The good news is that a certain very senior politician, at a speech at a recent charity dinner, stated that all we need to do is make the military much more like civilian businesses and make everyone in the military more productive! One wonders how? Does he mean we all need to drop more bombs or shoot more people?
I was reading an article on the MOD homepage in the past couple of days, where the senior chap being quoted - I forget who, but someone from Centre - possibly a senior civil servant - was genuinely proud of how the MOD had been transformed by slashing budgets and numbers of personnel. There seemed to be a genuine pride that the Services had shrunk as if the military were a business and we were simply overheads.
I know we often say that we couldn't 'do another Falklands' , but frankly, I don't think we could even 'do another Libya' these days. Whilst the high paid help are sitting in their ivory towers, full of self congratulation at slashing capability - let's not beat around the bush, redundancy = reduced capability - much of our recent 'success' as it is has come from our ability to surge when required. And we have been able to surge because a degree of 'spare' capacity has existed. We no longer have that 'spare' capacity, frankly as an institution, I often get the feeling that we are now struggling to get the basics done on a daily basis.
And it's only going to get worse. Just what is the irreducible minimum to guarantee a safe and effective air capability? And when did we pass that point? People are tired. People are pissed off. We just want it all to stop, to allow us time to recover and regenerate from 12 continuous years on active operations without interference from politicians chasing votes, VSOs chasing knighthoods and Civil Servants chasing paperwork. I don't think it's too dramatic to suggest that as an Air Force, it feels rather like the state of the Puma Force in 2006-8 but on a larger scale. And we all know how that one ended.