Well, if we mil Brits want to be really depressed, a look at this piece should do the trick. It's by Ted R Bromund, in an American magazine,
The Weekly Standard. It's called
Damn, Busted.
https://www.weeklystandard.com/ted-r...nd/damn-busted
Here are a few snippets:
For two decades, British governments have promised to square the funding circle by achieving greater efficiencies, a promise first heard in that 1998 review. For two decades, the efficiencies achieved have failed to keep the declines in defense spending from gnawing into the size and strength of Britain’s forces.
What’s even more disturbing are the lies the British tell themselves to make all this seem okay. There is the lie that today’s equipment is so much better than yesterday’s that it doesn’t matter how little of it they have. Leaving aside the obvious fact that even the best plane can’t be in two places at once, the problem with this lie is that buying one plane doesn’t get you one plane on the front line: Given training and maintenance, it gets you about a third of a plane, which is much less useful.
Britain’s can-do military culture and its political willingness to deploy mean that Britain is taking on far more risk than it realizes, and on margins that are almost comically slender.
In the end, Britain’s problem isn’t money. It’s the absence of leaders who are able to advance a vision for Britain’s world role that would justify spending more money on it.
Anyone disagree?
airsound