If I had any hair, I'd be pulling it out

Well that's a lie, I do have some hair. It's just so short I can't pull it out. The reason why I might be tempted to is because over the weekend I put in - on and off - 12 hours into my post about what I'd like to see in SDSR 2015. After 52 paragraphs (I was numbering them to make it easier to track) I realised a couple of things;

1) I was only a third of the way through what I'd planned to write,

2) Even that would have been too much to digest in one article,

3) I'd quite like to not spend another 24 hours writing before it gets published,

So, switching to plan B, time to conjour up an abridged version which will hopefully appear here tomorrow.

Update 26/07/13

So, while the sun has been burning down on our pleasant isle the last few days... I've had a bloody cold. I've also spent the last three evenings burning an old shed, and despite the best efforts of multiple showers still smell like the inside of a medieval pub. Which also explains why I haven't been up to much on the interwebs. Plan is to sit down this weekend and commit to paper my thoughts on the next SDSR. 

The Next Steps

A suitably bulls**t bingo way of saying "here's what I've got planned for the near future".

And that would be three things, assuming that something incredibly interesting and new doesn't pop up to distract me. First, as part of Think Defence's call to arms to fellow bloggers to weigh in on their thoughts about what they'd like to see SDSR 2015 produce, I'm going to take a look at just that and present my current musings on the subject, what I'd like to see etc.

Secondly, I've been doing some work/research off and on for about the last year on the subject of the relative value of defence spending domestically vs overseas. One of the arguments in favour of buying domestically is that it protects British jobs and that some of the money spent is clawed back through taxes etc. I'm now ready to put forward a tentative article on that subject and some of the key arguments and assumptions that underpin in it.

Finally, after producing the first of my "Devil's advocate" series I got a request for a subject matter for the next one. The subject: the dissolution of the RAF. So as soon as I've collected some more material for that, including some ideas offered up by the person interested, I'll have a crack at that one. Having learnt something from that first post on Special Forces, I'm also going to add a conclusions section to the end, to better explain my own thinking on the subject in question.

If you want to suggest an idea for a Devil's Advocate post, or indeed any subject you'd like to see covered, you can either leave a comment in the box below or you can e-mail me at; defencewithac@live.co.uk

You can also follow me on Twitter; @defencewithac, although by my own admission I don't tweet much right now.

The Devil's Advocate: Special Forces

So this is to be the first of a new semi-regular series called "The Devil's Advocate". The purpose of these articles is to assume a position that I normally oppose and make an honest attempt to argue the case from the other side, both in the interests of learning and to give readers something different, especially as some readers will likely disagree with the positions that I normally support.

Today we're going to start with Special Forces. Or more precisely, the case against them as separate, dedicated units, especially in these times of squeezed budgets.

The coming days and weeks

So I'm going to lay out a bit of a sneak preview of what's coming, only in the sense of giving away a few titles. The post I'm currently working on is part of a new semi-regular series that I'm planning to do every now and again called "The Devil's Advocate", a name of such stunning originality that precisely nobody gasped in excitement. I did one of these for Think Defence once, which you can read here. 

The purpose, as the name suggests, is to take up the opposite side of the argument to the one I currently hold myself, and try to argue the case from that perspective. That may sound like a silly thing to do, but it's something I've found has worked quite well for me in the past in other areas. Taking up the gauntlet of the opposition compels you to look in detail at things from a different perspective and potentially see things you wouldn't otherwise see. If done honestly, it may even sway you to that argument, or it may indeed just expose flaws in it that you hadn't seen before. Either way it should make interesting reading, for those who like that sort of thing.

The first of these is going to be a post about Special Forces, and the idea that we no longer need dedicated units like the SAS and the SBS.

After that I'm going to go with Think Defence's summer of strategy idea, and put down my thoughts on what I'd like to see in the SDSR'15. Beyond that...? I have some phrases and words written down of stuff I'd like to have a shot at. The question is which ones? Time will tell.