Blair forgets The Despot's Golden Rule
If you're in a situation where you're desperately clinging on to power and you're relying on your armed forces to 'plug the policy gap' there's one golden rule that every dictator, despot and disreputable ruler knows it's this: make sure you pay your army.
The British army is suffering manpower shortages, in new recruits and in experienced middle ranking officers. The lack of new recruits isn't so worrying - more people enlist in hard economic times and as the economy is doing reasonably well, it's hard to tell the effect on Blair's foreign adventures on these figures.
But it's the steady loss of experienced officers and key figures like sergants that is causing real concern. It was this that led Chief of the General Staff Sir Richard Dannatt to warn Blair not to 'break' the army over Iraq.
Perhaps the potential
Perhaps the potential soldiers are not too keen on the idea of being led into harms way by corrupt, lying politicians! Just a thought.
Perhaps if he wasn't so keen
Perhaps if he wasn't so keen on he-maintarian intervention, we wouldn't need such a big army
And of course, you also need
And of course, you also need to have nuclear weapons because the future is uncertain and you want to have the confidence to make mortal enemies whenever policy dictates that you should go out and do so.
Our armed forces are already
Our armed forces are already too small, the Royal Navy is short of ships which is why Fleet Auxiliary ships are carrying out drugs interdiction work in the Caribbean.
The Royal Air Force is too small especially as we have lost the Fleet Air Arm Sea Harriers with no replacement aircraft in sight yet.
The Army was overstretched with Iraq and all its other commitments before we deployed so many of it's numbers to Afghanistan.
For the young single guys in the Army operational duties are great, it's why most people join. But you can only take so many tours before you wear out.
For the troops in their 30's with a wife and kids, constant deployments become hard work, you miss a lot of the things that you think you should see as those kids grow up.
Constant deployments also mean that other training can be missed as can courses with short turn round times between tours.
This all has a cumulative effect which is what can "break" our armed forces.
Break them! By all means
Break them!
By all means break them!!
Dear Lord, please break them!!!
Only then will (perhaps) they stop going around the globe slaughtering people and laying the foundations for economic slavery!