Tony Blair is to be much admired for many things, but this insanity is definitely not one of them. Down the road, the question will be, "What were they thinking?" A loss of national security, indeed world security, is the result of purely political weakness..
Nearly a quarter of the RAF is to be axed, with the loss of more than 100 front-line aircraft, Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, said yesterday.Overall, the Armed Forces will be reduced by a tenth in what the Tories described as "a political and moral betrayal". Many ships and tanks will be scrapped.
The RAF is to be cut from 53,800 personnel to 41,000 and will lose all 108 Jaguar ground attack aircraft. A fifth of its Tornado F3 fighter aircraft are to go, plus its base at Coltishall, Norfolk.
It will also lose nine of its Nimrod maritime patrol aircraft and the RAF Regiment's air defence capability.
The Royal Navy will lose 5,000 men and 15 vessels, including the Type 42 destroyers Cardiff, Newcastle and Glasgow, the Type 23 frigates Norfolk, Grafton and Marlborough and the hunter-killer submarines Spartan, Superb and Trafalgar.
The Army is to lose 5,500 men and more than 80 Challenger II tanks as part of a major restructuring in which all 19 single-battalion "famous names" will be subsumed into large regionally-based regiments, with the loss of four named regiments.
The only expansion is in special forces, with a second regular SAS regiment expected to be created to cope with the amount of work the SAS and SBS have been carrying out in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Telegraph in London has it right:
With unconscious irony, Mr Hoon's obituary for the military is entitled "Delivering Security in a Changing World". He is in denial about our insecurity in a world that is changing for the worse. There is no clear recognition of the threat from rogue states, perhaps equipped with WMD, and no acknowledgement of the fact that troops went into action in Iraq without proper protection against such dangers - not to mention basic equipment such as desert boots and body armour.Posted by Alan at July 22, 2004 11:35 AMIt is fatuous for the Defence Secretary to pretend that these cuts have been driven by strategic rather than financial factors, or for the chiefs of staff to profess satisfaction. Soldiers, sailors and airmen would respect their top brass more if they had put up more resistance to the politicians.
But it is the Prime Minister who has let the Forces down most. At his command, they go to the ends of the earth to fight for Queen and country. He invokes their patriotism, but he is not prepared to pay for it. Under the guise of a strategic defence review, the Blair Government is conducting a policy of unilateral disarmament.