One of the more rare positive outcomes of the austerity cuts imposed by the coalition is the reduction in our defence budget.
We still spend tens of billions on maintaining our useless nuclear capability we will never use so we can pretend we are one of the big guys but our capability to start more dodgy wars has been diminished.
To anyone with a functioning brain cell that is a good thing so i'm guessing the former US defence secretary Robert Gates brain cell wasn't connecting properly because he has piped up to say that cuts in UK defence spending mean UK will no longer have full-spectrum capabilities.
"A smaller armed forces would mean the UK could no longer be a full-spectrum military partner to the US" he said.
You mean America won't let us tag along when they invade other oil-soaked countries and kill hundreds of thousands of their population and send drones in to blow up wedding parties?
How is there anything not to like in that sentence..erm, i mean damn. Guess we will just have to sit out the next wars then. Shame that.
3 comments:
You should remember that it wasn't the fault of our guns & tanks & battleships that we started looking for non-existent WMDs in Iraq; it was the fault of the dickheads ultimately in control of them.
We'll always need effective armed forces - the 20th century certainly taught us that if nothing else. But the size and scope of them are legitimate grounds for debate in any democracy.
I'll cast my vote for 'bigger than what Lucy wants, but not as big as what Nigel Farage wants' ;)
I will tweak the line i often quote at q when he turns all John Wayne doing gun control discussions that - it isn't having lots of guns, tanks & battleships that start wars but if i wanted to start a war i would use lots of guns, tanks and battleships.
In my thinking if we had less of them then we would be less equipped to help out when the USA wants to spread democracy around.
Sure, but we'd be less equipped to do anything else too. I think we should concentrate on restoring sane leadership, not on disarming ourselves because we can't be trusted with lethal weaponry.
Post a Comment