Defensiebegrotingen en -problematiek, niet NL

Gestart door Lex, 10/07/2006 | 21:54 uur

andré herc

Defensieminister Pieter De Crem (CD&V) trekt morgen naar de ministerraad met een boodschappenlijst vol legermateriaal die hij onontbeerlijk acht voor 'zijn' leger. Op de steun van de Inspectie Financiën (IF) kan hij alvast niet rekenen. Die zegt: "de marge voor deze legeraankopen is nihil."

In totaal vraagt Defensie 490 miljoen euro, 242 miljoen voor dit jaar en 212 miljoen voor volgend jaar, voor allerlei legeraankopen. Als De Crem zijn coalitiepartners zal moeten overtuigen van de noodzaak van die aankopen, zal het advies van de Inspectie Financiën hem alvast niet helpen. "De reële budgettaire marge voor de uitvoering van deze legeraankopen is de facto nihil", schrijft de bevoegde inspecteur-generaal. "De uitvoering van dit programma zal de staatsschuld met minstens 500 miljoen euro laten aangroeien. De komende generaties zullen deze aangroei gedurende vele decennia moeten dragen."

voor meer zie link

http://www.demorgen.be/dm/nl/989/Binnenland/article/detail/1436166/2012/05/10/Inspectie-Financien-geen-geld-voor-investeringen-De-Crem.dhtml
Den Haag stop met afbreken van NL Defensie, en investeer in een eigen C-17.

Ace1

waarom is het nieuws over de  Visegrad group hier geplaatst en niet in deze topic?

http://www.defensieforum.nl/Forum/empty-t20985.0.html

Lex

Central Europe to create a joint combat unit

Defence ministers from the Czech republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia signed a joint statement on May 4, pledging to create a 3000-strong combat unit for EU forces by early 2016. The unit, to be commanded by Poland, is set to have its first training in late 2015.

Czech Defence Minister Alexandr Vondra called the agreement "a strong signal that the four central European countries are capable of taking on such a task without a great European power behind them". Other EU states, however, are free to join. Slovak army chief Peter Vojtek confirmed that Austria has already expressed interest in sharing certain responsibilities with the group.

As a part of the deal, the four central European countries will coordinate their defence planning and public procurement of military equipment to lower their expenditures. They also vowed to continue joint military exercises after the end of the NATO mission in Afghanistan, where they have deployed a total of 3600 personnel.

All four countries joined the EU and NATO in 2004. They formed the Visegrad group, or V4, in 1991 for the purpose of cooperation and further European integration.

SDA.org,
07/05/2012

Lex

Het gaat hier niet om de NL situatie. Verzoeke daar rekening mee te houden.

Dank u.

Lex
Algeheel beheerder

Tanker

Citaat van: jurrien visser op 05/05/2012 | 13:59 uur
Citaat van: Kapitein Rob op 05/05/2012 | 13:53 uur
Zal ze in Den Haag niet boeien; nog maar 6 mijnenjagers over.....

Den Haag moet eens een keer beter nadenken... op een dag als vandaag "blaten" over een zwaar bevochten vrijheid en nu dood leuk de voorwaarden scheppen voor het volgende debacle.

Hypocriete bende!

Hoorde gisteren een stukje van de speech van burgemeester van der Laan van Amsterdam, op zich mooie woorden.
Echter de overheid doet er niets mee, maakt niet uit welke partij, allemaal 1 pot nat.

Defensie is en blijft de sluitpost op de begroting, de woorden van politici zijn dus " lege hulzen"
Lijkt mij geweldig om eens een discussie aan te gaan met een politicus met als onderwerp defensie, die lul je toch zo onder de tafel.....

jurrien visser (JuVi op Twitter)

Citaat van: Kapitein Rob op 05/05/2012 | 13:53 uur
Zal ze in Den Haag niet boeien; nog maar 6 mijnenjagers over.....

Den Haag moet eens een keer beter nadenken... op een dag als vandaag "blaten" over een zwaar bevochten vrijheid en nu dood leuk de voorwaarden scheppen voor het volgende debacle.

Hypocriete bende!

KapiteinRob

Zal ze in Den Haag niet boeien; nog maar 6 mijnenjagers over.....

jurrien visser (JuVi op Twitter)

Iran Mine Threat Scares Navy; CNO Scrambles To Fix Decades Of Neglect

By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.

Published: May 4, 2012

WASHINGTON: Iran's threat to strangle oil tanker traffic through the Straits of Hormuz has the Navy scrambling to redress its decades-old neglect of mine warfare. Admirals from the Chief of Naval Operations on down have publicly admitted the service is not where it needs to be.

"What I find amazing is the amount of interest that's being afforded mine warfare by the senior navy leadership," said Scott Truver, a naval analyst and author. "It's all due to the Iranian threat to close -- if indeed it is possible to close -- the Hormuz Straits."

When asked point-blank whether he was "comfortable" with the Navy's mine-clearing capabilities, the Chief of Naval Operations said bluntly, "No." But, Adm. Jonathan Greenert went on in remarks at the Navy League's Sea-Air-Space symposium last month, "I feel much better than I did six months ago. We've moved about a billion dollars total" from various accounts to weaponry for shallow-water warfare in places like the Gulf, and "a lot of that was in mine warfare," Greenert said. "But we have more work to do," he went on. "It's not just the near term issue."

The Navy's long-term solution is a high-tech concept centered around the controversial Littoral Combat Ship, which will serve as a fast, albeit vulnerable, mothership for mine-hunting helicopters and a host of unmanned vehicles. That's definitely more attractive than the traditional approach of sending minesweeping ships, divers, and even trained dolphins straight into the minefield. But the much-delayed mine-countermeasures module for the LCS is still in development, with extensive testing about LCS-2, the Independence, scheduled for this summer. Until it's operational, the Navy's counter-mine capacity remains distinctly limited.

"We've been doing mine countermeasures since 1917 and we still can't get that package ready for production," lamented naval historian and analyst Norman Polmar. For now, "14 minesweepers and two squadrons of helicopters are our nation's entire mine countermeasures capability."

In March, Adm. Greenert made a very public point of ordering more mine-hunting helicopters and ships to the Gulf, noting that the deployment would double the number of Avenger-class minesweepers operating out of Bahrain from four to eight. What he didn't emphasize was that's more than half the nation's entire minesweeper force, leaving just two ships for training in the States and four in Japan to keep an eye on China's estimated arsenal of 100,000 naval mines.

At the moment, moreover, the reinforcements for the Gulf are still en route -- not under their own power but hauled aboard heavy-lift ships, since the small minesweepers aren't well-suited to cross oceans on their own. The Navy continues to upgrade the 1980s-vintage minesweepers, recently improving their sonar for example. Overall, however, the Avengers are slow, vulnerable, and increasingly difficult to maintain.

By contrast, the LCS is brand new, much faster, and at least as survivable as the Avengers. The Navy rates both ships' resistance to battle damage as "level one," compared to the more resilient level two for the similar-sized Perry-class frigates and level three for the much larger Arleigh Burke-class Aegis destroyers. The LCS also has an anti-missile system and other self-defense capabilities the Avengers lack to keep from being hit. Moreover, the whole LCS concept of sending out unmanned submersibles and helicopters -- the Avenger cannot do either -- is meant to keep it further from danger in the first place. While the Pentagon's own independent Director of Operational Testing & Evaluation has questioned the LCS's ability to survive in a "combat environment," even LCS skeptic Polmar admits it's an improvement over the geriatric Avenger.

In the strategic big picture, however, the most important difference is that whereas the Navy has just 14 Avengers, it has committed to buying 55 Littoral Combat Ships. Not all 55 will be minesweepers: The LCS concept is "modular," with each ship capable of being quickly re-outfitted to deal with either mines, submarines, or swarms of fast attack boats (all three are part of the Iranian arsenal, incidentally). The Navy plans to buy 24 mine-countermeasures modules, almost double the number of Avengers.

The devil is in the modules, however. Only the small-boat-fighting module has actually been deployed on a real-world operation, without its full complement of weapons. Work on the anti-submarine module was "reset" after the Navy changed its concept to better exploit LCS's speed; delivery is not expected until 2016. Then there's the mine countermeasures module, with two prototypes in testing and formal assessment by the Director of Operational Testing & Evaluation scheduled for 2014.

"The key piece for us is we now have the software that works," said the Navy's program manager for LCS modules, Capt. John Ailes, in a briefing at last month's Sea-Air-Space convention. With the underlying software in place, he said, the Navy can keep plugging new capabilities into the module as they become available in a continuous cycle of upgrades. In May, for example, the Navy announced it was adding the "KnifeFish," an unmanned submersible specifically designed to look for mines that are buried on the sea floor instead of floating, a task right now that can only be accomplished by trained dolphins and divers.

In the longer term, Navy officials talk about having unmanned mini-subs that can "porpoise," briefly surfacing to transmit data back to the LCS for analysis before returning to their underwater hunt. With current technology, however, sailors with winches have to physically haul the drones back aboard to download the data. So at the moment, said Capt. Ailes, "the biggest challenge we have is launch and recovery" of the main unmanned mine-hunting submersible, the Remote Multi-Mission Vehicle (RMMV). "We can safely pick it up, we can safely put it down," said Ailes "[but] we want to make it routine."

Another mundane obstacle to the high-tech approach is that the LCS's MH-60 Sea Hawk helicopter is simply a lot smaller than the MH-53E Sea Dragon that makes up the Navy's existing -- and highly regarded -- airborne mine-hunting squadrons, which operate off big-deck amphibious warfare ships and carriers. Equipment optimized for the MH-53 needs to be resized for the MH-60, with inevitable losses in capability. Nevertheless, given that the LCS-based MH-60s will supplement the existing MH-53 units rather than replace them, the Navy's mine-clearing capacity will still increase overall.

The nascent LCS fleet will face a complex juggling act learning how to use all these new mine-hunting capabilities and its anti-small-boat module and the sub-hunting system, whenever that is operational. In theory, a specialist mine warfare ship would be ideal. In practice, it's only the multi-role potential of the LCS that convinced the Navy to buy them in numbers, and it's only in numbers that a ship can create critical institutional mass.

Historically, mine warfare has been a marginal activity, conducted by a few sailors in a few ships far from the Navy's power centers, aircraft carriers, submarines, and amphibious warfare ships. The fleet has occasionally had mine-warfare panics in the past -- in 1950 after North Korean mines laid by wooden sailing junks kept Douglas MacArthur's invasion force out of Wonsan; in 1991 after Iraqi mines damaged the ships Tripoli and Princeton -- but the effort has always quickly flagged. "There was a lot of money thrown into mine warfare for three or four years and then attention turned elsewhere," said Truver. "That's my concern: That mine warfare's going to be getting money but then, as priorities change, it's going to be a backwater."

http://defense.aol.com/2012/05/04/iran-mine-threat-scares-navy-cno-scrambles-to-fix-decades-of-ne/

dudge

Lijkt me gewoon een goede zaak. Ook onderling elkaar aanspreken, en kan me aardig vinden in de uitspraken van hammond.

Hyperion

#958
Ah de slaappilletjes beginnen langzamerhand niet meer te werken. Maar ach, beter laat dan nooit!

jurrien visser (JuVi op Twitter)

#957
Lords Committee Call On Germany and Other EU Nations to Pull Their Weight In Providing Troops On the Ground

(Source: House of Lords EU Committee; issued May 4, 2012)
 
The House of Lords EU Committee has today called on the EU to improve its defence capabilities and ensure it can deploy a greater proportion of its armed forces when needed. In their report the Committee stress that given the America's stated declaration that its defence priority is now the Asia-Pacific region and not Europe it is urgent that the EU gets its own house in order on defence capabilities. The Committee call this 'America's wake-up call to Europe' and call on the EU to act.

The report calls on EU Member States to show a willingness and capability to organise themselves militarily and the political will to deploy troops if necessary. The Committee say that Member States should set out a strategic plan outlining what they are willing to do collectively and in what circumstances. They also say that the European Defence Agency should play a role in enabling the experiences of smaller alliances, such as the UK-French treaties, to be shared.

The Committee say that despite being Europe's economic powerhouse, and having a large defence budget in absolute terms, Germany does not pull it weight in military operations and must begin to engage to the same degree as the UK and France if the EU is to fulfil its potential on defence issues. The Committee recognise there are historical and cultural objections in Germany to playing a greater military role but argue these must be overcome if the EU is to have an 'effective security and defence policy'.

The Committee considered the role of EU Battlegroups which were established in 2007 to ensure the EU would be able to deploy troops into action were necessary. Battlegroups are made up of 2 sets of 1,500 troops and are intended to be available to be deployed within 5 days. However today's report makes clear that since their creation Battlegroups have never been deployed. The Committee say that if needed in future Battlegroups should be deployed when the right circumstances next arise. Failure to do so would seriously weaken the credibility of the Common Security and Defence Policy . To ensure that they are ready they should be tested for preparedness as NATO troops are.

The Committee considered the EU-NATO relationship and are clear that NATO remains the only defence community capable of the territorial defence of Europe and say that it is vital that US continues participate in that. The report makes clear that what is good for the EU is good for NATO and vice versa. However the Committee suggest that there are areas such as humanitarian missions, mixed civilian and military operations and peacekeeping where it is more appropriate for the EU to be able to act. In order to achieve this it is vital that these missions are properly resourced.

Commenting on the report Lord Teverson said:

"America has made clear that Europe is no longer its key priority in terms of defence. As America looks elsewhere it is time the EU took up the challenge of ensuring Europe continues to be properly defended.

If that is to be the case Germany, Europe's biggest economy and a key player in every other area of EU activity, must play a bigger role in European defence. It cannot be left to the UK and France to continue to carry the burden of European military capacity.
If EU Member States are to act together to improve European defence capabilities there needs to be strategic plan set out between them as to when they will act in unison to deploy troops. Between them EU Member States have more military personnel than the US, what is lacking is the organisation to coordinate those troops and the political will to deploy them when needed."

http://www.defense-aerospace.com/articles-view/release/3/134977/uk-lords-report-on-european-defense-capabilities.html

jurrien visser (JuVi op Twitter)

Hammond - UK Would Welcome Enhanced Defence Relationship with Germany

(Source: U.K Ministry of Defence; issued May 3, 2012)
 
Defence Secretary Philip Hammond spoke about how Germany and Britain are responding to today's security during a speech in Berlin yesterday, 2 May 2012.

Mr Hammond was hosted by the Deutsche GesellschaftfürAuswärtigePolitik (German Council on Foreign Relations) in Berlin, and his speech was titled 'Shared Security: Transforming Defence to Face the Future'.

In his speech, Mr Hammond explained that, unlike during the Cold War, a defensive crouch posture or 'Fortress Europe' will not meet the needs of national or regional security in this new era. This means intervening beyond the borders of the European Union when necessary.

He also emphasised that with the United States beginning to focus on Asia, Germany should join with the UK and France in transforming their armed forces and generate both the military capability and political will to deploy military resources more widely in future in support of NATO, the EU and coalition operations.

Mr Hammond, reflecting on changes in Berlin over the past 40 years, said that the reunification of the city, with many of the old certainties and familiar features disappearing, was a metaphor for the wider changes that have taken place in the 20 years since the Wall came down, across the globe, and in the strategic security environment in particular. He said:

"The Cold War imposed order and a degree of certainty... the enemy was known and was pretty predictable.

"In divided Europe, NATO and the Warsaw Pact understood the boundaries and operated by a set of rules and understandings.

"But in pure power-balance terms, we have swapped the certainty of a known and predictable enemy for a world of shifting power balances, emerging, independent challengers, and diverse non-state threats.

"So that a myriad of lesser, but nonetheless potentially devastating threats, emerge to make our societies in some ways less safe, less secure, and less certain in facing the future."

Facing the future

Mr Hammond said that this unpredictability and rapid change in the threats we face makes it all the more important that our respective armed forces, and our collective defence arrangements, are correctly configured to meet the requirements of today - and prepared, at the same time, for what is around the next corner.

The central argument in his speech, Mr Hammond said, was this:

"The responsibility of European nations to defend their citizens can no longer be discharged by a strategy of homeland defence and a 'Fortress Europe'.

"The threats we face are no longer territorial, so a passive defence of national territory is no longer adequate protection for our citizens.

"Our security requires that we do not sit back and let threats come to us, but that we project power to meet them - wherever in the world they are forming."

Mr Hammond said, therefore, that the NATO Alliance, and the European part of it in particular, must continue to develop together the capability and the political will to act when necessary - to project power, including, but not limited to, military power, and to deploy it rapidly when we must.

The need for transformation

Mr Hammond talked about Operation UNIFIED PROTECTOR being a coalition success, and, for the people of Libya, a liberation they can justly claim to have seen through themselves.

It has reconfirmed the utility of NATO as the most successful tool for collective defence ever created, he affirmed, adding:

"But the Libya operation also cruelly exposed the imbalances and weaknesses in the Alliance and thus the scale of the task facing European NATO nations.

"Even with the very limited nature of the Libya campaign, the nations of Europe could not have undertaken this operation without the US shouldering much of the weight.

"We know what the problems are. Too many allies are failing to meet their financial responsibilities to NATO. Too many countries are failing to build and maintain appropriate capabilities to meet the new threats we face, or to make them available for operations."

Mr Hammond said that while we have known about these deficiencies for many years, we can no longer afford to carry on as before, because the United States has made clear that it intends to reflect in its strategic posture the growing importance of the developing challenges in the Pacific:

"Let me be clear about this - it is in Europe's interest that the United States rises to the challenge that the emergence of China as a global power presents and we should support the decisions the US has made.

"But that means we, the nations of Europe, must take on more responsibility for our own backyard; shouldering the major burden in the Balkans and the Mediterranean, but also being prepared, if necessary, to take a bigger role in relation to North Africa and the Middle East.

"This isn't about the United States walking away; this is about the nations of Europe taking more of the strain of our collective defence in our own region. Responding to the threats that most directly impact on us."

Fiscal realities

Mr Hammond acknowledged the 'fiscal challenges', saying:

"Without strong economies and sound public finances it will be impossible to sustain in the long term the military capability required across Europe to maintain collective defence and, when necessary, project power to confront threats as they form abroad.

"Yet, in the long run, all NATO members, if they benefit from collective defence, must contribute appropriately to it.

"Each of us must live up to the responsibility to fund national defence properly as a contribution to the Alliance - a responsibility which we reconfirmed as recently as 2010 at the Lisbon Summit.

"But in the short term - when pressures on national budgets are so severe - it is frankly a waste of breath to call for more defence spending to bridge the gap between what the Alliance needs and what the Alliance has. So, for now, more money is not going to be the answer."

Mr Hammond said therefore that we must do things differently:

• maximising the capability we can squeeze out of the resources we have.

• prioritising ruthlessly; specialising aggressively and collaborating unsentimentally.

• investing in capability that is fully deployable, and available for collective defence action - if necessary outside Europe's borders.

• working together to do more, with less.

Collective Defence

Mr Hammond said that the UK's National Security Strategy and Germany's Defence Policy Guidelines come to the same conclusion: to tackle the threats we share in common we need to act in common through all the institutions that exist to provide us with a collective response - the UN, NATO, and the EU among them:

"The challenge is to produce extra military effect, and do it swiftly, without duplicating effort or reinventing proven structures that already exist," Mr Hammond said.

"This will need to begin with a clear-sighted assessment of the current state of NATO's collective competence, taking account of what we know of reductions already planned and how these will impact on current capabilities. And a willingness to recognise the gap between that capability and NATO's stated level of ambition.

"This will provide a baseline against which to take the right decisions: greater pooling and sharing of capabilities; mission, role and geographic specialisation; greater sharing of technology; co-operation on logistics; and more collaborative training.

Multilayered Defence

For Britain, Mr Hammond said, 'Smart Defence' is also about making the Alliance more flexible, encouraging collaboration among groups of Allies and with partners outside the Alliance:

"We need an approach that allows natural bilateral partnerships or regional groupings within the Alliance and across its boundaries to flourish - adding value to the capabilities available to the Alliance as a whole."

Britain is actively pursuing such collaborative initiatives, Mr Hammond said, citing the new Northern Group of nations, including Germany, the Baltic and Nordic countries as well as the UK, and the Franco-British Defence Treaties as part of this process.

And the UK would welcome an enhanced defence and security relationship with Germany, Mr Hammond added, based on the areas where we can best add to Alliance capability through bilateral co-operation:

"We should work towards common positions in NATO and the EU, identifying reasons for any disagreements and tackling them head on, while building on the many areas of agreement as a foundation of our future co-operation."

Capability and deployability

Mr Hammond spoke about how the British Armed Forces that will emerge from our Defence Review will be formidable, flexible and adaptable - equipped with some of the best and most advanced technology in the world, supported by the fourth largest defence budget in the world, meeting in full our NATO responsibilities.

He said the watchword for the transformation process has been capability, not size, adding:

"This focus on capability rather than size is one of the most positive outcomes, I believe, that is emerging from the German transformation programme.

"A new phase and a significant step forward in Germany's post-Cold-War reconfiguration to face the future symbolised by the commitment made to the mission in Afghanistan.

"For both Britain and Germany, the test of transformation will be the ability to generate the level of military capability set out in our plans.

"But it will also rely, in Germany in particular, on the ability to generate the political will and public support for the deployment of military resources more widely in the future in support of Alliance operations beyond our borders.

"By refocusing existing budgetary resources on more deployable capabilities, Germany has probably a greater capacity than any other European NATO partner to contribute to short-term enhancement of the Alliance's capabilities."

In conclusion, Mr Hammond said that it is in all our interests to encourage Germany to realise that potential.

http://www.defense-aerospace.com/article-view/release/134978/uk-wants-closer-defense-ties-with-germany.html

jurrien visser (JuVi op Twitter)

Russia Orders More S-300 SAM Missiles

MOSCOW, April 28 (RIA Novosti)

The Russian Defense Ministry has resumed large-scale procurements of modernized S-300V surface-to-air missile systems, the manufacturer said on Saturday.

"The State Defense Order through 2020 provides for significant volumes of procurement of modernized S-300V air defense systems," Almaz-Antei's general director Vladislav Menshchikov said.

Almaz-Antei's former design bureau chief Igor Ashurbeili previously said S-300 production for the needs of the Russian military had stopped and that there were only export contracts.

However, in early March the Defense Ministry signed a three-year deal with Almaz-Antei for delivery of S-300V4 air defense missile systems.

The S-300 system is a family of long-range air defense missile systems capable of engaging all types of airborne targets including UAVs, helicopters and planes, as well as ballistic and cruise missiles.

Almaz-Antei said in early April it would build a new air defense systems plant in the Nizhny Novgorod region by 2015.

The company manufactures S-300 and S-400 Triumph surface-to-air missile (SAM) systems among other products.

http://en.rian.ru/mlitary_news/20120428/173113385.html

jurrien visser (JuVi op Twitter)

Citaat van: Lynxian op 29/04/2012 | 13:43 uur
En waarom niet, hé? De politici in Europa doen toch geen moeite, dus laat het ze op den duur maar voelen. Wanneer men erachter komt dat we geen drol meer voorstellen, wordt er misschien eindelijk weer eens geïnvesteerd in de belangrijke gebieden.

Je zou toch denken dat "de haantjes" inmiddels weten dat het moeilijk is om van uit "de min" naar een positief saldo te komen, beter is dan een kleine plus om dit later weer uit te bouwen.

Ace1

Type 22 death row: symptom of Britain's self-destruction



4 Type 22 frigates on 'death row' Devonport, July 2011, Photo: Keith Reed
The harsh reality of the government's "strategic defence review". Amongst the most depressing sights in the UK today, HMS Campbeltown, Chatham, Cornwall and Cumberland lie at Devonport in various stages of dismemberment being stripped of secret formula radar-absorbent paint, weapons and other useful or sensitive equipment ready for scrapping. With at least 5-10 years good service left in them (HMS Campbeltown had multi-million£ refit as recently as 2009!), they were suddenly axed by a government with a dogmatic fixation on short-term cost savings and no understanding of maritime power. Although these ships date from the 1980s and were designed incorporating lessons from the Falklands War, they were still very capable warships and until recently were serving around the world protecting Britain's interests. Devonport naval base, the largest in Western Europe, lies half-deserted with few ships to support or refit. Its skilled workforce shrinks and another valuable national asset built up over centuries is left to wither. While many countries are investing in their navies and recognise the importance of maritime power, Britain which once dominated the globe through sea-power is self-destructing, slashing its Navy and throwing away assets and trained people that it may never be able to replace.

The Type 26 Frigate programme is crucial to the future of the Royal Navy.

The demise of these 4 frigates would be fairly unremarkable if there were replacements ready to come forward but there are no frigates under construction in the UK only the vague promise of the Type 26 Frigates which are supposed to start arriving in around 9 years from now! BAe Systems, the corporate giant that has the sole monopoly on UK warship construction, was awarded the contract to begin design of the Type 26 Frigate in March 2010. There are plans for 'up to 18′ of these ships including an ani-submarine version and a more general purpose version. Given BAe System's track record and an MoD that has consistently over-complicated and moved the goals posts during big procurement projects, it will not be surprising if costs spiral, delays occur and the Royal Navy receives less than the 18 promised.

http://www.savetheroyalnavy.org/wordpress/type-22-death-row-a-sign-of-britains-self-destruction