....we seem to be awash with Chinooks to carry soldiers ... where exactly after Afghanistan?
Who knows? That is the problem with short-term thinking.
The same sort of short-term thinking that led to the MPA capability being given a 'holiday' could also lead to squaddies being vulnerable to IEDs in some future conflict where those seemingly easily discarded Chinooks may have been quite handy.
Who'd have guessed back in 2000 that fourteen years later we'd be trying to drag ourselves out of yet another meatgrinder of a conflict in the North West Frontier? Where may our ground forces be operating in another fourteen years?