State of UK readiness ?
Discussion
After a week of much talk of the naughty Russians etc......
Does anybody know of the state of readiness of our forces ?
I have spoken in my taxi with tank regiment lads who are now fighting on their feet, I have spoken with trainee flyers who were binned before their course completion, and highly skilled navy people who were being forced out into civvy-land.
It seems across the board we are loosing too many skills too fast.
Do we have the capacity to even sabre-rattle ? Any thoughts ?
Does anybody know of the state of readiness of our forces ?
I have spoken in my taxi with tank regiment lads who are now fighting on their feet, I have spoken with trainee flyers who were binned before their course completion, and highly skilled navy people who were being forced out into civvy-land.
It seems across the board we are loosing too many skills too fast.
Do we have the capacity to even sabre-rattle ? Any thoughts ?
Media says 16000 russian troops in crimea. At it's highest we had 9500 in afghan and that stretched logistics massively. Add to that the timing, with us finally withdrawing from Afghan and the public appetite for more warry business at absolute zero..
No, we won't be playing here. We won't even be on the sidelines, or in the stands.
No, we won't be playing here. We won't even be on the sidelines, or in the stands.
si-h said:
It seems across the board we are loosing too many skills too fast.
Do we have the capacity to even sabre-rattle ? Any thoughts ?
No.Do we have the capacity to even sabre-rattle ? Any thoughts ?
Even sanctions will only come back and bite us when they triple the gas price. In short, Russia could annexe things one by one and nobody could really stop them because nobody wants to take them on. Let's hope Putin stops after the low-hanging fruit.
shouldbworking said:
No, we won't be playing here. We won't even be on the sidelines, or in the stands.
Agreed.More like locked outside the turnstiles after the game has started.
Probably no bad thing though.
I don't see what everyone's getting all stressed about though, this was a when not if event.
Putin is no fool, and in the big scheme of things, Cameron, Obama, Hollande, Merkel et all, are just not in the same league as a former Lt.Col in the KGB.....
aeropilot said:
Putin is no fool, and in the big scheme of things, Cameron, Obama, Hollande, Merkel et all, are just not in the same league as a former Lt.Col in the KGB.....
Obama has the might but is in the wrong place and has nothing to gain from conflict; Europe would be simply cannon fodder. Europe is only good at talking, and bleating, and more taxation to pay for the talkers and the bleaters. By the time they've met for coffee and biscuits, Russian paratroopers would be in place.I think the EU should send in that unelected diplomatic heavy weight Baroness Cathy Ashton, Putin will s
t himself, die of boredom and acquiesce immediately.......
On another note, although it smacks of hypocrisy and double standards we should make lots of noises towards Russia and get the UN to write Moscow a strongly worded letter (just think Hans Blix and Kim Yong il in Team Amercia ) and just let the Eastern Europeans get on with it.
t himself, die of boredom and acquiesce immediately....... On another note, although it smacks of hypocrisy and double standards we should make lots of noises towards Russia and get the UN to write Moscow a strongly worded letter (just think Hans Blix and Kim Yong il in Team Amercia ) and just let the Eastern Europeans get on with it.
iphonedyou said:
Hooli said:
I believe we've got four fighters on the Falklands which we can use & the BBMF is ready. Feck all else left except a rowing boat & two pedalos.
I shouldn't laugh, though.
I could yet ending up leading the second Charge of the Light Brigade (though at 7mph)
I went to Portsmouth late last year. When I visited there were 14 ships in harbour. HMS Bristol is permanently moored and without engines, Endurance is dry docked awaiting the gas axe, and of the other 12, only 3 were sea going combat ships. The other nine were a mix of frigates and destroyers awaiting a tow to Turkey.
Of the three Type 45s in harbour, one was undergoing maintenance, and one of the others was without vital anti-aircraft/missile defence systems. So ONE warship deployable at short notice. And not a fixed wing aviation asset in existence.
As far as the army goes, I can only speak based on my own experience. The Corps of Royal Engineers has been shrinking for two decades. Constant disbandment, re-role, and draw down has diminished both capacity and capability. I know a little of what is happening to the Armoured Corps too, and it's similar - vehicles withdrawn into central pools, cutbacks on training budgets meaning that crews will often not have 'fought' a tank even on exercises. Since the first deployments to Afghanistan the politicians have been happy to move toward a "lighter, more mobile, flexible army" which basically means that we no longer have the tools required to fight anyone who kept hold of their "big toys".
I think the government is finally beginning to realise that it's impossible to 'rattle a sabre' when all your sabres have gone off to the recyclers. All I can say is I'm glad I'm out. When I signed up, the USSR was the bogeyman, we rotated units through various readiness states, and there was ALWAYS an element of BAOR that was ready to roll out into battle within hours. Then the wall came down, and the 'brave new world' dawned, and peace was going to break out properly and permanently. How daft we were to believe that.
Of the three Type 45s in harbour, one was undergoing maintenance, and one of the others was without vital anti-aircraft/missile defence systems. So ONE warship deployable at short notice. And not a fixed wing aviation asset in existence.
As far as the army goes, I can only speak based on my own experience. The Corps of Royal Engineers has been shrinking for two decades. Constant disbandment, re-role, and draw down has diminished both capacity and capability. I know a little of what is happening to the Armoured Corps too, and it's similar - vehicles withdrawn into central pools, cutbacks on training budgets meaning that crews will often not have 'fought' a tank even on exercises. Since the first deployments to Afghanistan the politicians have been happy to move toward a "lighter, more mobile, flexible army" which basically means that we no longer have the tools required to fight anyone who kept hold of their "big toys".
I think the government is finally beginning to realise that it's impossible to 'rattle a sabre' when all your sabres have gone off to the recyclers. All I can say is I'm glad I'm out. When I signed up, the USSR was the bogeyman, we rotated units through various readiness states, and there was ALWAYS an element of BAOR that was ready to roll out into battle within hours. Then the wall came down, and the 'brave new world' dawned, and peace was going to break out properly and permanently. How daft we were to believe that.
yellowjack said:
How daft we were to believe that.
The only people that believed that were the politicians/accountants in the Treasury who 'needed' a justification to slash spending on the Armed Forces.I don't know of anyone with even a remote connection to the Armed Forces that believed it.
aeropilot said:
I don't know of anyone with even a remote connection to the Armed Forces that believed it.
When I joined as a boy in 1987 we were given a talk by an old crusty Quartermaster who'd served in the South Atlantic in '82.He genuinely believed that those of us joining up at that time would "never see combat operations outside of Ulster". He didn't think either NATO or Warsaw Pact had the stomach for another big war, and we'd had our 'limited' war for a generation (he was referring to the Falklands).
When the wall came down, many of us serving were looking forward to a wholesale withdrawal from Germany and a quiet career polishing bayonets and 'marching up and down the square' in Catterick or Tidworth. It sounded a damned sight more attractive than a 22 minute life expectancy if we'd deployed against the 'reds'. Then we tried to police the world, and barely got a day's peace since.
When I think back to those early days, there were never many medals on parade in 'twos', some GSMs for NI, maybe a Falklands campaign medal or two, and some SNCOs with LS&GCs and BEMs. Nowadays, the man with no medals is the odd one out. It's not all that unusual to see some of the old sweats with 15 or 16 of the buggering things, and at £8 per medal to get them mounted, it's a bloody expensive business.
yellowjack said:
When I signed up, the USSR was the bogeyman, we rotated units through various readiness states, and there was ALWAYS an element of BAOR that was ready to roll out into battle within hours. Then the wall came down, and the 'brave new world' dawned, and peace was going to break out properly and permanently. How daft we were to believe that.
The difference as I see it is that for centuries 'war' was an outright clash between opposing and roughly equally matched countries, or allied groups of countries, winner take all. Now 'war' is an optional, limited, smalltime punchup against someone easy to fight (by that I mean easier to fight than Stormtroopers).There is an over-simplified but nice statement along the lines of 'Those who beat their swords into ploughshares may find themselves working for those who didn't'.
yellowjack said:
As far as the army goes, I can only speak based on my own experience. The Corps of Royal Engineers has been shrinking for two decades. Constant disbandment, re-role, and draw down has diminished both capacity and capability. I know a little of what is happening to the Armoured Corps too, and it's similar - vehicles withdrawn into central pools, cutbacks on training budgets meaning that crews will often not have 'fought' a tank even on exercises. Since the first deployments to Afghanistan the politicians have been happy to move toward a "lighter, more mobile, flexible army" which basically means that we no longer have the tools required to fight anyone who kept hold of their "big toys".
There are 100 or so Challengers lurking in BFG, so presumably they get to run over trackpads every now and then, with brews in between from the BV. That said the plan is to bring them home in 2015 and probably put them in the big shed with the others.The RN is in a fairly sorry state, a lot of the useful stuff has been binned to pay for the carriers.
The thing with UK readiness is that since we started 'selecting' which wars we fight, rather than getting thrown into war in the defence of our Sovereignty, we've had time to prepare before deployments. Not a huge amount of time, but often just enough, if you work flat out, to get enough stuff ready to make a good show of ourselves.
Back in 1990/1991 I was with 23 Engr Regt, and we were warned off for Op Granby 2, and were meant to deploy in relief of 32 Engr Regt who went out on Granby 1. To that end, the priority was to get 32's vehicles serviceable first. They raped our stock of Chieftain spares, and 'cannibalisation' was officially sanctioned for major assemblies. They even had one complete AVLB off us, swapped directly for a really broken one of theirs. This was fine. We'd have to work hard, but there was time to get the 'war reserve' spares broken out of UK storage, and fix the utter crap we'd been left with...
...then the game changed, the relief in place idea of a Granby 1 and 2 morphed into Granby 1.5 and we were told to be ready to join the 'proper' armoured engineers (23 was a 'close support concept' regiment, so despite fielding Chieftain AVRE and AVLB, we were never officially "Armoured Engineers") out in the desert. 32 were with 7 Brigade, we went out with 4 Brigade.
Thankfully I avoided being sent on the ships, with the vehicles. Those boys had a nightmare, trying to get the last few vehicles ready while at sea. But in the end, despite the fact that we'd been left sitting in Osnabruck with a bunch of vehicles that could barely be driven into REME's workshops under their own power, we managed to deploy a full Armoured Engineer troop in support of the 3RRF Battle Group, and keep it (mostly) serviceable for the duration.
The trouble is, the lessons are never learned, often because local commanders won't admit how stretched they really are, and how perilously close we are to failing sometimes. So the budgets are cut, and locally the forces are properly strapped, but back at HQ the senior commanders seem to live in a strange world where their troops could be ready at a moments notice. Back in the real world, vehicle crews break their backs time and again, and always pull enough out of the bag to convince formation HQs that their dream is real. "We are the architects of our own downfall" - by making things happen against the odds, deploying despite budget cuts, we at the sharp end make the rod for our own back.
The unofficial motto of the British Army...
"We the willing, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much, with so little, for so long, we are now qualified to do anything, with nothing."
It's a quote we knew well. I just didn't know at the time that it was originally attributed to Mother Teresa.
Back in 1990/1991 I was with 23 Engr Regt, and we were warned off for Op Granby 2, and were meant to deploy in relief of 32 Engr Regt who went out on Granby 1. To that end, the priority was to get 32's vehicles serviceable first. They raped our stock of Chieftain spares, and 'cannibalisation' was officially sanctioned for major assemblies. They even had one complete AVLB off us, swapped directly for a really broken one of theirs. This was fine. We'd have to work hard, but there was time to get the 'war reserve' spares broken out of UK storage, and fix the utter crap we'd been left with...
...then the game changed, the relief in place idea of a Granby 1 and 2 morphed into Granby 1.5 and we were told to be ready to join the 'proper' armoured engineers (23 was a 'close support concept' regiment, so despite fielding Chieftain AVRE and AVLB, we were never officially "Armoured Engineers") out in the desert. 32 were with 7 Brigade, we went out with 4 Brigade.
Thankfully I avoided being sent on the ships, with the vehicles. Those boys had a nightmare, trying to get the last few vehicles ready while at sea. But in the end, despite the fact that we'd been left sitting in Osnabruck with a bunch of vehicles that could barely be driven into REME's workshops under their own power, we managed to deploy a full Armoured Engineer troop in support of the 3RRF Battle Group, and keep it (mostly) serviceable for the duration.
The trouble is, the lessons are never learned, often because local commanders won't admit how stretched they really are, and how perilously close we are to failing sometimes. So the budgets are cut, and locally the forces are properly strapped, but back at HQ the senior commanders seem to live in a strange world where their troops could be ready at a moments notice. Back in the real world, vehicle crews break their backs time and again, and always pull enough out of the bag to convince formation HQs that their dream is real. "We are the architects of our own downfall" - by making things happen against the odds, deploying despite budget cuts, we at the sharp end make the rod for our own back.
The unofficial motto of the British Army...
"We the willing, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much, with so little, for so long, we are now qualified to do anything, with nothing."
It's a quote we knew well. I just didn't know at the time that it was originally attributed to Mother Teresa.
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