St Crispin’s Day

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!

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?

BBC NEWS | Politics | Pressures ‘driving UK troops out’
Defence minister Bob Ainsworth said the forces were achieving “our highest priority - success on operations”.

Wrong Mr Ainsworth! 

The highest priority is to have a Balanced, Capable & Deployable military.  Sadly, we have become fixated with fighting in just two regions of the world (not hugely dissimilar) and fighting one sort of adversary (the asymmetric threat).  The upshot of this is that training for all the other types of conceivable conflict is going by the wayside.  Training in Jungle, Arctic, High Intensity, & OBUA environments have all taken hits as there is less time between deployments to keep up these important skills.  So what happens if the next threat is from a country with a more conventional force structure? Or is in the defence of a Dependency that is based in a jungle region?  Not going to happen?  Let’s hope so, because the military we have now got won’t be trained to deal with it!

In case you were wondering, St Crispin has returned home (hence the increase in blogging).  I’ll be back in Iraq in just under three weeks.

My journey home from Camp Bastion was fraught to say the least.  39 hours in total, and it’s only 3500 miles for goodness sake!  I could have gone to Australia quicker!

The main problem was this

Its a tristar.  It’s basically a piece of junk that the RAF purchased from several airlines back in the 1980’s when they no longer had use for them (as they were too old).  It broke down twice once on the gulf coast & once in the Mediterranean (5 hours & 3 hours respectively).  Another exmple of how the best troops put up with some of the worst equipment.  remeber most of these guys were going home to see loved ones for R&R. 

One interesting part of the journey was the unbelievable amount of updates we got regarding our delay at RAF Akrotiri.  It could’nt be anything to do with this old story could it? 

Hat tip to “the Chosen Man” for bringing this piece to our attention.

 The piece is about the death at 88 of a Battle of Britain veteran Iain Hutchinson.  He flew spitfires in defence of his country.  We all should be grateful to him for that.

What I found rang a particular bell with me were some of the coments on the website (admitedly the Daily Mail).

Here are three that I found myself agreeing with, and which I find myself remembering everytime another hero falls.

 ———————————————————

The word hero is banded about too freely these days but this man epitomises the true meaning of the word, i wonder what he thought of what had become of the country he and his comrades risked there lives for.

- Mark, spain

Can we expect B. Liar to mention the passing of Mr Hutchinson in the House of Commons and pay his respects - in the same way he did for Linda MacCartney? I somehow doubt it.

BBC NEWS | UK | British helicopters crash in Iraq

As always the quote from official sources is

“Initial reports indicate that the crash was an accident and was not a result of an attack by insurgents.”

This was almost the same quote that was put out when the C130 hercules was destroyed  (thanks to Postman Patel for blog) in Al Amarah after an “incident during landing“.  St Crispin has learnt that all was not as it seemed in this case, and operational errors / complacency was probably to blame.

It appears that the usual landing strip clearance operation was put in place prior to landing, but due to complacency / bad leadership or incompetence, the strip was left unguarded for a period of time and this was enough for the insurgents to get an IED (roadside , or runway-side in this case, bomb) in place.

We must remember those killed in this latest tragedy.  We must also remember that the military have been there so long now, that errors may be starting to slip in.

I wonder when the truth will come out on this one?