteful spending for UK taxpayers. Bronk said the navy was “scrapping frigates which have just gone through refits because we simply don’t have enough crew”.

An anonymous defence and government sources allegedly told the Telegraph newspaper in January this year that the service was so short on sailors that it was reportedly having to decommission two Type 23 class frigates in order to staff its new class of frigates.

“Being honest about the costs upfront, I think, is absolutely crucial for keeping the [GCAP] programme on track,” said Bronk. “If we want to do this, it’s going to cost quite a lot of money, and we’re going to have to allocate significant additional funding from outside the core defence budget as it currently exists.”

Bronk added that the current defence budget was inadequate to meet the needs of the current force, let alone a next-generation fighter programme. The research fellow also emphasised that the planned service-entry date of 2035 for the sixth-generation fighter was imperative for Japan. 

“That is [2035] is an absolute requirement for them,” he said. “I’ve spoken to very, very senior Japanese Air Force personnel who have said in those terms: ‘2035 is an absolute cutoff for us’.”

Complementary industrial capabilities across GCAP partners

The outlook for GCAP is not all bad, however. When asked about defence industrial capabilities and complementary elements of those across Italy, Japan and the UK, Bronk said there was a lot of it.

“The Italians are excellent at hardware for sensors,” Bronk said. “Leonardo is making the radar for Typhoon, which will form the basis for the main sensors on GCAP initially.”

The European Common Radar System (ECRS) Mk 2 radar has been fitted to an aircraft ahead of flight trials. ECRS Mk 2, which will be used by the Royal Air Force Eurofighter Typhoon fighters, has been developed by Leonardo UK and integrated into the UK’s test and evaluation Typhoon by BAE Systems. The companies told Shephard last year that some of lessons learnt during trials with the ECRS MK2 would feed into the GCAP programme.

On the UK side, Bronk highlighted Rolls-Royce as “one of the very few manufacturers that can make a fifth-, or indeed a next-generation combat aircraft engine”. The Eurojet EJ200, the powerplant of the Eurofighter Typhoon, was largely based on the UK engine maker’s XG-40 technology demonstrator.

Rolls-Royce possesses the capacity to manufacture such high-performance engines owing to its substantial R&D funding that comes from its dominant position in nearly half of the civil aviation market for large turbofans. The UK also has the know-how from an airframe design and low-observable technology perspective.

Japan, for its part, can bring a “massive industrial scale” and the ability to manufacture at an “unbelievable quality” to the GCAP effort, said Bronk. 

“[Japan] has engine test facilities that we [the UK] no longer have, which is very useful,” he added. “And they just bring an extraordinary engineering base, which is at a scale and quality that we don’t really have in the UK anymore.”

Related Programmes in Defence Insight

Global Combat Air Programme [UK]

Global Combat Air Programme [Italy]

Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP) [Japan]