Originally Posted by
Jackonicko
the very unconfirmed rumour is that Trump's announcement of the US withdrawal is being used to justify a reduction in the UK's sorties.
Interesting framing. As the stated aim of the operation is the defeat of ISIS, isn’t it likely that the reduction of the ‘Caliphate’ to an area smaller than a fast jet’s turn radius has rather more to do with it? Until GR4’s last sortie, the UK’s contribution was essentially unchanged from the days when it stretched from Raqqa to Baghdad. There’s only so many jets you can safely fit into one tiny patch of sky.
This negative framing feeds the toxic ‘use it or lose it’ philosophy that prevails in Whitehall, as if it’s somehow wrong to take assets off operations. The impact of operations on force generation is too easily dismissed, as I suspect the F35 force will soon find out. And that’s before considering (other) cases where the national interest would be better served by not deploying at all. There’s little enough space for politicians to take sensible decisions as it is, and it’s constrained even further when journalists use judgemental angles such as ‘because Trump..’.