No more need to worry about Labour's long term plans

ChrisD

I would like to know what the MOD plan to do right here and now about the damning coroners verdict on the safety of the Nimrods.
When I heard that the plane was not safe, and has never been safe to fly, words failed me.
As to our commitment to Iraq and Afghanistan, how about a real commitment to the safety and well being of our troops serving in both countries right now.
The answer is simple, either provide them with adequate up to date equipment in sufficient numbers as part of a proactive Nato force, with all countries pulling their collective weight. If we can't afford to do that, and there is no collective will to make Nato as a team do better, then we need to remove them from both countries.
To be honest, the New Labour Foreign policy of Tony Blair has bankrupted our armed forces with at an incalculable cost to the brave servicemen and women and their families.
Gordon Brown has bankrupted the country financially and I don't think that we can afford to fund any grandiose Foreign policy however noble some on the centre right think it might be.
We need to rebuild our MOD from the grass roots upwards, and that will take time and investment way beyond the first term of a possible Conservative government, even if it happens sooner than first thought.

AlanofEngland

Afghanistan? Deploy less, in fact deploy nowt!! We can't afford it, either in cash or lives. Time for the EU superstate to get in and do it. End of!!

kinglear

Nato should never have been in Afghanistan to start with - it was to stop the Russians and might yet be needed for that very thing

Tina

Just want to say that Liam Fox was fantastic on the BBC election special last night. I thought he gave a 10/10 performance, especially compared to that idiot Labour MP Chris Bryant from the Rhonda Valley, (THE VERY SAME MAN THAT PLAYED A LARGE ROLE IN THE ATTEMPTED COUP OF 2006, AGAINST BLAIR).

Ted Tedford

This is starting to get a bit surreal. It is simply impossible to have an armed forces that is 'properly equipped' for the range of operations that a modern armed forces could be called to undertake: it is just too expensive.

The current MoD policy is flawed, of course, but equipping, maintaining, deploying and recovering an army is incredibly complex. No nation in the world does it well. Te best that we can hope is that we do it less badly than our enemies.

The money spent on making the Nimrod fleet fail-safe would have been cut from another part of the defence budget. So let's cut soldiers' housing! But that is a 'breach of the covenant'. What about fewer training exercises in Canada or Oman, r using less fuel? Fine - until someone gets sued for not being properly trained.

Or we could cut health, or schools... But I don't suppose many CHers would be agitating for less money on kidney dialysis, more money on body armour, still less for increased taxes.

It's not like running a sports team or a cake shop. The threats to the forces are constantly evolving. The equipment cycle is usually responsive, but is very slow and expensive. The forces try to make good the time-lag by adapting procedures, but this is never going to be perfect: it's a constant cycle of action, reaction and counter-action. Some threats you defeat, some you don't.

Demanding properly equipped troops would not only 'save' them from conducting controversial operations such as Iraq or Afghanistan: it would ensure that they were *never* deployed, and would therefore be subject to extensive pruning by the Treasury - and then, most likely, we'd find that they were useless when we needed them the most.

Lance Diatessaron

I thought a coroner was employed to find out how people died. Since when has it been his job to 'save lives' or to offer policy judgements to the government? This Andrew Walker spends far too much time grand-standing to the press and indulging in petty point-scoring. Every time I open a newspaper, he's posturing about inadequate body armour, excessive secrecy, poor training, poor comminications. He doesn't want a better-equipped armed forces: he wants a utopia where no one ever gets injured, no one needs make spending decisions based on conflicting priorities and where he gets to pose as the champion of the underdog.

Ground the Nimrod fleet, by all means, but what capability replaces them? And who will Mr Walker blame if a British soldier is killed because of a failure in early warning or surveillance that this capability provided?

TGF UKIP

There is a great deal of defeatism and detachment from reality in some of these posts. ChrisD and Ted Tedford are Coffee Housers I greatly respect and generally substantially agree with. However, on this occasion while agreeing on many of the points they make, I do have a different analyis overall.

Defence issues like this go right to the heart of "Britain's place in the world" and its strategic relationships and one of the omissions I found curious in ChrisD's and Ted Tedford's posts was the absence of any mention of the transatlantic relationship.

This is a global, intertwined, interconnected world containing some malevolent forces radically inimical to this country from which we cannot detach or insulate ourselves by wishful thinking. Clinton tried that, paid attention only to the focus groups, assumed it would all go away and along came 9/11.

It seems to me now that we have the choice of being another european country,essentially pacifist like Germany or merely blustering and grandstanding like the French or we pursue the route of successive British governments through and including the Blair Government of saying we cannot stand by and let the U.S. bear entirely the burden of defence of the West but we must participate in that defence militarily and politically.

To those who would argue that we should simply leave the U.S. to it and save ourselves blood and money, I would simply say that we would be massively encouraging the isolationist tendency in America which is never far from the surface. Such a U.S. withdrawal would make the world a much more dangerous place and few countries would be more vulnerable to the consequences than the UK with its large muslim population and the Pakistan/Afghanistan nexus. We would do well to bear in mind here that the U.S. has done far more than anyone else via its security and intelligence agencies to protect itself.

To play our part means investment not only in equipment but, mirroring the McCain agenda, an increase in men in boots and their welfare and training and an investment level far above the current defence allocation.

Among the many reasons why I so despise the Cameron Tories are Dave's defence and security policy speech in Berlin and the commitment to continue Brown's underfunding of the Armed Forces. Dave clearly intends a Tory Britain to be a true european partner.

The comment I entirely agree with is that of Lance Diatessaron. Walker is a complete maverick, an anti- American and an anti-military CND throwback to the seventies and eighties. I often wonder who appointed him.

Max Kaye

Tina, I agree that Chris Bryant was - er - pants.

Paul B

I agree with everything UKIP says. One has only to look to see what happened in Exeter yesterday to realise we cannot just close our eyes and wish the situation away. Islamo-fascists have declared war on us-to withdraw now from either Iraq or especially Afghanistan will be rightly be seen as an incremental victory by our enemies.

We no choice to commit to the long run,equip our troops with whatever they require and let them know that they have our full, unequivocal support-no weakening now, especially for easy political advantage.

BrianSJ

Fraser
Thank you for travelling as our eyes and ears. I like the reporting in Asia Times Online http://www.atimes.com/ - including Pepe Escobar.
They are much more pessimistic about Basra and Iraq.
Any thoughts?

Ted Tedford

TGF: I don't think we disagree. My last para about 'saving' the Forces from Iraq and Afghanistan was supposed to read ironically: an army focused solely on a narrow, territorial definition of national defence is doomed to wither. (I've posted here before that military 'non-intervention' is usually necessity masquerading as virtue.) Some people, including ChrisD, sincerely argue that we can have an armed forces solely for the territorial defence of the UK, and dispense with overseas interventions. That is a perfectly noble view, but, like you, I think they are wrong.

My other objection is to people who write blank cheques with their mouths, without thinking through the consequences. Also like you, I despair of any party having the guts to raise defence spending - so the money has to come from within the existing budget.

My wider concern is that some people seem to think warfare can be risk-free. Most of the high-profile Walker-led inquests, and the attendant media coverage, have implied that process in warfare is perfectible, and that all contingencies can be mitigated. This is stupid, and reflects the huge gap in understanding between those who have served and those who have not.