Is the State Best Serving Us and our Armed Forces?

In my last post I mentioned our lack of a carrier to send to Libya to rescue our stranded citizens. There's a lot more to it than I mentioned and I want to cover it here.

In fact, I've heard on the grapevine of serious issues surrounding this very issue. The lack of a carrier isn't the only issue. The thing is, a carrier is not only the ship, it isn't even only the helicopters on board for deployment to rescue stranded brits: its a fighting unit, which includes fast jet air cover in the form of harriers, which make the air safe for those helicopters to operate.

So scrapping the carrier and the harriers removes a whole swathe of not only naval but aviation capability. No longer can we take aircraft to theatres of operation. Instead we have to rely on friendly foreign airbases to house our land based aircraft, something which isn't always available.

In the case of this weekend's desert extractions, we've had to rely on fixed wing Hercules transports utilising airstrips in the desert flying out of Malta no doubt with fixed-wing air cover in the form of Tornados or Eurofighters. Of course that means that we can only extract people who can travel to or are already at airstrips, leaving a lot of people behind. Helicopters need no runways to operate from.

Another question that needs to be asked is why the (untypical for government) haste to scrap the assets that have been retired and render them beyond use? We already know about the Nimrods that were cut up in public view, but at Christmas I had a look at Ark Royal only weeks after it had docked for the last time. Already the scrapping process had started in earnest.
I have no information about the Harriers, but one can imagine that their fate is something similar.

I have no idea why these assets have been scrapped so hastily rather than being mothballed and keep them in reserve just in case. Sure it'd cost money to mothball them, but nowhere near as much money to keep them operational.

I just think there's something spiteful either in government or the MOD in this rush to put these weapons beyond operational use. Is there rift between the government and the MOD?

In any case, the real losers aren't the government or the MOD, but those people done a disservice by the badly planned, clumsy and poorly executed reductions in capability: us, the people that pay for it all and those from the UK stranded in the Libyan desert.

Load.... Aim..... Shoot Self in Foot.

Today has the news services full of David Cameron handwringing and apologising for the late intervention of the government in extracting UK nationals caught up in the Libyan crisis.

Not one New Outlet as far as I can see has picked up on the idea that if we had a an aircraft carrier at our disposal, we could have pointed it and its complement of helicopters at the Libyan coast in order to extract our people.

Instead, thanks to the ill-conceived and rushed defence cuts, we have to rely on those rare civillian airlines who will rush into trouble spots and help extract refugees. This, understandably takes time as airlines are contacted, insurance companies are briefed, costs and contracts are negotiated and the plan eventually made.

I said many months ago before the election that the cuts government were about to embark on needed to be micromanaged, in such a way that primary assets and front-line services weren't adversely affected.

Instead we got the top-down rhetoric of old, the clunking fist of the MOD causing mayhem among defence assets, removing whole swathes of front-line capability with absolutely no regard for the consequences. We have local councils allowed to react to cuts in funding in the most politically devastating and costly way, rather than forced to cut non-essential and frivolous pet projects. In fact the government has done exactly the wrong thing in its first months of tenure and has left itself exposed to the machinations of the leftist spin machine. Its a weakness that will be exploited ruthlessly: that the coalition government is incompetent and unfit to govern.

And to be honest, given the government's track record so far and their apparent inability to learn from mistakes, I totally agree.

The Arab Uprising.

As absorbing as it is to see the people of various Middle-Eastern nations revolting against their respective regimes and as horrifying as it is to see the bloodshed in Libya, I do wonder how so many people could so suddenly become so organised and revolt in such numbers.

I just wonder what the back story is, who the organiser is and to what purpose they are plunging the Middle East into turmoil.

Only now, a decade on is the true story of our military interventions coming to light. We now know the WMD claims were a hoax, we know that the invasion of Iraq was essentially illegal, we know that the UK cabinet was hardly consulted at all on the policy that has cost so many military and civillian lives.

I would hope that if there is some organising force, some ulterior motive behind these numerous uprisings, the mainstream media will dig it out and display it for all to see, rather than it be left to the blogoshpere and whistleblower internet sites to provide the truth.