Oh Graham O
“If the RAF were actually fighting an air war, the situation would be very different, but its not.”
What is your definition of an air war: the Battle of Britain?
The RAF has almost every single capability in its inventory deployed in Afghanistan. In many ways, this fight is an air war just as much as it is a land war. Perhaps you forget how we got in there; how we move and how we protect soldiers under fire.
The fact that our aircraft are relatively immune to Taliban attack is not a reason to denigrate their efforts or funding.
If we did not have the overwhelming advantage provided by air over the soldiers in Afghanistan we would be taking many more casualties.
Just so that we can judge how your master plan would work, perhaps you could tell us what you would spend any extra money on in saving Soldier’s lives. And when you do, tell us whether some of that money might be found from the 50,000+ Army personnel who do not deploy and the multitude of tanks and artillery that is sitting in hermatically sealed huts.
The UK’s future security cannot be decided around the relative value of one service over another in the current conflict (a conflict that is more discretionary than you realise); it must be made on a balanced requirement to meet the Country’s needs, now and in the future. As the PM demonstrated recently, he thinks that includes being able to enforce NFZs; he has already cut the RAF beyond the point where we can do that in any meaningful way. The recent Nimrod R1 reprive is one very obvious case in point.