Originally Posted by
Just This Once...
I think you have a warped sense of what an ally is - we share no values, culture, loyalty, common history or have any mutual defence treaties with the House of Saud. UK PLC's interest in that land is oil, money & regional influence. If you think we would have any dealings with them should they be devoid of oil & money then you may need to drink stronger coffee.
I have no such dellusions of what kind of country Saudi Arabia is, I worked directly with the RSAF from 1991 to 1993 and unlike many western chaps in the Jeddah community, refused to attend any of the barbarous public executions, I was able to withold my curiosity sufficiently. However, ally is a statement of fact, it is perhaps an irrelavant point, which is that they a tiny country, have so much more give militarily. Someone posted earlier that if we could afford more Hawks, they should go straight to RAF Valley, that in itself, makes my point entirely.
Our armed forces, as has been reflected upon daily over the what seems like months, are in a deeply weakened and abandoned state. We have two aircraft carriers, neither can be deployed for reasons of either maintenance or manning, not without abandoning other ships. Frigates and Destroyers can't be deployed because they can't be re-supplied, the only veesels we had capable of doing that our safe pair of hands government sold off to Egypt in 2021. Enough said. Typically, traditionally, the RAF has been more man power intensive than the Naval Services, not any more and the RN is alarmingly short of personnel. Whoever you chose to compare HM Forces with now, we might have, through decades of political and leadership folly, reached the bottom I can't imagine it getting any worse, or can it?.
FB