Daily View: What now the future of the British armed forces?
The Defence Green Paper proposing radical changes to the armed forces has sparked debate about the future of Britain's armed services.
An element of the Paper suggests a coalition with France on weapons procurement. France can't be trusted:
"Just look at France's track record since the September 11 attacks. At virtually every turn the French have spurned the international consensus to go their own way. President Jacques Chirac's attempts to sabotage the transatlantic alliance in the build-up to the Iraq war are well-documented."
past and present British governments of "skimping" investment at home, instead spending on foreign bases due to an "inflated sense of its world role":
"Exactly the same could be said now of the Government's order for two huge new aircraft carriers, plans to replace the Trident nuclear deterrent and preparations for expeditionary forces to be used by future governments to meddle in other countries' affairs all over the world.
A new high- speed rail network? You'll be lucky."
his recommendations for restructuring the armed forces:
"The younger generation of air, land and sea warriors that the past ten years have produced know that the wars they are fighting today will morph into the conflicts of tomorrow. Much as they love their cap badges, they know that subtle, fast and highly trained small, integrated units are the only way to fight the new form of war that is already upon us. There is now a very good case for copying the US Marine Corps and integrating the Army, Navy and Air Force into one."
The army commanders understand better than ministers that the traditional military won't win wars anymore:
"Budgetary cuts of the magnitude envisaged will demand clearer thinking about the changing character of future conflicts. A separate MoD paper published yesterday suggested that future conflicts are unlikely to be fought on a well-defined battlefield, such as was the case in the first Gulf war. It says a future conflict will be 'cluttered', on terrain where it will be difficult to discriminate between a mass of ambiguous targets - friendly forces, NGOs, journalists and the enemy."
The the paper for asking questions of a "fundamental nature" even if it is sceptical about the worth of publication so close to an election:
"At this stage, these are only ideas, very preliminary ideas, which need to be considered within the context of a much bigger question: what should be Britain's future place in the world? That the Green Paper has paved the way for just such a profound discussion means that it might not have been such a waste of time after all. The next government, whoever forms it, should resist the temptation to put it in the shredder."
While the Green Paper has created interest in the newspapers, that MPs did not show the same amount of interest, illustrated by the low turnout for the discussion:
"As we all know Her Majesty's Armed Forces have spent the last seven years fighting in far-flung parts of the world. Their deployments have hardly been uncontroversial. So you'd think that the release of a new Green Paper on the 'way forward' for the armed forces might be a moment of some interest and, indeed, even at this stage of the electoral cycle, some importance.
Not so. At least it doesn't interest our parliamentarians. As Think Defence points out only one in twenty MPs bothered turn up to listen to and debate the Green Paper."
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