Death of senior Royal Marine officer (aged 54)

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Re: Death of senior Royal Marine officer (aged 54)

#41 Post by Undried Plum » Sat Oct 09, 2021 8:17 am

fear UK won't be able to fight lengthy wars like in Iraq
Why the hell would we want to fight lengthy wars like in Iraq and Afghanistan? They were mind-blowingly stupid things to do.

Why have we still got Challenger tanks, etc? What are we supposed to do with tens of thousands of squaddies left over from WW2/Cold war/Empire? Use them to force down the wages of civilian lorry drivers?

If we scrap the damned Blaircraft carriers and the daft F35s and Trident and its successor and all the rest of the piss-pathetic unnecessary vainglorious garbage, we'd save hundreds of billions in the long term.

We have a navy which has more admirals than seaworthy warships. An air force which has more Group Captains than operational aircraft. There is massive scope for slashing the insanely bloated "defence" budget from £50Bn to a tenth of that.

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Re: Death of senior Royal Marine officer (aged 54)

#42 Post by TheGreenGoblin » Sat Oct 09, 2021 8:24 am

Undried Plum wrote:
Sat Oct 09, 2021 8:17 am
fear UK won't be able to fight lengthy wars like in Iraq
Why the hell would we want to fight lengthy wars like in Iraq and Afghanistan? They were mind-blowingly stupid things to do.

Why have we still got Challenger tanks, etc? What are we supposed to do with tens of thousands of squaddies left over from WW2/Cold war/Empire? Use them to force down the wages of civilian lorry drivers?

If we scrap the damned Blaircraft carriers and the daft F35s and Trident and its successor and all the rest of the piss-pathetic unnecessary vainglorious garbage, we'd save hundreds of billions in the long term.

We have a navy which has more admirals than seaworthy warships. An air force which has more Group Captains than operational aircraft. There is massive scope for slashing the insanely bloated "defence" budget from £50Bn to a tenth of that.
He is not so much slashing a budget as undermining the basis of the UK's ability to "pose", never mind act, as a serious power on the world stage. If one is happy with the ever rapid decline of the UK then Radakin is definitely a man for our times. He is the outrider of irrelevancy, the emblem of diminuition, the lackey of failure, the incubis of the incompetence inherent in the current political zeitgeist, i.e. the quintessentially modern Englishman! =))
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Re: Death of senior Royal Marine officer (aged 54)

#43 Post by Undried Plum » Sat Oct 09, 2021 8:33 am

Britain hasn't been a serious world military power since the fiasco of Singapore in February 1942.

Suez should have reminded us of that. So should Iraq and Afghanistan.

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Re: The Oleaginous "One" stars in another debacle!

#44 Post by CharlieOneSix » Sat Oct 09, 2021 8:40 am

TheGreenGoblin wrote:
Sat Oct 09, 2021 7:48 am
Army plans huge cuts to its infantry that could see up to a third of troops axed as critics fear UK won't be able to fight lengthy wars like in Iraq......

.......it will be overseen by new Chief of the Defence Staff, Admiral Sir Tony Radakin

The man has exactly the slippery credentials required to work in the financial services industry or politics.
Compare this feeble prawn to military leaders like Zhukov, Paton or any one of the historically great British military leaders and throw him back in his slimy bucket. He doesn't even deserve the mercy of a shot behind the head with a Makarov pistol!
A bit harsh, TGG. The article says the Army plan huge cuts, not Radakin. The guy doesn't take over as Chief of the Defence Staff until 30th November so you can hardly blame him for a decision taken before he is in post.
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Re: The Oleaginous "One" stars in another debacle!

#45 Post by TheGreenGoblin » Sat Oct 09, 2021 8:58 am

CharlieOneSix wrote:
Sat Oct 09, 2021 8:40 am
TheGreenGoblin wrote:
Sat Oct 09, 2021 7:48 am
Army plans huge cuts to its infantry that could see up to a third of troops axed as critics fear UK won't be able to fight lengthy wars like in Iraq......

.......it will be overseen by new Chief of the Defence Staff, Admiral Sir Tony Radakin

The man has exactly the slippery credentials required to work in the financial services industry or politics.
Compare this feeble prawn to military leaders like Zhukov, Paton or any one of the historically great British military leaders and throw him back in his slimy bucket. He doesn't even deserve the mercy of a shot behind the head with a Makarov pistol!
A bit harsh, TGG. The article says the Army plan huge cuts, not Radakin. The guy doesn't take over as Chief of the Defence Staff until 30th November so you can hardly blame him for a decision taken before he is in post.
Maybe so C16, but a man at his level of seniority would have know what was afoot well before he took over this critical role. In fact he is exactly the kind of man that this government needs to oversee this debacle. A grey, legally adept bureaucrat, who will serve his political masters well, and be well rewarded and honoured for his infamous service . Who wants to be be remembered as the man at the top during a period that marked the final stages of the decline of a once relevant, some might say glorious, military power!

I admit that I am probably being harsh, but there is something about that man I don't like. Something about the eyes!
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Re: Death of senior Royal Marine officer (aged 54)

#46 Post by FD2 » Sat Oct 09, 2021 10:20 am

What the country needs is men of this calibre. That's the way to do it! If this is considered excessive then Paton could always box someone's ears. That'll teach the shirkers. How about a few battalions of the Waffen SS?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre

Who better to help with the mercy process than good old Vasily Blokhin?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Blokhin

I agree completely with C16 - I know nothing about Radakin or his personality but he's not taking over as CDS for several months yet. He may well have known about the CGS's plans but we don't know do we? What would he do about it anyway, in his present position as CNS? The decisions are not really made at their level anyway are they? They control on a day to day basis but otherwise advise the government of the day or do what they have been instructed to do.

Agree or disagree about the carriers and the F35's but that decision has been made so are they to scrap them now? Personally I'd have gone for 'cats and traps' and F18s from the States but that's water under the bridge isn't it?

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Re: Death of senior Royal Marine officer (aged 54)

#47 Post by TheGreenGoblin » Sat Oct 09, 2021 11:07 am

FD2 wrote:
Sat Oct 09, 2021 10:20 am

As for the Waffen SS, they were militarily very effective (albeit totally morally reprehensible) and continued to be in places like Indo-China War, Algeria, the Congo, even South West Africa...
I am a about do what I am often do, and I ask for forgiveness before I do it. I am going to drift or wander off piste (as opposed to pissed) just for a minute, and say that Alan Bristow's autobiography had some very interesting anecdotes about the ex German military types operating in French Indo-China and elsewhere!
Tan Son Nhat airport in Saigon was jointly controlled by the French military and the local civil authorities, with the military having the final say. The French were fighting a murderous, dirty war against the Vietminh in Indo-China, relying heavily on Foreign Legion forces made up largely of German mercenaries, and it was clear to me they would benefit from having five or six Hiller 360As fitted out in a rescue role for medical evacuation of wounded from the battlefield. I arranged to make my slide and film presentation to senior Armée de l’Air officers, but they wanted to see a helicopter perform under the local climatic conditions. How could I get hold of a machine?
In fact it was due to two of these German mercenaries that he was drawn to whale hunting that spawned the succes off his helicopter company...
Lars Andersen. His crews called him ‘Fanden’ – the name means ‘devil’ in Norwegian, and was apt. He was six foot four and had fists like legs of mutton, and had in his time been acknowledged as the world’s best harpoon gunner. In 1937 he had been signed up by the Germans, the world’s biggest users of whale oil, on a three-year contract at a reputed $125,000 a season – unheard-of riches even in the world of whaling. His German connections had done him no favours after the war, and he was unable to return to Norway. Fanden Andersen ruled over a piratical army of crewmen, mostly German and Norwegian with a few Shetland Islanders thrown in. Among the Norwegians were said to be a number of quislings, Nazi sympathisers who had backed the wrong horse and who like Andersen were unable to go home; others had been banished from Norway for the peculiarly Norwegian crime of having worked for a foreign whaling company. Those who had worked for the Germans, in particular, were persona non grata; Norway had looked on Germany’s expansion of its whaling fleet in the 1930s with jealousy, and any of its countrymen who joined the Germans was banished. But money dictated the game; whale oil was so valuable and so vital for everything from foodstuffs to lubricating watches that even in February 1940, the Germans and the British concluded a de facto agreement to allow the Norwegians to export whale oil to both sides. With the war over everything had changed except the pressing need for whale oil, and these men were there to provide it.
Bristow, Alan. Alan Bristow: Helicopter Pioneer . Pen and Sword. Kindle Edition.

My great-grandfather was Norwegian, and a whaler, who left Norway under a cloud (how dark I only recently discovered) and set off to make his living slaughtering wales at Walvis Bay with the Germans in the early 19th century!

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Re: Death of senior Royal Marine officer (aged 54)

#48 Post by Undried Plum » Sat Oct 09, 2021 11:43 am

FD2 wrote:
Sat Oct 09, 2021 10:20 am
Agree or disagree about the carriers and the F35's but that decision has been made so are they to scrap them now?
By far the greatest cost of those damned things comes long after the initial sticker price from the factory.

For example, when Norway looked at the lifetime cost per F35 they found that a $100M aeroplane would actually cost well over $1Bn over its full lifetime.

We should sell the damned Blaircraft carriers to India or Pakistan. Or mebbe sell one to each of those countries so that there won't be any fighting over who gets 'em, so to speak. The F35s should simply be ferried back to where they came from and get a refund for the fuel reserve on arrival.

They still don't know how to gas-axe the Polaris boats which are rotting alongside the wall in the inner basin at Rosyth, but we should scrap or sink them all, as well as the wretched Trident and Dreadnought boats, to make artificial reefs.

Britain should get used to the fact that we are no longer an imperial power and we should learn to adjust to the fact that threatening the world with thermonuclear weapons is really not a clever or useful thing to do.

As for carriers, Britain has no need or use for 'em. Britain is an aircraft carrier. Airstrip One.

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Re: Death of senior Royal Marine officer (aged 54)

#49 Post by TheGreenGoblin » Sat Oct 09, 2021 12:11 pm

Some shanigans going on here today. As the post I linked to in my comments about the Waffen SS, etc. in response to FD2's post has gone AWOL. Surely we aren't been censored or have I entered the twilight zone? =))

Anway I said something like this in response to FD2's original post.

The old "we were only obeying orders" excuse really doesn't cut it, for senior officers, when they should be telling the truth to power. "Oh for a senior officer that has the moral courage to tell his political overlords the truth, even if it does mean the end of his career".

I then responded to FD2's rather waggish alluson to the Waffen SS and Paton, by saying that the Waffen SS were militarily effective (albeit morally reprehensible) and then, "we shouldn't allow concentration camps and massacres to get in the way, when we are fighting enemies, as the British well know, vide. the Second Boer War, Amritsar, Kenya etc. <<my waggish riposte to his waggishness>> ;)))

As for Paton he was probably completely mad, but at least he was an effective commander. In the end war is a form of madness after all"
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Re: Death of senior Royal Marine officer (aged 54)

#50 Post by FD2 » Sat Oct 09, 2021 9:02 pm

We don't know if any of them tell the truth to power. It's secret. The policy comes from above them and it's up to them whether they stay in post if they don't like it. No doubt some would rather cling to power than stand down but we're not likely to know which ones are we? I was pointing out that no civilised countries should wish their forces to emulate the Waffen SS and their adventures behind the Barbarossa lines or the complete barbarity of the Russian forces at Katyn. I'll agree though about Zhukov and forgive Paton his slap slip - they were outstanding generals.

I'd also agree about not trying to be a world power and I fear the carrier forces will be badly protected in action due to the lack of escorts and the 'peace dividend' that has led successive governments to neglect the UK armed forces of all three colours. At least they have two foreign escorts to boost their numbers at present. The country should be another Switzerland? No, I think it must retain some ability to bite, if not at the 1960s level, and certainly replace Trident idc. Appeasement of dictators does not work and China's bullying from Tibet to Taiwan, the Uighurs and the South China Sea countries must be confronted. If not it certainly won't be restricted to the Spratleys and Scarboroughs.

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Re: Death of senior Royal Marine officer (aged 54)

#51 Post by FD2 » Sat Oct 09, 2021 9:36 pm

GG Of course you are right about the ill treatment of opponents by the British and especially the Boer families in the 2nd Boer War and the treatment of the Mau Mau fighters in Kenya - the relative scale of those actions versus the WW2 atrocities should not be an excuse.

Stalin said the deaths of a few million is a 'statistic' but I find it hard to agree with that. No doubt Hitler thought much the same, as did his people, until vengeance arrived from the east.

Maybe we should confine the discussion to what is happening today in the world of the defence chiefs.

Perhaps some truths about General Holmes' mental state will come out at the inquest. Until then we we should not believe too strictly what we read in the press.

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Re: Death of senior Royal Marine officer (aged 54)

#52 Post by TheGreenGoblin » Sun Oct 10, 2021 12:02 am

FD2 wrote:
Sat Oct 09, 2021 9:36 pm
GG Of course you are right about the ill treatment of opponents by the British and especially the Boer families in the 2nd Boer War and the treatment of the Mau Mau fighters in Kenya - the relative scale of those actions versus the WW2 atrocities should not be an excuse.

Stalin said the deaths of a few million is a 'statistic' but I find it hard to agree with that. No doubt Hitler thought much the same, as did his people, until vengeance arrived from the east.

Maybe we should confine the discussion to what is happening today in the world of the defence chiefs.

Perhaps some truths about General Holmes' mental state will come out at the inquest. Until then we we should not believe too strictly what we read in the press.
All fair points FD2. As ever, your are in the right of it. :-bd
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Re: Death of senior Royal Marine officer (aged 54)

#53 Post by Pontius Navigator » Sun Oct 10, 2021 8:15 am

The country should be another Switzerland? No, I think it must retain some ability to bite, if not at the 1960s level, and certainly replace Trident idc.
Having been in the V-Force during the Cold War I believed in the deterrent. Although vulnerable it was also visible. Today though I cannot envisage us retaliating should some second rank nuclear power chose to use nuclear weapons.

One belief was that first use would occur at sea. For that to occur the aggressor would need a target.......

Switzerland? Why not? Like Sweden they believe in armed neutrality, unlike Ireland or Iceland that depend on others. Why do we need to project naval power?

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Re: Death of senior Royal Marine officer (aged 54)

#54 Post by Undried Plum » Sun Oct 10, 2021 9:59 am

The country should be another Switzerland? No, I think it must retain some ability to bite, if not at the 1960s level, and certainly replace Trident.
Like most us here, I'm of an age to have been through a phase of believing that there was a Commie plot to take over the world and that any time soon we should expect a knock on the door from a fur-hatted soldier with snow on his boots. We believed that any time soon the Fulda Gap would be flooded with Soviet tanks and simultaneously believed that the pesky Reds would nuke us given half a chance. Not many of us, certainly not I, questioned the fundamental contradiction in those idiotic beliefs.

I grew out of that absurd phase of my life and grew to understand that Britain's possession of nuclear weapons is just daft. Expensively daft. Very very expensively so.

Sweden and Switzerland are very good examples of wealthy countries which have never seriously considered nuclear weapons to be a defence aid. Sure, they still spend silly amounts of money on their militaries, but that's a historical hangover from two or three centuries ago when they faced a realistic threat from foreign cavalry and artillery. There exists no realistic threat that Switzerland or Sweden or Britain will be overrun by a foreign army.

As for the "defence" part of the MoD, the ongoing invasion by tens of thousands of illegal immigrants across a very narrow and easily defended neck of the Dover Straits shows the pathetic and delusional idea that our tens of billions of Pounds spent on so-called "defence" are other than a waste of money to be a monstrously expensive self-perpetuating waste of money.

Sure, we need army bomb disposal teams and the Tupperware Taskforce. Sure, we need a squadron of fighters to do the QRA thing to shoot down a hijacked airliner. Sure, we "need" a coupla hundred scarlet tunic wearing soldier to do drill at Buck House and Battenberg Castle to keep the wealthy Chinese tourists coming to Britain. Sure, we need Tier One special forces to do unmentionable stuff. That's about it. Two or three Billion quid should cover that very comfortably.

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Re: Death of senior Royal Marine officer (aged 54)

#55 Post by FD2 » Sun Oct 10, 2021 7:25 pm

I'm of an age where I believe that nuclear weapons are needed more than ever. It's easy to take the piss out of the present state of the UK armed forces but they are the way they are due to successive governments mishandling defence issues and failure to confront the, for instance, real 'villains' in the cross-Channel immigrant fiasco - France and the EU - who make no effort to stop the flow northwards from the Med. The Frog police fire a few rubber bullets and seemingly want the world to believe that they cannot patrol a few miles of their own coast - like Nelson's telescope being pointed back at the UK from a blind eye. 50 million? - go and boil your bottoms mes amis! Every Froggie I have met has been kind, intelligent and good company. They just seem to choose crap leaders, like the Little Napoleon.

The fallacy of land based aircraft being able to protect all the country's territories and friends around the world was conclusively disproved by the Falklands fiasco. If even one of the older Ark Royal or Eagle had been available the Argentinians might well have thought twice but government lack of interest in a British territory, defence 'peace dividend' cutbacks leading to what the Argies saw as an inability to muster sufficient forces to counter their invasion gave them a tacit green light. That is why we need at least one carrier available to send to any potential trouble spot. They are a projection of our interest and our ability to counter aggression against our friends and not just the big two, but any future enemies that my crystal ball cannot make out in 2021.

Obviously one against many in the case of the big two, at the moment, belligerent powers is not sufficient and that's where an independent deterrent is also needed. It's not intended for use against tinpot dictators threatening Britain's friends but direct military action against the UK itself which may occur shed any twisted religious or other type of nutter acquire nuclear capability.

I remember the worries back in the 60s about the Russian tanks pouring through western Europe. NATO was a lot more solid back then, apart from the French of course - yet again being awkward. The solution was widely leaked that the tactical use of nuclear weapons was the only way of deterring them and the hope that the other side would not decide to escalate from there. Europe did not subscribe to the anti-Commie US-style hysteria mentioned, just a quiet watch and the hope that the USSR would confine itself to bullying its satellites like Hungary (good job they did there), Czechoslovakia (another good job) et al.

The UK should decide once and for all whether it wishes to diminish its role on the world stage to a position of armed neutrality or spend more to re-create credible armed forces. At the moment they are trying to be a big power on a shoestring, because every time bigger defence spending is announced another section of the armed forces will be cut back or lost. The fly in the ointment is that the country is running on huge debts so perhaps it will end with the carriers being flogged to newly rich 'friends' after all.

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Re: Death of senior Royal Marine officer (aged 54)

#56 Post by FD2 » Sun Oct 10, 2021 7:34 pm

ps I don't think Sweden or Switzerland are good examples - they both benefit from being in a good place geographically and can build their wealth under the protective shadow of their neighbours. I do concur that neither of those two countries was seriously threatened by enemy cavalry, being especially useful to the Germans for other purposes in WW2. The UK has been threatened by invasion though, hasn't it? In the future? - who knows - I wish I had the gift of foresight.

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Re: Death of senior Royal Marine officer (aged 54)

#57 Post by Pontius Navigator » Mon Oct 11, 2021 8:09 am

FD2, back in the 70s even regarding the Soviets. I remember a paper exercise, Wintex, ran for 10 days and really stretched our ingenuity as players using real war stock numbers and attrition tables. Eventually enough was enough and SACEUR went nuclear.

No idea the level of play but I think at ministerial levels. And of course no idea how realistic the end game, but we were all surprised that SACEUR decided his nuclear demonstration would also give him a tactical advantage and opted for a limited strike on 50 targets.

Endex was two minutes later.

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Re: Death of senior Royal Marine officer (aged 54)

#58 Post by Pontius Navigator » Mon Oct 11, 2021 8:14 am

Regarding Sweden and Switzerland, Norway is an active player in the Alliance but its defence forces are very much for homeland defence.

We would have difficulty detecting, let alone intercepting, light aircraft into UK and our Border Agency is too small with only 20,000 personnel.

My brother in law, ex-police, works part time at an airport. His daughter works full time and is more mobile doing airports and docks.

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Re: Death of senior Royal Marine officer (aged 54)

#59 Post by FD2 » Mon Oct 11, 2021 10:15 am

I think it's deplorable how little attention has been paid to defence of the UK mainland for many years both at sea and in the air. It seems to be a one sided game for the Border Force as there's sod all help from the other side of the Channel and too few people to do the job, as you say. It has been quite foreseeable for a long time that immigrants would eventually be arriving from France - in fact since the Calais migrant camp was established in January 2015. I expect the UK was slow to anticipate this, just for a change. Any ministers want to plead guilty? Didn't think so.

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Re: Death of senior Royal Marine officer (aged 54)

#60 Post by Undried Plum » Mon Oct 11, 2021 2:33 pm

FD2 wrote:
Sun Oct 10, 2021 7:34 pm
The UK has been threatened by invasion though, hasn't it?
Not credibly. Not for a very very long time.

Operation Seelöwe was a non-starter. The Wehrmacht's amphibious capability was limited to river crossings and the Kriegsmarine was hollow in the middle. They had big heavy hitters which couldn't manoeuvre in the narrow confines of the Dover Straights and little u-boats which couldn't operate in the shallow sand-banks of the Western end. Not much in the way of frigates or destroyers in between. The Luftwaffe never came close to gaining air superiority, never mind air supremacy.

Sadly for we who admire aeroplanes, it was the RN, not the RAF, who won the Battle of Britain by precluding Seelöwe from taking place. Those Rhine barges were never fit for sea duties and with such low seaboards they'd have been swamped in a beam sea of any more than two or three foot waves. The ones which hadn't sunk through natural causes would have been pummeled by gunnery of the RN's Destroyers. If a rump of an invasion force had managed to struggle ashore on the beaches of Kent and Sussex, they'd have been unsuppliable and would run out of ammo and other stuff and would have had to surrender. Hitler would have gone nuts and executed several dozen of his best Generals in one of his rages.

Last time there was a hostile invasion of the British mainland was nothing more than nuisance raids on a few seaports by the Septics in 1812.

Napoleon never gained enough sea power to seriously attempt an invasion. Another example of the RN saving the country from invasion. Pusser's slick copper-bottomed war canoes had a two or three knot advantage over ffroggie ones with their moluscean dangleberry skin friction. That sort of thing makes all the difference when you want to cross the T.

The postulated Commie invasion was nothing more than a hoax. A cheap way of maintaining vastly overbloated military expenditure. We really didn't have any rationale for attacking North Korea, for example. That little peninsula was never of interest to the British Empire. Suez was never going to be tolerated by The Empire and so was doomed from the start.

As for TB Liar's dodgy dossier, we all now know that it was a hoax too. The "threat" of British sovereign territory being nuked with Ayrab missiles at 40 minutes notice was total bollocks.

There was the Norman invasion. I'll give you that, but that was so long ago and technology has advanced so much that it's scarcely relevant to the 21st century. Same-same the Viking and Roman invasions.

As for the Falklands, that was easily preventable in 1982. A few years earlier the Callaghan government did the right thing when GCHQ/SIS Int gleaned from radio intercepts that the Argies were planning a minor invasion of the islands. Callaghan sent two or three Frigates and Destroyers down there and told the Argies what he was doing and why. They cancelled their plans and that was that. No need for carriers.

Peter Carrington's office dropped the ball when faced with an identical situation, and being the honorable noble man that he was, he took full responsibility for his dozy Department and resigned. Madam Handbag was delighted to have an opportunity to fight an election-winning war. Rejoice at that, rejoice.

Sooner or later the Argies and the Brits are going to have to come to terms with the oddity that those islands fell into the hands of the Coalite Company who saw them as a vast treasure trove of peat. It's anomalous that the islands are British. Eventually some sort of rapprochement arrangement is going to have to be agreed. Now that Argentina is a democracy and now that there's a reasonably proportionate defence capability at MPA and its remote radar sites and its usual frigate or destroyer within the vicinity, as well as the occasional A-boat as well as a very robust short-notice contingency plan to bolster those forces, the chances of a surprise pop-up invasion by Argentina are nil.

For tired old Lady Britannia to have a "Strike Force" poncing about in the South China Sea in the 21st century is absurd. Dangerously so.

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