I posted earlier about the coming budget cuts (€1 billion on a €8.5 billion budget) for the Dutch armed forces. At that moment I didn’t have the time to do a follow up on that piece, but here it is.
I have to say that the result isn't as bad as I suspected for the Navy, as far as material goes. The personnel cut is an entirely different matter.
The army has been hit hardest and all the MBT's will be sold.
And there was a surprise as well. The number of F-16's will be cut to 68 (from 87), but 4 MALE's will be bought. And although it isn’t mentioned anywhere, it will be Predators.
Consequences for the Navy
So yes, the Dutch will loose 2 OPV's, but they will have 2 more OPV's than they have now. Most likely customer for these 2 OPV's: Oman.
The JSS (or big honking ship if you're Canadian) has survived the budgets cuts, but 2 AORs will disappear. One was already heading out anyway, because it's 35 years old and with the current size of the Dutch Navy, we just do not need 2 supply ships.
Anyone thinking that HNLMS Amsterdam would be kept when the JSS would be ready was delirious. Biggest problem is that the Netherlands will have to do a year without any resupply ship.
Customers: for HNLMS Zuiderkruis it's probably the scrapheap, or we give her away to Pakistan, who operate her sister vessel. HNLMS Amsterdam was commissioned in 1995 so has plenty of life left. Canada is looking at the Spanish Patino class as a possible replacement for their aging Protecteur class, they might be interested, since the ships are sisters. They were the result of a cooperation between Spanish BAZAN and Dutch NEVESBU.
The biggest reduction in numbers is with the MCM vessels (from 10 to 6). With 6 we're at the minimum number of vessels needed. The North Sea is still riddled with unexploded ordinance, but truth be told, most are found by fishers in their nets and not the Dutch Navy.
Consequence of this cut is that there are not enough vessels to permanently have one available for international missions, like Libya where HNLMS Haarlem is out minehunting after the French discovered Libyan vessels laying mines. Customers: most likely Eastern European countries.
So the end result is: from 27 major surface ships to 24. That's way better than I was expecting. If measured by gross tonnage, whe're talking negligible differences. It's less than 1,000 tons on a 100,000+ ton Navy.
Defence Helicopter Command
Going from 4 different types of helicopters (Chinook, Cougar, Lynx, NH90) to just two (Chinook and NH90) is about the smartest thing to do. And while on paper the total number of helicopters will be reduced from 44 to 37, that doesn't paint the right picture.
The Dutch might have 14 Lynx' on paper, but only 10 are serviceable. The Cougars are even worse with 17 on paper and 6 serviceable. And the Netherlands might have received 2 NH90's, but those are undergoing tests at the moment and are not actually deployed on their intended tasks. So that's actually 27 serviceable helicopters that can be used.
With the Chinook fleet rising to 17 and the NH90 to 20, it should become 37. And with those 37 helis you should be able to actually transport 888 troops, compared to the 883 paper figure right now.
Conclusion
Well it might not be the future people had in mind a year ago, but for the Navy and the Defence Helicopter Command it isn't as bad as I was expecting.
The ever declining numbers of vessels does mean even less places the Netherlands can go to at the same time.
This isn't the end, because now discussions in Parliament are beginning, with left wing parties focussing on the job loss and right wing parties on the loss of equipment.
And a final note. If you understand Dutch, for the fun of it you should first read the last chapter of the document sent to Parliament and then the rest. For those who don't understand Dutch, this is the picture you would get when reading it this way:
The world isn't getting any safer, we intend to
That's what you get when accountants (the Ministry of Finance) effectively run the armed forces.
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