Apparently, the British military is being told by politicians that they will be cutting costs. Even if that means that Harrier jets are forcibly retired. Leaving no fixed wing aircraft that can fly from Britain’s aircraft carriers.
The RAF may have to scrap its Harrier jump jets as the armed forces face the ‘bloodiest spending round’ of modern times.
Defence chiefs have met to discuss drastic measures which could include the Army shrinking to its smallest size for 150 years.
Each service has set out plans to sacrifice manpower or equipment in the hope of slashing billions from the costs of national defence.
Options include cutting up to three of the Army’s infantry battalions, losing around 1,800 fighting men at a time when the ranks are under intense strain and taking the Army’s manpower target below 100,000 for the first time since the 1850s.
The Royal Navy could mothball its Type 42 destroyers earlier than planned – leaving a gap before modern replacements are ready – and postponing building new frigates.
Scrapping the Harriers would leave no fixed-wing aircraft capable of flying from the Navy’s two carriers.
One wonders if the politicians realize that there will be no revenue to spend if Britain becomes defenseless. At some point, someone will realize that a nation defended by these and these is pretty easy pickings.
Britain is further along the curve than the US is right now. But our politicians are busily cutting our ability to defend ourselves, too.
The very last parade given by the British survivors of the D-Day landings in Normandy in honor of those who did not return is over. The veterans, all very old now, will not organize another parade.
They stood proudly, remembering those who served bravely alongside them.
Hundreds of veterans defied humid weather yesterday to pay tribute on their last memorial service in London.
With heads held high they marched down Whitehall, some with walking sticks and others in wheelchairs.
Decked out in smart blazers and berets many shed a tear as they attended the memorial for the last time
At least two former soldiers collapsed during the service, as the heat and long time spent on their feet proved simply too much.
The Normandy Veterans Association (NVA) said this is the last memorial service they will organise in London as it has become increasingly difficult to hold, because of the age of veterans.
There are fewer and fewer veterans of the D-Day landings, or indeed of the entire Second World War now. After all, it has been 65 years since the landings. Yet these men have carried on, year after year to pay tribute to those who did not survive the war.
They still serve, all these years later.
It is now up to those younger people who were not alive during the Second World War to remember the fallen and all who served in the name of freedom and liberty. Let us not take that duty less lightly than the veterans have done for all these years.
“…Whether you know it or not.” Mark Steyn:
There’s a very basic lesson here: For great powers, studied neutrality isn’t an option. Even if you’re genuinely neutral. In the early Nineties, the attitude of much of the West to the disintegrating Yugoslavia was summed up in the brute dismissal of James Baker that America didn’t have a dog in this fight. Fair enough. But over in the Balkans junkyard the various mangy old pooches saw it rather differently. And so did the Muslim world, which regarded British and European “neutrality” as a form of complicity in mass murder. As Osama bin Laden put it:
“The British are responsible for destroying the Caliphate system. They are the ones who created the Palestinian problem. They are the ones who created the Kashmiri problem. They are the ones who put the arms embargo on the Muslims of Bosnia so that 2 million Muslims were killed.”
How come a catalog of imperial interventions wound up with that bit of scrupulous nonimperial nonintervention? Because great-power “even-handedness” will invariably be received as a form of one-handedness by the time its effects are felt on the other side of the world. Western “even-handedness” on Bosnia was the biggest single factor in the radicalization of European Muslims. They swarmed to the Balkans to support their co-religionists and ran into a bunch of Wahhabi imams moving into the neighborhood with lots of Saudi money and anxious to fill their Rolodex with useful contacts in the West. Among the alumni of that conflict was the hitherto impeccably assimilated English public (i.e., private) schoolboy and London School of Economics student who went on to behead The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Pearl. You always have a dog in the fight, whether you know it or not.
Studied neutrality is met with contempt by the dictators of the world. That is why Obama’s cautiously neutral response over the past week is such a problem. There was at least a somewhat better response from the White House yesterday. It is not enough. The west, especially the United States, has got to stand for something. Liberty would be the right message to be on right now. Denouncing the evil of Iran’s mullahs would be the right thing to do. Publicly refusing to even consider negotiating with Iran for any reason as long as the mullahs kill their own people would be a good place to start.
We cannot be neutral when liberty is at stake. We always have a dog in that race.
World news | Gaius June 21, 2009 | 
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