St Crispin’s Day

Bless their little colonial cotton sox!

Apparently every year since 1967 the US military academy at west point has been running a competition named “The Sandhurst MIlitary Skills competition“.  I can only presume  it’s named after the worlds best military academy!

Well this year a couple of teams from Royal Military Academy Sandhurst went over, and……………………….

Any guesses about the final team standings??   No I though not!

Answers on the link to the competition if you needed to check.. Shame on you!

BBC NEWS | UK | MoD accused of Chinook ‘cock-up’

Anti- free market as it sounds, this little debacle is good evidence of why we need to have an independant arms industry in this country.

Listen here to Edward Leigh’s soundbite on the subject

 You can just imagine the Boeing sales reps reply to the MOD when they visited the chinook showroom to get some replacements for the 9 that weren’t working.

“Yes, Mr Limey, I know you want 4 more, but, you see, that the US DoD will be buying 50 a year for the next 30 years.  Which kinda makes your offer to buy 4 a little lame!”

“I can find a gap in the production schedule for you in 2020.  Would you like the satnav option with that?”

Un-economic as it sounds, if we are going to run with the big dogs (in a military sense) we’ve got to spend a higher percentage of our GDP on defence than they do, not less!

In addition, the original “cock-up” was caused partly by the fact that the procurement team would have been completly made up of RAF staff officers, who we all know are “Utterly utterly useless!”

About time to cancel the experiment of having three forces, and revert back to the much more pragmatic one of having the fly-boys subsumed back within the Navy & Army!!

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!

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!

Harstad, Norway | Marines in naked rap | The Sun |HomePage|News

 I suggest that the MoD spokesman is sacked immediatly, if he thinks stripping naked, and pissing on each other is “out of character” for Marines, then he’s not got the experience needed for this job.

Marines strip at the drop of a hat!  It’s tradition!

New Stryker Faring Poorly in Field

 So it’s not just us then!!

BBC NEWS | England | Beds/Bucks/Herts | Coroner attacks MoD over failure
The inquest heard how, before the incident on 11 June, 7 Para soldiers had complained repeatedly about a lack of proper equipment - chiefly standard night vision kits and weaponry.
Mr Walker, assistant coroner for Oxfordshire, said: “They (the soldiers) were defeated not by the terrorists but by the lack of basic equipment.”
He said sending troops into a combat zone without basic kit was “unforgivable and inexcusable” and “a breach of trust between the soldiers and those who govern them”.

He recorded a narrative verdict in which he said Capt Philippson was unlawfully killed.

Yes, bu his own government!  This has got to stop right now.  It’s criminal to have any sort of budget cuts in defence whilst we are going out on these operations.  If there is a squeeze on any budget, then eventually someone at the bottom of the chain says “let’s only take half the night vision goggles we need!”

The Air Force doesn’t need any more F-22s. - By Fred Kaplan - Slate Magazine

The US have seen sense. An aircraft designed to cope with the cold war threat!  Who needs it?  Typhoon anyone?