TopBadger wrote: ↑Wed Mar 24, 2021 2:54 pm
Little waster wrote: ↑Tue Mar 23, 2021 4:44 pm
In unrelated news
British Army to be cut by 10,000 troops.
I assume those extra 68 nuclear missiles have enhanced capabilities so they are also able to check the ID of civilians in occupied countries, distribute food parcels, shoot a suicide bomber in a crowd, dig out earthquake victims, hold a Central European bridge against an armoured column, vaccinate children, bayonet charge some teenage conscripts and wear funny hats on the Queen's birthday.
Otherwise it would be a bit silly to spunks tens of billions away on augmenting a weapons system to counter some infinitesimally unlikely chain of events at the expense of the 99.9999% of things, you know, our armed forces actually have to do regularly.
Wow... will be able to fit the entire regular Army into Old Trafford. Remember that only about 1/3 of that number are Combat, the other 2/3rd are combat service support (comms, engineering, logistics), and of the combat arms not all troops are fit 100% of the time. You'd likely be able to fit the actual available fighting force inside Craven Cottage.
IIRC it gets even worse then that.
On top of that a number of the actual combat-ready troops will always be tied up in various internal security roles, (guarding bases, facilities, palaces etc.), training/being trained, on rotation and so on.
So the actual number of deployable troops at any given point drops further and there is a lower limit of what can be usefully independently deployed, the so called "self-licking ice-cream".
In theory we could plonk 5000* soldiers down in, say, Basra but all 5000 of them would be tied up simply supporting the presence of themselves there. There wouldn't be a single spare soldier to actually do anything useful. You could use those 5000 to back-fill a larger deployment of US troops (and that was the role of the farcically low numbers** contributed by the majority of Bush's
Coalition and that's excluding the bulk of the so-called Coalition who sent nothing at all, even the Australians at No. 3 failed to send an effective number of troops) but there can be no pretence that is an viable independent deployment.
So that 10,000 is skimmed straight off the actual operational capacity of the UK Army, what you are left with then is essentially a Self-Defence Force. That might not necessarily be a bad thing but we have to stack that against the Tories loudly trumpeted post-imperial delusions of projecting force East of Suez, even into the South China Sea, and giving the Chinese a damn good thrashing as spouted by chinless fireplace sales-men.
*IIRC that was the lowest deployable limit.
**including such mighty forces as 200 Poles, 55 Tongans, 50 Filipinos, 24 Moldovans and 2 Icelanders!
This place is not a place of honor, no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here, nothing valued is here.
What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us.
This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.