Regular land army F00ked. Hooligans budget increased. Army will argue large traditional land forces must be maintained, yet with 2 interventions of land forces potentially seen as failures and at best a draw, (at the strat level here, not the small wins we have achieved) I cant imagine they are going to get away lightly. 80,000 seems too many tbh. Territorials will be expanded I expect and called up to deal with humanitarian ops as and when they spring up.
MBT units to go, as will any legacy cold war kit. With FRES canx, it would be interesting to see what happens though, One would have thought a lot of the protective vehicles currently in the desert would suit small highly mobile units.
Mix of network based capable air, sea in connection to spearhead units for raids on terrorist training camps has to be the way forward. Very rapid mobility will also be key. The recent relationship between military might restrained by "ROE" will have to go. It has been an abject failure, and one of the main reasons we failed in Iraq. We could only stay for so long watching an insurgency grow, hiding behind ROE before we lost the support of the local law abiding population surely? If we want to win, we have to relearn how to fight dirty.
Can anyone envisage the political will to invade another country in our lifetimes? I cant.
The SDSR I'm worried about is 2020 - new stuff in service, wheres the money to pay for it to operate it?
I almost suspect that Camerons recent statement is a play at statesmanship. There is a lot of evidence to suggest there will be a boom towards the end of 2014. If you look at Cash holdings of large business, they are massive. THe Special liquidity scheme ends in 2014, meaning the banks will have stopped paying back the BOE and all that liquidity pumped into the system will start to float back (slowly at first) into investment. It is this that will drag us out the mirth and the government know it. Recent statements will have just as much to do with settlement of pensions and other union disputes and a "management of expectations" for todays bad news reference GDP. There is a boom coming in 2015 that will fit in perfectly for the next elections, wait and see. The reversal of QE is going to take a decade to pay back and can be used by the central bank to directly control inflation, rather than brutal rate rises. The inflation we are currently paying for will be taken back at a later stage as the money supply is controlled by reverse QE.