Should old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind?

A good question, but one not entirely relevant to defence issues. Thus it means that yes, I've run out of time before fully forming the article that I was planning to post just ahead of the New Year. Which means it'll just come out in a day or two.

Till then, thanks everyone for making the start of this blog a good 'un. I hope 2013 will prove just as good for 'defence with a "C"' as 2012 was. Thanks for all the comments and e-mails, links to and twitter re-tweets.

On a quick note, if you see comments that were deleted by me, that's spam. As any Internet site with a comments function grows it naturally starts to attract fake comments with embedded links, which have to be removed on occasion. My personal goal is to never have to delete genuine comments, unless they're clearly just offensive or blatant trolling.

And on that note I'm off down the pub in a bit to spam the land lord with requests for "three pints of Carlsberg please mate".

Happy New Year everyone, thanks again for stopping by, and I'll see you in 2013!

Annnnnnd back

Well, for now. Till Tuesday brings a new year and a new hang over.

I hope you all had a good Christmas and got everything you wanted from Father Christmas (not Santa). Would you believe it, he brought me a copy of "Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket, (2001)" by the late Richard Holmes, CBE. It's almost like I ordered it off Amazon myself...

I've been diving into that book recently so my apology's for coming back to the blog "late", but a lot of my free time has been consumed on this wonderful book. It's the sort of work where just reading the introduction has you captivated already, and the rest of the book hasn't disappointed (so far).

If you've never read a book by Richard Holmes then shame on you! If you're here, reading this, then it means you have some interest in the military and likely military history. Thus it is almost incumbent upon you to own a Richard Holmes book. I can highly recommend Redcoat, or if you want something a little more up to date then perhaps look at something like Dusty Warriors, which follows the fortunes of the Princess of Wales Royal Regiment in Iraq, 2004.

As for me, I'm hoping to sneak out one more complete article before the new year comes. As for next year? Who knows, but it looks like it's going to be another busy one.

Jinge Bells

Merry Christmas.

Hope you all have a good time and get everything that you wanted this Christmas. Enjoy the tree too.

General Sir Peter Wall - Evidence to the Defence Select Committee

So here we are, at last. 

This is basically a run down of some of the evidence that General Sir Peter Wall, Chief of the General Staff, gave to the House of Commons Defence Select Committee on December 5th, 2012, with regards to the Future Army 2020 concept. As always with these things it should be pointed out that quotes provided are taken from the uncorrected transcript of oral evidence, which means this is not the final, approved version, and that neither the witness nor the members have had an opportunity to correct the record where errors exist. 

Update 17/12/12

While I finish up my next post, I need a temporary distraction to keep people busy.

Afghan style.

Cue the members of 21 Regiment, Royal Engineers, who will be in Afghanistan over Christmas as part of the Herrick 17 deployment.

Update 14/12/12

I'm currently working on a post based around the evidence given to the House of Commons defence committee by General Sir Peter Wall, so that should be finished some time soon.

For now, I'll just share an interesting link with you from the BBC about a new foam that the Americans are working on for sealing internal injuries on the battlefield. Link here.

Robbing Sketchers to pay Autoglass

Today I want to meander off into a slightly odd region of defence procurement and talk about a chap called Frederic Bastiat, a 19th Century French political economist and classical liberal, who did much work on the subject of Opportunity Cost (The relative value of one course of action over other alternatives), which led to his 1850 essay "That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen", which included a section that has since become known as "the parable of the broken window".

Update 04/12/12

Blimey. Hello December!

I'm currently working on a post that should be done either later tonight or tomorrow. I think it's a goody.

But then I would say that. Stay tuned.