Anyone else heard the news on this?

Apparently 20,000 men are to go from the army :- 5 battalions will completely disappear and tank numbers etc will be hit.

What do brits think of this? The MOD is claiming it is 'sensible' but i think numbers are simply too low now.

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It is an offence for a Trooper to die in bed!

Stop dying at once and when you get up, get your bloody hair cut" - Wintle to Trooper Cedric Mays (Royal Dragoons), who recovered and lived to the age of 95.

Well you'll still have enough men to fight Malta and the Isle of Man, but that's about it

cut to the bone! never stop!



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"Las Malvinas fueron, son y serán Argentinas"

LOL. Even in such a weakened state, Britain could still keep Argentina from "robbing" the Falklands. Of course, a well manned Cub Scout Den could do that.

Nemo me impune lacesset,

---

"The chief aim of all government is to preserve the freedom of the citizen. His control over his person, his property, his movements, his business, his desires should be restrained only so far as the public welfare imperatively demands. The world is in more danger of being governed too much than too little. It is the teaching of all history that liberty can only be preserved in small areas. Local self-government is, therefore, indispensable to liberty. A centralized and distant bureaucracy is the worst of all tyranny. Taxation can justly be levied for no purpose other than to provide revenue for the support of the government. To tax one person, class or section to provide revenue for the benefit of another is none the less robbery because done under the form of law and called taxation." John W. Davis, Democratic Presidential Candidate, 1924. Davis was one of the greatest trial and appellate lawyers in US history. He also served as the US Ambassador to the UK.

If the Falklands are so damned close, and the British military so damned weak, it should be no problem for Argentina to take them back!

"If the Malvinas are so damned close, and the British military so damned weak, it should be no problem for Argentina to take them back!"

Actual Argentinian Army operational capacity...



we're not punk nor we´re bullying countries around the World as United States of the Kingdom... Contrary to criminal behavior... Malvinas are Argentine by historical rights not by force... I can put a gun in your head and grab your wallet... that would make the wallet legally mine? Criminals believe it would. Normal people believe that is criminal. Which side are you?


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"Las Malvinas fueron, son y serán Argentinas"

There is some irony but I was taken by Yag's photo of the flag draped British soldier's coffin. I couldn't find a dead Argentinian photo except the one of the current dictator's husband and he certainly doesn't count as a brave dead soldier. There must be a reason you don't see Argentinian soldiers carried in honor.

Nemo me impune lacesset,

---

"The chief aim of all government is to preserve the freedom of the citizen. His control over his person, his property, his movements, his business, his desires should be restrained only so far as the public welfare imperatively demands. The world is in more danger of being governed too much than too little. It is the teaching of all history that liberty can only be preserved in small areas. Local self-government is, therefore, indispensable to liberty. A centralized and distant bureaucracy is the worst of all tyranny. Taxation can justly be levied for no purpose other than to provide revenue for the support of the government. To tax one person, class or section to provide revenue for the benefit of another is none the less robbery because done under the form of law and called taxation." John W. Davis, Democratic Presidential Candidate, 1924. Davis was one of the greatest trial and appellate lawyers in US history. He also served as the US Ambassador to the UK.

we're not punk nor we´re bullying countries around the World as United States of the Kingdom...

Nor, apparently, defending your sovereignty against rogue Cub Scout Dens, either.

Contrary to criminal behavior...

LOL. Yeah, no one would ever link Argentina with criminal behavior say like an imperialist invasion and illegal occupation before rightful authority expelled these pirates.

Malvinas are Argentine by historical rights not by force...

Not only have you failed to prove any such claim, you tried and failed, miserably, the use of force.

I can put a gun in your head and grab your wallet... that would make the wallet legally mine?

No, that would be robbery.

Criminals believe it would.

I talk to criminals every day, hey, maybe that's why I find it so easy to talk to you, Yag. Most don't believe any such thing.

Normal people believe that is criminal.

I think everyone believes it is.

Which side are you?

I'm on the side that has the legal claim. Prove Argentina's legal right and I'll change my views completely.

Nemo me impune lacesset,

---

"The chief aim of all government is to preserve the freedom of the citizen. His control over his person, his property, his movements, his business, his desires should be restrained only so far as the public welfare imperatively demands. The world is in more danger of being governed too much than too little. It is the teaching of all history that liberty can only be preserved in small areas. Local self-government is, therefore, indispensable to liberty. A centralized and distant bureaucracy is the worst of all tyranny. Taxation can justly be levied for no purpose other than to provide revenue for the support of the government. To tax one person, class or section to provide revenue for the benefit of another is none the less robbery because done under the form of law and called taxation." John W. Davis, Democratic Presidential Candidate, 1924. Davis was one of the greatest trial and appellate lawyers in US history. He also served as the US Ambassador to the UK.

Anyway.. do people think 82k troops will leave us able to manage major deployments such as in the Iraq war?

Do you think extra TA recruitment will be able to compensate?

Finally.. do you think its camerons fault, or the blackhole from browns days?

______
It is an offence for a Trooper to die in bed!

Stop dying at once and when you get up, get your bloody hair cut" - Wintle to Trooper Cedric Mays (Royal Dragoons), who recovered and lived to the age of 95.

I think Brown/Bliar have to bear the lions share of the blame for the state we're in though there are a lot of other contributing factors.

The MOD has been wasteful in the extreme for far too long now and i like the idea of making them commercially accountable for procurement decisions.

Cameron hasn't helped though and i think theres no doubt the SDSR was badly mismanaged in at least some areas.

For me, 82k is too low yes and the current cuts are gonna come back to bite us some time down the road, unfortunately it will be probably be the lads which feel this worse. I know I'm moving away from purely military here but i can't for the life of me understand why we're handing out so much in benefits and foreign aid when the forces are taking such a hot. Easy answer for me would be to completely stop foreign aid and go after the long term benefit scroungers. They should be in one family per room accommodation and given food stamps and no cash what so ever. This would also leave more money for those with genuine health issues and who just need assistance in the short to medium term.

I think we pay too much for equipment, I think that's part mod incompetence, part BAE, and part the government constantly changing requirements?

It's very fustrating.. a colleagues son learnt of his redundancy while on active duty in Afghanistan!

I agree on cutting benefits, I would cap it so having 6 kids isn't the way to have an easy life.. and is scale benefits based on how long since you last worked.. so if your made redundant you get proper help, but if a lazy bum who has never worked you get there bare minimum

Foreign aid.. I think is rarely really aid.. and is actually political bribes to facilitate trade

______
It is an offence for a Trooper to die in bed!

Stop dying at once and when you get up, get your bloody hair cut" - Wintle to Trooper Cedric Mays (Royal Dragoons), who recovered and lived to the age of 95.

To say if the British Armed Forces are the right size you need to know what you want them to do. This was done very well for SDR, with the forces cut to match the expected missions from the review. This was great until the Government straight away committed us over the forecast tasking. If NI peace process hadn't worked as hoped, I'm not sure that the Army especially could have coped for the last 10 years.

If we say that we want to be able to do an enduring operation with an oversized Brigade along with a (very) minor second mission then we are about right. A larger one off operation could be done if there was no other taskings.

With the force size we're looking at the teeth/support ratio needs to be looked at. The tail for Afghan is shocking, and keeps on growing. HQ staff seems to be the only area that has increased in size.

I actually think that the size of operation that the Army can now support brings it into line with what the other services, who have already received their cuts can offer. No point having a massive Army if the other services can't support them. We won't always have an unopposed air and maritime environment.

It's incompetent civil servants, not politicians that mess things up. The politicians do as they're told.

"It's incompetent civil servants, not politicians that mess things up. The politicians do as they're told."

As much as I'd like to heap all the blame on the CS, and some of them seem to make it fairly easy, its usually very senior people in uniform that mess things up.

The top brass have somehow managed to get away without much critism from our performance in Iraq and Afghanistan, how is beyond me.

And its the guys on the ground who suffer - makes me angry tbh

______
It is an offence for a Trooper to die in bed!

Stop dying at once and when you get up, get your bloody hair cut" - Wintle to Trooper Cedric Mays (Royal Dragoons), who recovered and lived to the age of 95.

Defence cuts was mentioned on last nights question time. Uk and Isreal have similar sized defence dudgets, MOD has 23K civil servents with equipment procurement, Isreal has 450ish.

I always thought that Isreal had about 1/3 of the UK Defence budget?

Others factors to consider with that statement is the aid from the US comes with caveats, there will be little contracts competition and that National Service may take up some of the slack. I also imagine that due to their position in the world their processes are slightly more, focussed....

Thats not to say that our procurement is good, far from it, its awful, but most of it is self induced, and again, the blame falls as much on those in uniform as the CS. First stage should be getting the requirements and contracts right, then not changing them all the time. Which to my mind means thinning out the military presence and contracting proper Project Management teams to replace the rest. Will never happen though, as we love changing our minds everytime there is a change of personnel and/or policy.

In terms of the cuts, I actually think they've made a good stab at the future composition of the Army. Although if you are cutting 20% of the manning and are managing to keep all the cap badges (as advertised), then surely there is something wrong.

With the SCOTS changes and lack of loss for Guards and RIFLES there is more than the whiff of political interuption from the Government and Senior Army. This was the chance to have a proper pull through, but as it is PR has won the day. What a shock.

I thought that the Isreal defence budget was smaller than ours, maybe they include all the extras from the USA or it's worked out aa a percentage of GDP, don't realy care.

Other countries just seem to be able to manage their procurement budgets better than we do.

Typhoon screwed up (gun & cement), Type 45 numbers cut (should have built the 12 that were ordered and sold 6 on), Boxer, buying it/not buying it/ buy/cancelled, how much did that all cost.

Michael Portillo was on This Week after QT saying that we could bin Trident and the Carriers as they arn't needed, as former SOS he should know better that any extra saving from cancelled Trident (£25 bn) woudn't find it's way back into mod funds.

The cuts to the infantry was a sop to the SNP, all pre cuts talk was poor recruitment battalions to go, that would/should have been 2 of the Scots Battalions.

As with everything, only time will tell if the cuts are to far, if they are and the government did get them wrong, well they arn't the ones that will do the fighting and the dying are they.

You can also thank BAE systems and others of their ilk for gauging/overspend

1) Eurofighter - 63 million per airframe...that may be a bit of a whopper.

2) Astute Class Submarines - 57 months late and 53 per cent over-budget - £1.35 billion

3) Tornado sustainment - very lucrative on 30 year old frames. Must needs loads of spares.

4) Type 45 Destroyer - £1.1bn ship. 9% less than an Arleigh Burke. Jaw dropping.

5) Nimrod MRA4 Refit - £3.8bn, for nine airframes...count them...nine!...that were late....nowhere near completion...when it was cancelled....

6) F35B chosen under pressure from BAE. Too expensive to refit Cat's on the carries, but by God, will they make some money from maintenance on all that F35B complexity.



I found this quite apt

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasitism

Parasitism is a type of non mutual relationship between organisms of different species where one organism, the parasite, benefits at the expense of the other, the host.

As long as you limeys got a decent navy, the nuclear subs and of course, the nukes it hardly matters if you have a 82,000 strong army. Who is going to invade england anyway? Other than US nobody can invade england either, being an island has its perks.

Only the US has the resources to deploy 100,000 troops overseas at war at the moment. So don't worry too much about deployment. In fact UK is being wise in cutting down on the numbers. No harm there.

In nearly all the cases mentioned its the MOD that are at fault. I'm no fan of BAe, but when something is wrong with the kit they provide they are still within the contract so nothing can be done. As I've always said, get the contracts right and everything will follow. Just a pity that MOD are rubbish and writing and sticking to contracts.

If a company doesn't meet a contract they go public with the job losses that will result in cancellation. Look at MRA4, most of the PR was about job losses, not the capability.

In year costings are killing the MOD, delaying a project to meet annual costs but adding a massive wedge to the overall cost? All in an average day!

Agree with the poster above, the RN and RAF future sizes dictate the size of force that we can support. One with a temp stretch to two brigades is all the UK can provide now. No shame in that, and more than suitable for any indepenant action that we might need to do. The key is that the last 10 years have seen a strategic reduction in capability. Individual platforms are better, but in reduced numbers. We can't even do a TELIC again. We have to know our limits, and not promise to take responsibilities that we can't handle. Iraq and Afghanistan spring to mind......

No harm in cutting down numbers....thats until the PM decides that our forces just have to be apart of some conflict somewhere and an understrenght Navy supported by an understrenght Airforce have to Land and support am Army without enough boots on the ground, no real armour/artilary, not enough sappers/signalers or helicopters. Bit like Afghanistan at the start but with fewer resources to draw from.

Will be interesting to see how many employers will be happy to release on mass employees in the TA, assuming that the TA will exist in a few years time.

UK Army to Lose 17 Major Units in Austerity Push

Jul 06, 2012

Associated Press| by Cassandra Vinograd
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LONDON -- British Defense Secretary Philip Hammond said Thursday the country's army will lose 17 major units in a sweeping restructuring to handle the loss of 20,000 soldiers under the government's austerity drive.

The U.K.'s army is shrinking from 102,000 troops to 82,000 by the end of the decade -- part of efforts to meet steep cuts to public spending ordered by Prime Minister David Cameron. The military is handling an 8 percent cut to its annual 37 billion pound ($59 billion) defense budget, and has already announced plans to scrap a fleet of jets and an aircraft carrier.

Hammond said that with British troops withdrawing from Afghanistan at the end of 2014, the armed forces must rethink their structure after more than a decade of continual combat -- including the simultaneous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"After a decade of enduring operations, we need to transform the Army and build a balanced, capable and adaptable force ready to face the future," Hammond said.

He said four infantry battalions -- each of which typically includes between 500 and 600 troops -- will be scrapped under the plans, and a fifth relegated to performing ceremonial duties in Scotland.

Under the new plans, the army would be divided into three levels of readiness: rapid reaction forces to deploy quickly on operations as needed; adaptable forces at a lower level of readiness who would take over after reaction forces; and force troops, which are specialist support units such as intelligence and medical units.

With military families still reeling over the job cuts to get force numbers down to 82,000, anger boiled over Thursday at the loss of some historic battalions.

Stuart Parsons, mayor of the northern England town of Richmond, said the Conservative Party-led government should be embarrassed and "hang its head in shame" for deciding that his town's 2nd Battalion Yorkshire Regiment would lose its status, ending 300 years of military tradition.

Hammond said that the loss of full-time soldiers would be offset by increases in part-time reservists, whose numbers will double to 30,000. However, the ex-head of the Army, Gen. Richard Dannatt, warned that relying on part-time soldiers could be risky.

"We all recognize that placing more emphasis on the reserves is a good idea in theory, but it has got to be made to work," he told BBC radio. "Let's hope that the next decade is rather more peaceful than the last decade, but I wouldn't bet on it."

Jim Murphy, a lawmaker with the main opposition Labour Party, said the plans would leave Britain with its smallest army since the Boer Wars of the late 19th Century. He said the cuts come as NATO operations will be under increasing pressure, particularly as the United States shifts its military focus to the Asia-Pacific region.

The government has acknowledged a smaller army would no longer be able to deploy in the same numbers as during the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

"Jobs and military capability have been lost and tradition and history have been sacrificed," said Murphy, the Labour Party's defense spokesman. "This isn't just a smaller army. It's also a less powerful army in a less influential nation."

http://www.military.com/daily-news/2012/07/06/uk-army-to-lose-17-major-units-in-austerity-push.html?ESRC=eb.nl

Nemo me impune lacesset,

---

"The chief aim of all government is to preserve the freedom of the citizen. His control over his person, his property, his movements, his business, his desires should be restrained only so far as the public welfare imperatively demands. The world is in more danger of being governed too much than too little. It is the teaching of all history that liberty can only be preserved in small areas. Local self-government is, therefore, indispensable to liberty. A centralized and distant bureaucracy is the worst of all tyranny. Taxation can justly be levied for no purpose other than to provide revenue for the support of the government. To tax one person, class or section to provide revenue for the benefit of another is none the less robbery because done under the form of law and called taxation." John W. Davis, Democratic Presidential Candidate, 1924. Davis was one of the greatest trial and appellate lawyers in US history. He also served as the US Ambassador to the UK.

"It's very fustrating.. a colleagues son learnt of his redundancy while on active duty in Afghanistan! "
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That sort of thing makes me sick and when you look at some of the wastes highlighted above its just unacceptable.

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Speaking of the Eurofighters close-in combat prowess, Major Marc Gr�ne, CO of 742 (Zapata), the second squadron of the wing, described to assembled aviation journalists how, on a recent visit to France to demo the aircraft, he had won two out of two battles against the Dassault Rafale in mock within visual range dogfights. Both fights were a standard set-up and merge at 21,000ft and 30,000ft he recounted, adding that the higher the fight the better the Eurofighter liked it. He singled out the Eurofighters excess power as its trump card over the Rafale

I think it should be cut even more .. to 50K highly skilled and sophisticated army. Remember it is only Army. Total number of British Armed Forces is roughly 200K at the moment + ~30K reservist.

It should be cut to 120K or roughly 0.2% of the population or 2 soldiers for 1,000 people. During a war time, it should have a solid plan to increase it to 10M soldiers

During a war time, it should have a solid plan to increase it to 10M soldiers

You can manufacture 10 million rifles and infantry kit in no time, how are you going to train these 10 million civilians to stand against artillery pounding and machine gun fire?

If training, equipping, feeding and maintaining an army is this easy every country would have had 1 million plus troops.

We're not a land military anyway. We've always been a sea-borne nation.

Brits back to their rightful place after 2 centuries of robbing and stealing....

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^ ^ ^
Says the oriental who's government steals other countries high tech stuff and
copies it for its military.

You really are retarded, huh..? In a chinese way of course?

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Quote - "Brits back to their rightful place after 2 centuries of robbing and stealing...."

Great while it lasted though......