St Crispin’s Day

BBC NEWS | UK | MoD insists Nimrod ’safe to fly’

HHmmm,, now the concerned, but un-biased corroner says that the nimrod is unsafe (and must be grounded immediatly) and the governemt (tight with money ‘cos they’ve spent ten years wasting it on the national health service &  youth offending programmes) says that it’s safe.

Whow do we all believe?  

If it’s safe why are we buying a new version?

Since when did any government replace something expensive before it was needed?  They always wait until it’s too late.

I may have said it before, but some who know me know I spent some hours in Nimrods, and I always had a vague nervous feeling that I was being flown in something older that me!

I went to a very interesting meeting today (which I can’t tell you about)

I learned that the government has made some political decisions about the armed forces (which I can’t tell you about)

These will directly lead to bad thing happening (which I can’t tell you about)

I’m sure they have a plan to deny it all or ignore it or cover it up.

BBC NEWS | UK | Forces’ centre gets £24m boost

Working on the assumption that this government has no empathy for our armed forces (and the current track record does not give lie to this idea), we can only assume that this increase in the budget to Headly Court is beause we are in these wars for the long haul.

It must be welcomed, at the very least we will have a better facility for a few years to come.

Let’s hope the locals don’t complain again!!

Well,  It’ been less than 24 hours since Boris became mayor, and already my car has had the window broken (whilst in SE London) and the Satnav stolen!

God! I hate wordpress!!

Sorry to Geoff, as I had to delete a couple of posts he had commented on as they had reformated the WHOLE WEBSITE.

I’m getting tired of waiting for minutes for the editor to load in WPand the strange formating mistakes it makes.
More importantly I’m angry that my it’s so hard to upgrade to another version.  ANyone out there able to help?

UK helicopter industry ‘will die in MoD cuts’  
A £1 billion helicopter project has been “offered up as a sacrifice” for defence cuts as the Ministry of Defence struggles to manage its funding crisis, it was claimed yesterday. 
The termination of the Future Lynx deal would herald the end of major helicopter manufacturing in Britain if Gordon Brown decides to go ahead with the reductions.  But defence sources said it was now “highly likely” that the order for 70 Future Lynx utility helicopters, which were to be bought for the Army and the Royal Navy, will be axed. The decision could lead to the closure of the Westland helicopter plant in Yeovil, Somerset, with the loss of 800 jobs. Douglas Carswell, a Tory MP who has written a paper on scrapping the Lynx deal with the Italian firm Finmeccanica, said: “This is a bad deal and the sooner we get out of it the better. “We could announce, for example, that we would buy the same amount of helicopters from Sikorsky - and still have £580 million to spend addressing funding shortages elsewhere in the Armed Forces.” He added that the Sikorsky Seahawk helicopters would be available within 12 months. The Lynx is not expected in service until 2013. But one programme that defence sources have confirmed is certain to go ahead will be the two aircraft carriers being built for £4 billion in Scottish constituencies with strong Labour Party ties. The issues are expected to come up on Thursday when industry chiefs meet Baroness Taylor, the defence procurement minister.
 

 I must comment that this is an ongoing issue with  military procurement.  We could always buy cheaper from other countries.  Everything from artillery ammunition to helicopters is better purchased from other countries such as the USA due to economies of scale. The problem is that when you need the spares, and the country who manufactures them is at war with you, then, the cupboard is usually bare! Hellfire missiles & Chinook spares were cases in point when the current conflagration blew up.

We need our own arms industry no matter the cost.  What we do need to do is sell our product to lots of others so that our economies of scale can work for us!