Why GCAP might be a bit fucked

In conversation with Michael Pryce

Former Principal Consultant at BAE Systems Digital Intelligence, Senior Air Systems Analyst at DSTL, and Independent Scientific Technical Advisor for the British Ministry of Defence, Michael Pryce is a man worth listening to. Let’s chat GCAP.

GCAP or Edgelord or whatever we call it these days, seems to be universally praised as a good idea; am I the only person who sees it having mad cost escalation and delays written all over it?

MP: No. I do too. I gave a talk on ‘TSR-2: A Warning for Tempest?’ about how there is potential for it to go the way of the TSR.2. Claims for digital design tools solving all problems seem dubious. The TSR.2 used digital design tools – they were around in the 1960s. They could not solve some fundamental problems involved in collaboration. Like GCAP/Tempest, the TSR.2 was a collaboration based on ‘sentence first, verdict afterwards’ – basically, we decide to do ‘this’, then figure out what it actually is after. All collaborations are negotiations, and they take time. Which costs money.

It seems that British fighter generations have historically flitted between agile & short-range, then sluggish and long-range: Javelin > Lightning > Tornado > Typhoon. With this in mind, should we expect Tempest to be long-ranged but sluggish?

Typhoon is pretty sprightly, and the Javelin could turn high up, but I think the days of turning and burning are seen as being behind us. The artwork for GCAP/Tempest makes me think of the lovechild of a Vulcan and