The decision to scrap Sea Harrier now comes back to haunt Blair
See the DT this morning and its article Navy 'too weak' for big role in Korea blockade.
NuLabour decommissioned and has scrapped the Sea Harrier force - in true vindictive MOD fashion making sure it can't be de-mothballed by selling and breaking the aircraft up ( sometimes you have to wonder whose side the government is actually on. )
Now the chance of Royal Navy ships needing aircover comes up and there is nothing left. The new destroyers are perhaps questionable (EU Referendum certainly thinks so ) - and not functionally existent yet.
But this could be the least of our problems - the Falklands still need defending against an increasingly aggressive Argentine regime. Perhaps Blair won't be remembered just for Iraq, but for losing Port Stanley as well.
The loss of the Falklands would be a new Suez - and perhaps destroy the armed services which to a major extent hold the United Kingdom together. The end of the United Kingdom could be the result.
The Navy must resist this commitment - which is ineffective without the Chinese anyway.
Update:
A widow of one of the guys from the RAF Nimrod that crashed in Afghanistan is reported by the BBC saying that her husband said:
"he could not remember the last time he flew a plane "with all the parts working"."
My point ? The services have been starved of money. A while ago I quoted the DT as saying the defence budget has gone down 25% .
6 comments:
They're not on our side that's for sure. But I have to wonder whether David's team are either. An interesting comment from Francis Tusa last night on Talk Sport when he referred to Cameron and his team as non-conformists. It's almost as if the military is being deliberately wound down.
We don't even have the vulcans to mount black buck missions if the Argentinians do invade, maybe we should see about buying a few old B-52's from the USA.
Let's be honest we couldn't mount another task force if we tried, we don't have the forces any longer.
The Vulcan bomber raids were in general very ineffective. Korea (last time with US marine corps aviation) and the Falklands (FAA) show that there is no subsitute for air support based near your area of operation.
It worth reading Sharkey Ward's book on the Falklands - I reviewed it a while ago here.
Watching all this develop is like being in a slow car crash.
I genuinely think that there is a deep seam of hatred running through the Labour movement.
They seem to think that the Armed forces are all closet Tories (which they are) and are plotting to bring down the Labour government (which they are not).
James,
Think you might be right here - maybe thats why they didn't act to make sure that 65% of our armed services could vote in the last general election.
Fortunately, a number of Sea Harriers have been retained by the MOD, and a number of Harrier T8 trainers for ground based training at the RN School of Flight Deck Operations.
http://www.royalnavy.mod.uk/server/show/nav.3284
The Sea Harrier issue was discussed at length on PPRuNe:
http://www.pprune.org/forums/showthread.php?t=98152
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