Defence: Public ignorance, the media, and cutbacks

[FODPlod]

Originally Posted by Lyneham Lad

Or, as Sir Max Hastings writes in The Times today - We need to tell the truth about defence.

This is the same gung-ho Max Hastings who, at his typically blinkered, fiercely pro-Army anti-everything else worst, labelled the Royal Navy as cowardly for not starting a shooting match with Somali pirates holding hostages at gunpoint on board a yacht bobbing about on the ocean. He even got that wrong because it was a Royal Fleet Auxiliary tanker on the scene, not a warship.

Having 'liberated' Port Stanley single-handed, he has conveniently forgotten which service delivered him to the Falklands and fought and died to protect him en route. Yet strangely, he sees little or no role for maritime capability, aircraft carriers, air superiority, CASD or much else the RN (or the RAF for that matter) has to offer. His eyes are firmly fixed on 'boots on the ground' to the exclusion of all else required to prepare the ground for them, deliver them, protect them, sustain them in theatre and provide them with vital intelligence.