Originally Posted by
pr00ne
And "that shower on the opposition benches" are constantly demanding that the Govt stop the current wave of reductions in the size of the British Army and retirements of RAF aircraft without replacement. Angela Rayner among them. You are flogging a dead horse, stop it.
If only they actually cared about the size of the army or knew what the Typhoon tranche 1 and Hercules were for - as opposed to screeching "cuts" purely as a stick to beat nasty tories with. They have absolutely no idea what they want or why they want it. Their latest wheeze of suggesting the Indo-Pacific tilt is not needed and that the UK should concentrate on NATO and Europe is similarly opportunistic, based purely on the Ukraine war, yet without a shred of supporting logic.
The reduction in strength in the army is an interesting example of this - it is always couched in terms of numbers, rather than capabilities, as if numbers alone were the answer. Hands up who knew that the British Army - even at 72000, is 20% bigger than the Bundeswehr? That'll be the army of the central European nation with the biggest economy and much closer to any land threat than the UK. The Polish army is still (just) smaller than the British army and they're about as close to the threat as you can get.
The biggest question the army has to answer is this - what is the army for and as a result, what does it's capability structure need to be and why? They have signally failed to do this for at least a couple of decades.
The biggest question the labour party has to answer is why should the UK return to a land-centric European strategy, when the European nations up-threat don't invest proportionately in their own defence?