We seem to be doing a better job building warships than developing the Ajax vehicle...
Is it the same Max Hastings
who once wrote:
A European war seems unthinkable. Instead, the armed forces are being configured to fight far afield, alongside the Americans or other allies. The thrust of British policy is to man and equip a standing expeditionary force for services overseas - "out of area" - as warriors or peace-keepers.
Perhaps he had a point back then.
Britain is about to buy 232 Eurofighters at a cost of £80m a piece. This is a folly comparable with building a modern copy of Nelson's Victory for fleet service, and much more expensive. The Eurofighter is a cold war interceptor. No strategist can devise a credible threat for it to intercept. Whatever the political difficulties of abandoning this project now, we should do so. The cost and futility of persevering are too great.
No one should be deceived by current plans to fit some Eurofighters with missiles and bombs for a ground attack role. The RAF is, in effect, buying a racing car as old-fashioned as the Bugatti, and spending another fortune to modify it for cross-country work. Diehards say: if the RAF does not have the Eurofighter, what does it have? Yet this argument possesses validity only if British defence policy is perceived as a job creation scheme for pilots and air marshals.
No need for fighter aircraft?
These [the Type 45 destroyers] represent another huge folly. They are escorts, offering limited anti-missile and anti-submarine cover, whose chief purpose is to maintain the critical mass of the Royal Navy. I have heard some senior sailors sincerely suggest that frigates also fulfil an important role in countering drug-smuggling. To such desperate measures has the navy come, in the struggle to justify its own existence, and what a nonsense it all is. In the unlikely event that Britain's carriers and minehunters face a submarine threat, aircraft offer far more effective protection than destroyers or frigates.
We honour the past achievements of the Royal Navy and RAF. But historic reverence should not today determine defence policy. We need a small Royal Navy dominated by carriers and submarines. We need to shift resources decisively towards the army, which is today grossly overstretched.
Was he spending time with Lewis Page by any chance? What sort of person proposes a navy without surface combatants? As for aircraft being more effective against submarines, does he mean fixed wing or rotary, like the ones carried by ships? How do you cue them without sonar equipped frigates? He seemed to argue that there would never be any air or submarine threat, and we should not have warships or aircraft for presence, but we need more troops for presence..
Anyway, back the the recent article - what are these warships from foreign yards he talks of?
Why commit troops to a NATO tripwire if they cannot be reinforced - which means countering air and naval threats in the Atlantic, Norwegian Sea, and Baltic? He is arguing that we should ignore air and maritime threats and deterrence, so we can focus on more presence on the ground...