The UK Military

Oh god where do i start

Where did i read yesterday that we have 11,500 bureaucrats in Filton Abbey Wood arguing about how many soldiers GD are allowed to kill with exploding batteries in the Ajax Fighting Vehicle, whereas Israel has a mere 300 in their equivalent body and all they care about is how efficiently the IDF can solve the Palestinian Problem.

If we had suffered in the 1930’s the millstone round our necks that Filton Abbey Wood IS you would have been fighting Hitler’s Stukas with Gloster Gladiators and Sound Enhancement Horns instead of Hurricanes, Spitfires and Chain Low. Because the pen pushing twats would have pissed on the spitfire Development and Grandad would have bern so utterly f**kef off with them he’d have taken Dennis Wheatley to one side, learned the requisite incantation and conjured lucifer to give them hell before pissing off to Rhodesia to await the inevitable

I hate agreeing with Dan

IF - we are to bring the British Army back to a size where it could once again be classed as a formidable fighting force, then how do we fund it. ?

Bearing in mind that we are entering a period where finances are extremely difficult, how would we finance taking our Army back to 80,000 or even 100,000.

The British Army is half the size it was in 1980, just 43 years ago

Scrap HS2 - thats £140 Billion saved right there.

and that is the problem, isn’t it

What’s that saying about peaceable folks being able to sleep quietly in their beds because rough men stand ready to do violence in their name ? I don’t remember the actual words but I think that is close enough.

The irony is what to do with the rough men when the need has passed. Dolph Lundgren and The Muscles From Brussels were the ultimate pinnacle of this with the cryofrozen killing machines they played in ‘Universal Soldier’ and there must be a hundred similar sci fi genres of a fighting force ‘kept on ice’ in much the same way

In reality a standing army costs money and that’s the end of it. Of course in my ancestor’s day nobody was FORCED to pay

You had the choice to live in, or near, the Castle Ward. An elevated position offering a view over the area from which an invader may come. A site requiring a payment to the local warlord who kept a standing army to fight and maybe die to protect the castle and those near it.

Or you could build a place near where the raiders would land. No one would think less of you or mock you. Far from it. For when the raiders came, your children would be told to run to the castle to raise the alarm, and they would be adopted and live. You, if you were skilled and lucky, would fight off the raiders long enough until the riders from the castle came. If not, then the wailing of your womenfolk as they were taken into slavery or worse, and the smoke rising from your home as your corpse burned on its threshold with it, served to further raise the alarm.

I don’t know when we last needed our army. Publicly i suppose 1981/2 when my career providing better ways for them to kill people was about to take off in the wake of the falklands debacle. And i say debacle as we did not really have a force completely suited to face the argentinian foe.

But we managed. We always do. Then afterwards we abandon those whose service we needed. Like we always do.

The biggest threats to the UK are the same threats for Europe, and we ought to concentrate defence to our own back yard and pull out of the AUKUS pact, the defence of the Asia-Pacific region should be left to our allies in that region - Japan, the USA, Australia, S Korea, Malaysia etc.

The best way to use resources is to pool resources, share the burdon and deepen co-operation with NATO and Europe.

We do not need bases or facillities in Oman, Qatar or Bahrain, we need forward bases here, in Europe, in The Baltic States, in Poland and perhaps joint bases in Romania and in the future in Sweden and Finland.