Jacko,
Whilst yet ANOTHER review is hard to swallow, it is equally hard to deny that in the light of recent events it is fully justified.
I think it a litle harsh to describe the SDR cuts as "swingeing." Reconfiguring from an unsustainable and increasingly irrelevant Cod War stance WAS needed.
I agree wholehearted;l about Trident, but surely that expense has long peaked, cutting it now would not save a vast fortune surely, but would remove a vast (if unuseable) capability.
Special Forces will undoubtedly be the recipients of extra funding, as will the likes of the Paras and the RM. But more FJ's, why? They are hardly relevant in a theatre like Afghanistan, certainly not in numbers greater than we have now. How are we going to use more than we have, will we ever NEED to mount a Granby sized operation again?
Human intelligence assets, SF, para-military and security resources are where we will need to focus in what is a real new world.
Strengthen UK AD, why? All the F3's and Typhoons in the world wouldn't have helped us on Sept 11th if the threat had been coming our way. A fully tooled up AD aircraft is helples against a suitcase bomb or a ballistic missile, and they are what we should be worrying about.
If the free world is serious about a sustained assault on terrorism, and I have my doubts that it is, then the UK forces will need to be substantially different to their present make up, fact!
BEagle,
I think you just may get your wish!
Methinks that FSTA is being looked at in a very different light right now. An already fragile economic justification appears to have REALLY gone off the rails. There will never be a better time to ACQUIRE decent second hand 767 or L1011 frames than now.
1.3VStall,
You obviously didn't hear his speech at the Party conference, then you'd KNOW where he stood.
eXtreme,
Lobby your MP to do what precisely? We currently spend 2.5% of the our GDP on defence, that's £23 Billion this year and a further increase has been announced taking it to £25Billion by 2003/4.
That's a greater per cent of GDP than the NATO average and of a GDP significantly greater than in this nations history.
Apart from the terrorist threat there is NO other real world threat to the UK, we are less at risk now than at any time since the late 19th Century.
Suit