So - you say we're not overstretched?

[WE Branch Fanatic]

98/99 Operational Commitments (http://www.mod.uk/publications/performance1998/commitments.htm)

So is anyone REALLY saying the the Forces have got less busy since then?

Kosovo, Sierra Leone, 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq......

[6foottanker]

Well, I guess a certain 'right honourable gentleman's paperwork must say so! Oh how well informed he is, best we employ some more civil servants.

[WE Branch Fanatic]

Any more comments, anyone?

[passpartout]

No.

Nothing we think or say will change anything.

We just have to get on with life and accept that there are more important things to spend the taxpayers' money on.

Like id cards

[opso]

Nothing we didn't already know and realise that nobody outside the effected military gives a damn about. I did find the apples and oranges comparison interesting though:

RN: 20%...training for, deployed on, or recovering...

Army: 36%...preparing for, deployed on, or recovering...

RAF: 9%...deployed...

Certainly where I work (although I concede that we aren't necessarily representative of the whole Service), for every person OOA we have at least one prepping and one recovering, which would push the comparative RAF figure to approx 18-27%, but that's a guess from the figures in that report.

The figures for more recent years don't take in to account the prep or recovery element and so are better compared against the 98/99 RAF figure of 9% (which would probably have been roughly RN:7-10% and Army:12-18% in that same year using the same impact as effects the RAF as a guide):

01/02 RN: 12.6% Army: 24.4% RAF: 12.7%
02/03 RN: 18.9% Army: 34.2% RAF: 16.1%
03/04 RN: 15.8% Army: 28.9% RAF: 13.6%

Or, to move away from quoting the seemingly authorative, but usually misleading figures, the implication is that the military isn't as busy as we were during the height of TELIC, but we're almost twice as busy as five years ago and the Army have been hit the hardest... Hardly a surprise to anyone other than vecvec.