Now here's a man who isn't frightened of fighting the politicians. And he had his ship, Ardent, sunk in 1982 by Argentine jets. He knows all about the perils of inadequate air defence when operating in littoral waters.
If ANY one man can save the Sea Harrier, Admiral West can.
A ROYAL Navy officer who was court-martialed for leaving plans for large-scale defence cuts on a towpath is to become the new First Sea Lord.
Adml Sir Alan West, Commander-in-Chief Fleet, is to take over from Adml Sir Nigel Essenhigh in September.
Adml West was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross after his ship Ardent was sunk off East Falkland by Argentine aircraft.
He was then posted to the naval plans department of the Ministry of Defence, where he was promoted to captain and made an assistant director of naval staff.
But his career appeared to have been blighted in 1986 when he lost a paper proposing radical cuts in the Navy's surface and submarine fleet.
The proposals appeared in the Mail on Sunday and the then Capt West was court-martialed.
It emerged at the court martial that he removed the documents from the MoD without permission, carried them in his coat pocket when they should have been in a security briefcase and failed to tell the MoD immediately of their loss.
Pleading guilty to negligence and charges of breaching security, he told the court martial that he had taken the documents home to Portsmouth to work on them. He lost them while walking with a friend in Sonning, near Reading.
Adml Sir Jeremy Black, then deputy chief of defence staff, told the hearing that Capt West was "an outstanding officer of his generation".
He was severely reprimanded, the second lightest sentence possible.
It appears to have done his career little harm. He headed a study into the integration of women on board ships and was subsequently appointed head of marine intelligence and then to a further high-flying post within the MoD.
Last edited by WE Branch Fanatic; 18th Apr 2002 at 19:20.