I think (as I’ve said before) some (not all) of you guys need to step back from the enthusiast magazines. It’s far too easy to wrap oneself up in the stuff that is peddled by pundits and manufacturers, whilst failing to understand the wider picture of reality and history.
Fundamentally, the issue is whether Britain can defend itself. Clearly, by whatever standards one cares to choose, we are barely capable of defending the UK mainland even as we are. After SDR we will have even less capability. Fox (using the old and dangerously feeble “ten year rule”) claims there is no direct threat to Britain which warrants any major defensive posture. This is of course utter claptrap. Nobody has a clue what lays ahead.
Instead, Fox is going to spin-doctor us into a brave new world in which Britain helps the US to police trouble spots around the world, equipped with our “formidable” force of maybe a dozen serviceable carrier aircraft. He will claim that all of these potential conflicts will be potential threats to Britain but like Afghanistan, only idiots will actually believe this rubbish. In order to conduct these future crusades, any credible means of defending the UK will have been destroyed, presumably for good.
So, let’s hope that Fox’s crystal ball is an accurate one and that no serious threat to the UK emerges either in the short or long term future, given that we will have virtually no ability to do anything about it if it did. On the other hand, our politicians will still be able to proudly strut on the world stage, committing Britain (and people’s lives) to even more conflicts which have the right foreign policy flavour.
Anyone with a few brain cells can see the utter folly of this situation and this is why hardly any MPs are willing to defend the carriers. Everyone knows what a ludicrous concept they are, but Fox (driven by the Navy’s appalling appetite for supremacy) is going to try his best to sell the idea to us this week. It would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic.
See I would love to know where your work has been published, because if you write like this in publication, its a sad thing for the printed word.
The Carriers have been sold to me and great great many others.
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