"Switch to Ecotricity & help fight climate change with your electricity bill. £20 will also be donated to The Converging World on your behalf." boasts the Ecotricity website. Yesterday, with the coroner's inquiry into the death of Trooper James Munday, the first soldier to be killed in a Jackal, we could have been something of a landmark in seeking better protection for our troops exposed to IEDs in Afghanistan. Instead, the opportunity was frittered away by a quiescent coroner and our loathsome media. No comment from me needed. Read it and weep, for yourselves and this once-great nation of ours. David Axe in Danger Room picks up the Mi-26 story, with some very useful comments. The lid is creaking open and the worms are beginning to crawl out of the can.
Friday, July 17, 2009
The Saintly Dannatt
Those of you who have followed this blog from way back and many others, will know that in June 2006 and in the months thereafter, we harnessed the resources of the blog, and much else, to the campaign to get better protected vehicles for the British Army, in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Those of you who know a little about this author know that I am a parliamentary researcher. I work for people in (relatively) high places. That means I get information ... lots of it, and we also get a lot of people in high places, very high places, giving us very high quality information.
Bear with me on this. Unlike some, with tiny nuggets of information who rush into print, we hold our counsel. What you see is most definitely not all we get. We know things ...
Amongst those things we know, are that, when the campaign for protected vehicles was at its height and there was huge resistance to better vehicles, it was the ARMY that was briefing against them. Ministers, contrary to popular opinion, do not like getting soldiers killed – they wanted the machines.
It is they, not the Generals who have to stand up in Parliament – they not the Generals – who have to face the angry relatives and deal with the flood of letters, the anger and the newspaper editorials, the accusations and the recriminations.
And behind the ARMY briefing was General Sir Richard Dannatt. He did not want Mastiffs for his army. He wanted FRES and he was not going to allow Mastiff to be bought because this might erode the funding stream for his pet project. His answer to the Snatch was the Pinzgauer Vector. As commander land forces before he became CGS, that was his baby.
Eventually, under considerable pressure, he very reluctantly agreed to take on a small number of Mastiffs, but only on the condition that they came out of the Treasury reserve and then on condition that they government bought some more Vectors. And we all know what happened there ... £100 million pissed up against the wall, five men dead, and many more who were very seriously injured. Thank you Mr Dannatt.
Then there were the helicopters. The Army could have had more machines. They could be flying now. It was offered more machines. The deal was to delay the absurdly expensive Future Lynx and buy-in off the shelf. Several options were put to Dannatt and he rejected every one of them. Future Lynx was his baby. He made it a resigning issue. The Army will get Future Lynx ... in 2014. Thank you Mr Dannatt.
And now the Saintly Dannatt – after making snide remarks about having to ride around in a US Blackhawk, when we could have been operating our own Blackhawks - is crying out for more UAVs to help deal with the IED menace. Good call, but why aren't they in place already? Ah, Mr Dannatt.
We did have a UAV in Iraq. It was the useless Phoenix, bought at the cost of £350 million which never worked properly – one of Mr James Arbuthnot's better decisions. Ministers wanted a replacement off-the-shelf. But Mr Dannatt wanted Watchkeeper, a £1bn project with all the bells and whistles. That was an integral part of the FRES project, Dannatt's baby.
Eventually, there was a compromise. Very grudgingly, Dannatt agreed to a very small number of Hermes 450s being bought, as long as they came out of the Treasury reserve, and did not affect the Watchkeeper programme. But they have never been properly integrated into the ORBAT as all the resource is going into developing and integrating Watchkeeper.
And now we need an "offensive counter-IED campaign" says the Saintly Dannatt because, unless we win this offensive, it could have strategic consequences. We've being saying that for several years and NOW he gets the message.
Yet, to the media, the Saintly Dannatt is a hero. To those who know better, he's a disaster. But then, the media have a narrative and two kids to support.
COMMENT THREADHere's a fun game...
That's not as great as it sounds. Not that it ever is.Not even cat litter
More on Defence of the Realm.Thursday, July 16, 2009
And this says it all ...
Then read this
COMMENT THREADNo headway at all
Writes that great sage Jeff Randallunder the title "We have a moral duty to our troops: pay up or pull them out", "There's plenty of scope for big cuts in the bloated welfare budget to preserve defence spending."
In the first three years of the intensified campaign in Afghanistan, from early 2006 onwards, the direct expenditure from Treasury reserve on the military campaign amounted to £3 billion or thereabouts.
For this current financial year – one year – the cost has escalated to £3.5 billion. Effectively, we are looking at more than a 300 percent increase on the average for the past three years. That produces not far short of £400,000 per annum, per person deployed in extra costs, not including the core funding from the defence budget.
It would be a useful exercise for an economist some time to make a cost comparison between this current and previous deployments, and it would come as no surprise whatsoever to learn as a result of such an exercise that this was the most expensive deployment, in per capita terms, in the history of the British Armed Forces, and even in the entire history of warfare.
Should this be the case, and in any event, the expenditure has been directed at defeating a primitive, low-tech enemy, few in numbers, who is able to buy personal weapons at a cost of tens of dollars and whose most potent weapon, the IED, is priced in the range of $100 – that is when our government is not providing the raw materials free of charge.
Purely on the basis of the normal scrutiny process, it would not be unreasonable occasionally to ask for some detail of how and why our government is spending our hard-earned cash, what was being achieved for it, whether it is being properly spent and whether it would be possible to get better value for money. And there would be nothing special in so doing. This is the normal process for any number of public sector organisations, carried out by a wide range of official and unofficial bodies.
To get near an answer, we have to look at the objectives of the campaign, the strategy, something of the tactics, the equipment and ... heavens forefend, the results and the prognosis.
But none of that troubles Randall. Like so many of his ilk, imbued with the hysteria of the moment about "Our Boys", his brains dribble out of his backside as he gushes inanities that would have a teenage swain blushing with embarrassment.
What is it about otherwise sensible and usually hard-headed commentators that, when confronted with the military, they quite literally lose the plot? We are making no headway in addressing the appalling waste and inefficiency here, and clearly will not until the likes of Randall decide to re-construct their brains.
COMMENT THREADFull house again
A special debate on Afghanistan has been convened in the House today ... nice to see the benches packed, with all the MPs taking such a close interest in the safety of our troops and the conduct of the campaign.
COMMENT THREADPlaying politics with peoples' lives
Although ostensibly addressing a serious deficiency in our military capabilities which is affected the campaign in Afghanistan, there is something distinctly tawdry about the way the Defence Committee has today "rushed out" a report on helicopter lift.
Read more on Defence of the Realm.Spreading
How long will it be before the British media break clear of the "Defence Advisory" notices and start reporting the news, one wonders. The block on reporting can only apply, legally, to "classified material" and since all (or most) of the information we have is in the public domain, the media have really no excuse for their silence.
COMMENT THREADOur troops are needed here
There is a very natural personal tension – which possibly reflects in this blog – between our support for the British (and international) intervention in Afghanistan, where we are seeking to improve the standard of governance in that country, and our view of affairs here back home, where we see the progressive decline in our democracy and the unremitting decay in the standard of government.
In many respects, though, what is happening in Afghanistan – and our management of the "war" in the portals of the MoD main building and No 10 - is a reflection of the greater malaise. For, although it is fashionable to laud the bravery of "Our Boys", the MoD as a parent organisation and the respective Services are as disorganised, dysfunctional and down-right inefficient as all or any of the public-sector organisations.
Nevertheless, it is hard for many people to take on board that the service chiefs, parading in their uniforms, are bureaucrats just like any other public sector bosses – with a strong political edge which makes them politicians in uniform, fighting their corners for their own sectional interests which may (and often do) have nothing in common with the national interest or even the broader interests of the armed forces. The idea that, for instance, General Dannatt is merely a gallant soldier, "above politics" is risible, straight out of the bumper book of fairy tales.
The conduct of the "war" in that far away place called Afghanistan, therefore, has a great deal in common with events here. Both policy development and management here and abroad are being conducted with probably the same degree of incompetence, compounded by serial stupidity, blind dogma and ignorance.
The only thing that is really different is that, in Afghanistan, British service personnel die very visibly (the rest are largely ignored). Their names are posted on the official MoD website and are read out in Parliament. By contrast, the bulk of those who die a miserable, undignified death from avoidable infection in an NHS hospital may be victims of the same brand of official incompetence, but perpetrated by a different band of actors in different circumstances - and they die without official recognition.
Another area of policy which is equally dysfunctional is energy, which combines with that insidious decay in democracy as we see that congenital moron Ed Miliband – whose best friends even despair about his brain cell count – announce that planning rules would be changed to make it easier for 6,000 onshore wind turbines to be built.
Britain's "default position" will now be to accept new onshore turbines, which means the building of "many thousands" of wind turbines will be imposed on country residents "as part of a new green energy strategy" – whether they like it or not.
As it happens, most of them do not. Last September, we reported on the valiant efforts of Owen Paterson MP and Bill Cash in supporting constituents in the charming rural area of Shropshire, called Bearstone near Market Drayton, objecting to the energy firm Nuon building a giant subsidy machine on their patch – worth £43 million, charged to consumers through the Renewables Obligation.
With some pleasure, I was told last night that an appeal to the Planning Inspectorate, robustly mounted at which Owen Paterson gave evidence, had succeded. Local people had formed the pressure group Vortex and raised a large amount of money to do serious research, producing well worked through evidence which prevailed on the day.
Under Ed Miliband's newly announced regime, that appeal would not have succeeded. Thus we see the destruction of one of the most fundamental systems of government, where residents have some control over their own environments.
Yet all this is predicated on the fatuous and increasingly discredited notion that the recent cyclical bout of increased temperatures has somehow been triggered by human activity, on the basis of badly constructed and pathetically limited computer models, driven by self-interested activists who have gulled politicians throughout the world into believing their dire creed.
That the myth of man-made global warming not only survives but has become a primary driver of government policy, to the enormous cost and discomfort of us all, is a classic example of the dysfunction of our government – and of the opposition which has equally bought into the myth. That it is now driving the destruction of our democracy, as the Mad Miliband hands down his edicts, should therefore be of great concern.
Thus, returning to the theme with which we started, one of the best arguments I have heard for withdrawing our troops from Afghanistan is not based on the intrinsic merits – or not – of our being there. Rather, it is the incongruity of our current position where we are seeking to impose good governance and foster democracy in a foreign country when we cannot achieve either at home and are witnessing the destruction of both.
If our troops are needed, they are needed at home, to storm the bastions of Whitehall and Westminster, to shoot the denizens so that we can start over. We need a New Model Army, because our masters are no longer listening.
Friday, 17 July 2009
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