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And back to sleep.
Can't speak for the Conservatives in regards to the first section but my guess would be stupidity for Labour. It isn't an area they probably thought about campaigning on so for that reason (I imagine) it isn't one that saw much focus.
Maybe (being generous) they were trying to sketch out what the armed forces role would be although very basically, whilst not really getting heavily into the practical details of how to do it. Whilst I couldn't see Labour taking radical action that saw lots of job losses I would like to think we would be in a stronger position to offer alternative investment to areas and retraining if needed to those involved to take some action in areas where we are wasting money on job creation.
I do think we need to figure out exactly what we want our armed forces to do and best equip it for that, if we cannot afford our aims we either need to increase the funding our make our aims more realistic. Which you point towards with your East of Skegness policy.
I liked your end paragraph, treatment of veterans would fit in with an anti austerity narrative.
The People this year reckoned there are 13,000 ex-soldiers living on the street, despite the government having enshrined the armed forces covenant in law, as it has also axed another 30,000 personnel.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/least-13000-hero-soldiers-left-11847000
LOL
I do commend your focus on the people, and your ideas of both a single administrative centre and a better post-service support programme are very interesting ones.
So the door could be open for Labour to exploit it - after all it's not just Daily Mail types who are patriotic. Unfortunately when the Leader is cheered on by people who are increasingly batshit crazy who think a big hug of world leaders will bring about world peace, the chances of Labour having a credible view on defence never mind a policy is very low.
It’s always been said that the RAF brass hats, when asked for areas to cut spending, put one or two insignificant items then the Red Arrows, knowing damn well that the minister won’t draw the line below there.
Ending do more with less is a nice theme more broadly across the public sector.
I disagree a bit on Trident - seems to be a demonstration of the sunk costs fallacy + of course Corbyn doesn't care about the cost, he is implacably opposed to nuclear weapons.
When we look back at the Forces satisfaction survey, we see some pretty awful stats:
https://www.forces.net/news/58-troops-are-not-satisfied-forces-life
I do think that the lead times for heavy equipment, often of decades, does tend to lumber each service with white elephants, and equipment that is either not suited for the task or such a financial burden that it beggars the human element in the service.
*PTSD gets cast around over all sorts of things, but is very real indeed in ex forces personnel. This is particularly so for those who served in the front line. @Dura_Ace occasionally gets a bit intemperate on here, and I think deserves to be cut a bit of slack as a result.
An interesting topic for a header, and good to hear a new voice. A virtual pint from me to @Dura_Ace
This is a very good point and something we are dreadful at as a nation. My cousin found it such a struggle to adjust to civilian life he actually reenlisted. Do you have any practical ideas as to how it could be implemented, however?
For example, would there be mileage in putting them in some kind of boarding college arrangement for a year prior to being demobbed, complete with training courses, medical support, careers advice and gradual relaxation of the rules so they don't go from total control to tota freedom in one fell swoop?
I suppose it's a result of the cuts etc. but surprised to find such a clear trendline with Labour government!
Terry had lost contact with his best mate Bob, during his five years in the Army, and the main theme of the show is the culture clash of the two mates as a result. Terry finds his best mate, and old town changed, and indeed aspirational, while he drifts from temporary job to pub. It is quite a serious theme for such a show, and it is easy to imagine that without a fairly tolerant Bob, Terry would have wound up on the streets.
But my main point is this. Before Putins World Cup he has, in a fit of pique shot passenger airliners out the sky, staged showy assignations in our country, carried out a dirty cyber war against western democracy, and dropped barrel bombs and chemical weapons upon Syrian families and children sheltering in the basement of their own homes. It doesn’t even matter now if this continues after, or even during our attendance at Putins World Cup party, already our World Cup attending appeasement will be a stain remaining on Britain forever, regardless how diplomatic numbers later decrease or increase and ambassadors move back and forth.
If you want a bad regime to commit even worse crimes, then carry on appeasing it. Whilst we are still in that World Cup party, don’t you dare say there is nothing more that can be done.
A United Kingdom Defence Force? They’ve just reversed this in Canada, but I accept lots of the administrative roles in the three services could be consolidated.
We have no argument with the Russian people, just with their gangster kleptocracy. Russia is the Congo with rockets.
Anyway, I have my tickets and leave booked.
Also I believe something like a fifth of all soldiers in the British services are currently technically in the Navy.
A unified command structure, with common procurement and common goals, might just be a help to our Armed forces.
Interesting article, Mr. Ace, but as long as Corbyn is Leader of the Opposition Labour will only be interested in reducing the armed forces as rapidly as possible [although every major party has cut it back in recent decades...]
F1: well, the bet didn't come off, but when a gearbox stops working on lap 2 that's not exactly foreseeable. The race itself was really rather good, with lots of overtaking early on and an intriguing strategy picture at the end. Will set about the post-race analysis now.
After all we haven't turned up to any tournament for 52 years anyway!
My father left the army after 22 years in the late 70s. Although he had started in the ranks he left as a Captain. I was just leaving school but I remember being impressed by how much effort was being given in supporting him with his next career. He went on training courses for interviews, did assessments to identify strengths and had lots of explanations about how civilians lived outside the cocoon that was the army. The result of all this was a placement as a college lecturer which went very well for him.
Has this fallen apart as the armed forces have shrunk? Or was it always better for the officers than the other ranks?
There are a series of problems that ex armed forces personnel face. They have been typically away from their home areas for many years. They have changed and so have the places they have come from. Fitting in again and rebuilding networks of friends is hard. Military life was, at least for my father, all absorbing. Civilian friends and contacts tended to wither with neglect. Housing was generally provided, certainly for those with families. It was very poor quality but there was an all in it together aspect that made it tolerable. Organising your own house, mortgage, insurance, contracts, even plates was not something people were trained in. In some ways you didn't need to grow up in the armed forces and I have always suspected that the ridiculous number who find themselves homeless is connected with that.
The cliché is that we don't look after our PTSD damaged soldiers well enough and of course we don't. But the problems are much deeper and need more thought than that. The Romans used to build new cities for their veterans, partly as a way of consolidating their empire but also, I think, recognising that after the Legion normal life was going to be tricky. Places like Devizes used to play that role in part. The numbers are smaller now but perhaps we should offer something similar.
So the number one thing that would improve veteran welfare would be to have them serve at least a year in a rear echelon unit before release. Unfortunately in recent times the tempo of operations has stretched the forces to the point where there very few rear echelon units in reserve where such 'decompression' could occur.
The modern forces are smaller, and shrinking, and while there are individual families and communities with strong forces traditions, in general we are a demilitrised culture. Vets now are often respected, but there is not the same universal experience. While no one blames the troops, the wars have been messy and unpopular, with at best indecisive and ambivalent outcomes.
My own fifty something cousin has just retired from the Army, including tours of Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Nepal. He now does consultancy work for the MoD concerning the technical side of procurement. He has greatly enjoyed his career, but is bemused at knowing where he is going to be living in six months time. After 30 years that is quite a novelty!
I hope somebody in the MoD reads Dura Ace’s suggestions about retaining the more experienced servicemen.
People try to simplify complex issues, both for popular appeal and for thier own peace of mind. Defence debate tends to come down to nukes vs no nukes, when we really need to focus on strategy. I've certainly changed my mind from global interventionism to agreeing with Dura that 26 years of continuous combat has produced almost no detectable benefits for Britain or anyone else. Withdrawing to the point of saying we don't care what happens anywhere outside our waters also doesn't seem quite right, though.
Labour tends to default to supporting the UN when needed, which tends not to work as the UN is only able to get involved when all the Security Council members want it. Europhile though I am, I'm wary of committing to an EU force that could get drawn into messy conflicts where both sides are pretty awful. Possibly we should maintain a smallish interventionary force which could be committed on a rare case by case basis.
The issues I see are that Skegness is not under any obvious threat. If we are basically looking at a national defence force you have to wonder what the point is. Who, exactly, is threatening to invade us? Such a force seems to me to be a solution in search of a problem.
Alternatively, there are still many areas of the world where a well equipped, small but well trained force can make a difference whether in taking out "bad guys", peacekeeping or even post disaster relief. I think that would be a good option for us. It would mean reconfiguring our forces around such a vision. We wouldn't need more than a very small number of main battlefield tanks or fast jets. We would need a lot more helicopters, ground attack aircraft, paratroopers, drones, logistical support etc etc than we have right now and we would need a political class capable of appreciating what such a force can and cannot do. The last point is obviously the trickiest.
Took us into the EC and took Middlesbrough out of Yorkshire, now he’s the best PM for Defence since WWII
Many thanks for this Dura Ace, was a real pleasure to publish this.
http://enormo-haddock.blogspot.co.uk/2018/04/bahrain-post-race-analysis.html
Ultimately war is diplomacy by other means, and we need to decide our future foreign policy before we can figure out what sorts of armed forces that we need. All services are bedeviled by the problem that equipment timelines are about 5 times longer than a parliamentary term, so we have equipment designed for the challenges of the nineties. These white elephants then drive an armed force direction that very poorly matches contemporary challenges. Trident is a case in point, but so are our Carriers, but not just these.
Oh and create full Marine Expeditionary Divison.
I think the era of large tank/armoured engagements is over.
'lackwittedly'
I also applaud your restraint & delicacy.
If anyone wants to submit a piece for publication please vanilla message me at any time.
PB is always looking for guest submissions.
Any pieces that praise AV and/or denounce lovers of pineapple on pizza as degenerates have a higher chance of publication.
Many of the people I knew served in combat areas as well, usually colonial wars; they didn’t all, as one friend did, guard airfields in wintry Norfolk armed with baseball bats.
The above is my submission to the 'Questions to which the answer is "No"' file.
Buying kit is by quite some distance the largest part of defence spending -
https://www.contracts.mod.uk/blog/breakdown-planned-defence-expenditure-2018/
- so improving the process would pay significant dividends.
At present, formation of defence policy and the weapons procurement process are intertwined in a muddled and politically fraught tangle. It is, quite rightly, the job of politicians to decide what it is our services should do; that they should be deciding what kind of carriers we ought to be buying, and in which constituency the should be built really isn't.
Removing procurement for the direct control of the MOD would have the additional, and probably greater benefit of forcing it to concentrate on actual defence policy.
(Looking at the regional breakdown of defence spending, an independent procurement agency might usefully be situated well away from Whitehall - in Yorkshire.)
We had a lot more rozzers then.
Correlation doesn’t imply causation.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-43694062
The analysis does go on to say that forces with the biggest falls in officer numbers are not seeing the biggest rises in serious violence.
As a university student and a private soldier in the Army Reserve, I have experience of both the educational system and the military, and undoubtedly encounter far more conformity in the former.
At its core, the military ethos is about shared values and standards: selfless commitment, discipline, respect for others, courage, loyalty, and integrity. These are not just vital for crafting fine soldiers; they also create better people. Soldiers are held to a higher standard by the general public; society knows that this set of specific values has been instilled in our military men and women, from the first day of training.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2018/04/04/must-call-army-fix-failing-conformist-education-system/
I'm not sure I agree, however, that the Mercedes wasn't fast enough. Bottas was within a few hundredths of a second of getting DRS a lap earlier; had he done so, he would almost certainly have passed Vettel before the end of the race.
(Mercedes might also possibly have made a poor strategy call keeping Hamilton out a couple of laps too long before his tyre change in the hope of holding Vettel up - the time he lost was significantly more than the margin Vettel had over him at the end.)
Have you not read the Home Office report.
Either Rudd has and she lied her ass off
Or she hasnt in which case she should have
I think the former is most likely
More stop and search and dealing with minor crime first and a 'broken windows' policy is all part of the solution
But we all know AV has no shortcomings.
https://twitter.com/SamCoatesTimes/status/983255173651812352
I have no relationship with them other than as a donor, but they run racing teams in a number of series staffed entirely by disabled military veterans. They’ve also got a lot of their team members jobs in the automotive industry, and run an annual charity race called Race of Remembrance every November. Awesome charity.
I mean they spent over £2.5 million on believing the fantasist Nick.
I could go on.
Added to that the view that project management skills don't need to be taught to more senior officers (after all, surely they've inherently developed them by now?), and the specialised skills for defence acquisition and project managers only tend to be taught to the junior and middle-ranking officers (usually no higher than OF-3), who are then in danger of stovepiping, and you don't have a recipe for unqualified success.
Senior officers usually got to that level through showing a good skillset for crisis management, while procurement should be carried out in such a way that there are no crises to manage, but somehow Defence Procurement tends to devolve towards crises. Either they've got the perfect skillset to cope with that and stop it becoming disaster, or there's a subconscious attraction towards crises, as that's where the skills comfort zone is.
There needs to be a culture change, where a tour in procurement immediately after a command or combat tour is seen as the final leavening before promotion, with an intervening training course in acquisition and programme management skills. Maybe that would help.
Plus didn’t Robert recently post some figures showing some of the biggest rises in house prices in the UK happened when there was virtually no immigration to the UK?
You think no immigrants have bought houses ? Or that those who have become new landlords by renting out to new immigrants haven't pushed up house prices by buying for themselves and for their tennants ?
That anyone thinks Raab is incorrect shows the ignorance of economics in this country.
The issue comes in before there: we spend many years inculcating a certain ethos and mindset in order to strengthen people in facing dangerous and hostile (and, to civilians, abnormal) scenarios and situations. Add to that those dangerous, hostile, and abnormal situations incurring an emotional and mental cost that can't be unpaid.
This is why the issue is exacerbated for those who come straight back from combat. As mentioned above, a 'decompression' tour would help no end.
There's two other elements that would help - one of which is being done, another of which is not:
- Transferable skills and qualifications. Ex-engineers and technicians often find it easy. Ex-infantry, not so much. The military try to encourage personnel to do courses and training throughout that aren't necessarily linked to their jobs (look up the ELCAS learning credits). They also try to align qualifications with civilian qualifications.
- Maintaining contact with civilian life. Because it's such a different (and peripatetic) life, people lose touch with those outside the military world; the military becomes their lives. Encouraging links with communities and trying to provide a "home base" for people would help, otherwise when they leave, they've lost their world and they're rudderless. I think officers tend to keep those links better than other ranks, which is one reason they tend to do better after discharge.
If Labour didn't have someone on the record calling for more Defence cuts (and an aspiration of abolishing the armed forces altogether) it could be a weak spot for them.
Incidentally, for anyone into classical history I just reviewed Xenophon's The Persian Expedition: https://thewayfarersrest.blogspot.co.uk/2018/04/review-persian-expedition-by-xenophon.html
Demand is not the same as need, I agree. There’s no demand for buying property from those who can’t afford to buy, but people still need to live somewhere.
Demand for housing to buy is as much related to demand and supply of mortgage finance, as it is supply and demand of the properties themselves. The Corbynites who want to f... the banks don’t realise this.
Demand for rental properties is related to supply of rental properties. If government policy discourages landlords then rents go UP in the short term, even if demand eventually falls as people buy rather than rent.
Some people don’t want to buy as they don’t wish to commit themselves to a particular location and there is a high barrier to moving in terms of the costs of purchase (stamp duty, estate agent, solicitor etc)
Supply isn’t highly electric, far from it. Lead times are years, the only mitigation being HMOs and property conversions, the latter of which still have relatively long lead times. The result is ‘beds in sheds’ and renting of ‘bed space’ in what are basically dormitories for lower paid workers in large cities.
Any government policy to increase affordability carries the risk of leaving people in negative equity, which is a serious restriction on mobility of labour.
‘Liverpool offer Fellaini a three year deal’
https://m.lequipe.fr/Football/Actualites/Mercato-liverpool-se-positionne-sur-fellaini-monaco-et-le-psg-a-l-affut/891151
However it is not the only factor, and I'd be interested to see his workings to get at a figure of 20% for immigration alone.
2011
No 2 AV = 68%
Yes 2 AV = 32%
https://twitter.com/DerbyChrisW/status/983222981995380736
Amongst his supporters agreeing with this, one of the comments seems unfortunate..
https://twitter.com/AbdulMahdiLab/status/983236051367092224
But the higher rents have certainly generated a sense that you have to get on the housing ladder as quickly as you can because it's actually cheaper in the short term and not just the long term. And, of course, higher rents makes saving for a deposit that much harder.
However lack of housebuilding, banks lending too much etc all added to the problem
The more I think about it that might be the worst thing Mrs May has ever done, worse than sacking George Osborne, making Gavin Williamson SecDef, appointing Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill her Chiefs of Staff, and losing Dave’s majority.