I still worry about the lads morale and welfare.
I mean the Captain and his officers on TV look exactly the right stuff. You need people like them and they are the utter salt of the earth.
But I've been on these horrible open ended deployment things myself. It draws down on you in the end, always. I worry about the lads who get the dirty end of the jobs down at the bottom end of the rung. I hope someone reading this who has some sort of input, can arrange the following;
(a) Seriously consider going to rotate the ships company of Bulwark through a cycle. Is topmast still in force and going? I would put them on a maximum 42 day cycle each. The Navy and the RM's ASRM can handle that. I mean it. Get the lads in and out over the 42 days. We have a spare capacity of people and the capability in airhead and money.
Reason-health/safety/efficiency/morale. This will be a long, long term goer of an operation. It is unrealistic to keep the same tiny percentage of lads in the Navy at the **** end of a long stick for a very long time.
(b) Get the Albion manned and out again, and start up the planning now as a replacement for the Bulwark. (This gives people hope for eventual relief for a ship on deployment-very important to the mindset of a twenty year old kid..)
(c) Get a plan going, a realistic one, for Libya. Have the Oil and Gas Multinationals involved, get them all together on an island, in London wherever but get a deal quickly on and get the whole country moving again. Money talks louder than prayers to Arabs and Africans and they need to get it going.
Otherwise its heading for an even bigger disaster than it already is.