Re: what a waste


Paul Carr wrote:

"Falcon" <falcon@xxxxxxxxxxx>
дÈëÏûÏ¢ÐÂÎÅ:7et01kF2hqoudU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Falcon wrote:

Westprog wrote:

Falcon wrote:
Nice rhetoric, but sadly, not true.
British field officers and the GS are appointed on merit and have
been for quite some time.

But the inter-service rivalries and traditions that mean that vast
amounts of the defence budget goes on hugely expensive prestige items
designed to win the last war are still in place.

However, the majority of the blame goes to politicians, who will always
choose jobs over lives. So billions are spent on Euro-fighters which go
straight into mothballs, and which will never be deployed in any
theatre in which the army are actually fighting. They get a rifle
which doesn't actually work, and they spend more fixing it than they
would have done replacing it. The lack of helicopters has been known
about since before GW1. And so on, and so on.

When the Berlin wall came down, it was fairly clear what kind of wars
the
British Army would be fighting. After 9/11 it was certain. But it's
still
set up for WW2. Naturally they weren't equipped for WW2 at the start of
WW2, or for WW1 at the start of WW1, same for the Boer War, Crimean
War, etc. I think they might have been OK for the Napoleonic wars, but
that might just be nostalgia.

# Ah, yes, I remember it well ... #

By the way, I read this today from the the British forces spokesman for
Task
Force Helmand.

"My command and everyone else is on the record as saying we have
sufficient
helicopters to undertake the operations here. Our equipment is top notch.
Many hundreds of millions of pounds is being spent on equipment. I can
vouch
the fact that the equipment has never been better and there's plenty of
it.
Could we do with more? Absolutely. Anybody would always want more. But we
have sufficient for the task that we're undertaking."

Makes you wonder who to believe, doesn't it? The Army or the Telegraph?

I'd be curious to know just how large the
military-industrial-congressional complex is in the United States of
America. You seem to be a man with a lot of info at your fingertips,
Falcon. Didn't the US congress approve the
manufacture of F22 jets, jets that will probably never be used in actual
combat unless we had a war with China or something? How many
intercontinental ballistic missiles does the US have now?

I'm not sure about either, but it's probably been wiki'd somewhere. I do
know that we made a serious mistake underfunding things like the RAF and the
Army prior to WWII. The great thing about having fast jets, carriers and
ICBMs (or tanks for that matter) on hand is that, if you ever need to use
them (or threaten to use them) you don't have to wait another fifteen years
for the damned things to go through the procurement and supply chain before
you can actually use them.

--
Falcon:
fide, sed cui vide. (L)





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