Saturday 20 January 2018

Wellington didn't have Challenger tanks and satellite guided rockets, Part Two: The Army

So back in August I wrote this
"Further compounding this problem is the reduction in the value of the pound brought on by the Brexit vote, especially when considering the future major purchases of US products such as the P-8 Poseidon and F-35 Lightning. Under normal circumstances you'd expect a big organisation such as the MoD to have taken a sizable hedge position in the dollar prior to the Brexit vote, just in case, given the scale of its potential exposure to currency risk. But then this is the MoD we're talking about, so nothing is certain. We'll find out soon enough I guess."
Yeah, so we found out. They didn't. And now the fresh black hole in the MoD's finances amounts to about £20bn over 10 years. But it's not all currency based, as it has also emerged that the MoD has backtracked on many of its prior pledges to reduce expenditure. Which brings us here, to the second part of this three part series looking at how the UK might plug said gap. That means assessing the army.

Thursday 11 January 2018

The New Army Recruitment Advert

There's been much outcry over the new army recruitment advert, so I thought as something different I'd give it a watch and relate my first impressions.

Thursday 4 January 2018

Something, something, 2018 Strategic Review, Part 1: The Royal Navy

The other day I laid out a few of my general thoughts on where UK defence is headed, what with all this talk of possible cuts on the horizon. I'm sure that in time the government will come up with a staggeringly good management speak term for it all, something like "a strategic reshaping" or "resourcing refinement". For now though I thought I might do a series of three posts taking each service in turn and expanding a bit on my thoughts, as it's been a while since I last mused about the services in such a way and "fantasy fleet" type posts are allegedly a good cash cow. The fact that I'm still using blogger would imply this either a) isn't true, or b) I just don't do enough of them ( so keep an eye out for the forthcoming weekly series "SDSR; Week x").