Widely trailed and reported today is a paper from the Royal United Services institute (RUSI) in their Future defence Review programme in which Malcolm Chalmers discusses capability cost trends and how that might impact the UK armed forces in the coming austerity years.
We will have a delve into this later but for now, here is the link to the article in question
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3 Comments
I don’t check the RUSI site very often so thanks for letting us know about this paper. I’ll give it a read so I’ll be better prepared to comment on anything that is posted discussing it.
Interesting read, on one hand it seems to be a harbinger of doom, stating that Defence Spending will need to fall by 5 to 15%. Yet confirms that the costs of developing new equipment is rising by 2-3%!! I like the idea of longer-range planning and the fact that Australia and Canada are already going down this route is encouraging.
What I fail to understand is, with Iraq and now Afghanistan, which are wars, not minor skirmishes, together with an urgent need to modernise our armed forces that have been starved of new kit for a very long time.; not to mention the potential threats from North Korea, Iran and the general Muslim/Al Qaeda terrorist threats how could anyone with an ounce of intelligence even dream of Defence cuts. We need a massive increase not cuts. Now we need to cut out the waste and the poor management but we either are prepared to defend ourselves or be prepared to learn a new language or adopt sharia law!!!
Slightly relevant to the RUSI paper, Just noticed on the BBC News Have Your Say website the number of people that comment that simply don’t seem to have a clue. It frankly makes me want to smash my head off of a wall for a while maybe it’ll dumb me down enough to understand why people say what they say. I think sadly defence cuts will happen and I doubt the next Government will change that as the cop-out is there to say “we can’t stop it the last government implemented the plan”.