News and Stuff

So I haven't been on twitter (@defencewithac) in a while, except to post links to articles, but having had the chance to sit down and go through it I saw some interesting links that I thought I'd share.

The Ukraine

The rapidly unfolding events in Crimea and the Ukraine have certainly given people lots to talk about, especially in the defence community. What's intriguing for me is how yet another government strategic review has essentially been proven redundant before the parliament that produced it has even finished.

You could argue this happened back in 2011 with Libya. Having removed aircraft carriers from the Royal Navy, it took just a few months for a situation to arise in which they would have been quite handy. And now we have the Ukraine, which casts a shadow over the governments decision to withdraw British forces from Germany and reduce the size of the armies armoured component.

Now am I suggesting that Britain should be gearing up to fight world war three on the North European plains? Erm, no. But what the incident in Ukraine has shown is that Russia is not afraid to exert its muscle when it comes to nations along its borders, or what it views effectively as former Russian territories. It's shown that the UK and NATO needs to maintain the ability to employ conventional deterrence just as much as a nuclear component. And I think it's shown that the British withdrawl from the continent, as if the UK has no interest in continental matters, is pre-mature.

The argument in favour of the Independent Air Force

The other day over at Think Defence a tired old issue was raised in one of the comments; the argument against independent air forces.

Now that's an argument that has been done to death multiple times, but it occurred to me in the moment that one of my original intentions for setting up this blog was to provide a repository for what were essentially long comments that could be quick referenced. And so today I'm going to do just that and write a sort of extended comment on independent air forces.