So what is in the Memorandum of Understanding old Virus Drayson signed with the Pentagon and Lockheed-Martin? As far as I know, he says it guarantees that no USAF personnel would be necessary in the chain of command. This says very little in and of itself. No US personnel are necessary in the chain of…
Read More Operational sovereigntyWhilst we’re on the subject of dubious Anglo-American diplomacy, it looks like nothing at all has been done about the F-35 intellectual property question. The HOC Defence committee says, essentially, that the supposed agreement on this is worthless and urgent steps should be taken to prepare a plan B. There is still no word on…
Read More Here we go againSo Mike Turner, CEO of BAE SYSTEMS, and friends are moaning about being investigated by the Serious Fraud Office over the Al-Yamamah kickbacks. They are claiming that thousands of jobs are at stake if the Saudis pull out of their order for Eurofighters, and therefore the government ought to quietly call off the SFO and…
Read More Don’t throw me into that…Chatter builds around the suggestion that security control of Basra might be handed over in early 2007. We’ve had quite a lot of this stuff before, tales that significant reductions in force might occur in six months’ time (one Friedman) and more recently announcements that such-and-such a province has been “handed over”. What we haven’t…
Read More Just one more FriedmanDavid Axe is out with the Queen’s Royal Hussars group again, and he is still in the grip of raging Brit Romanticisation Disorder. Please, enough with the Lawrence of Arabia stuff. Or, well, get a room, or a secluded tent at least. More seriously, he’s impressed by the tactics and the determination to keep the…
Read More BRD outbreak rages!The chatter is building up that a serious change in policy in Iraq is afoot. Supposedly, there is talk of an ultimatum to the Iraqi government to do various defined things or face undefined sanctions (this is an old John Paul Vann idea from South Vietnam), but there are also reasons to imagine that the…
Read More Talking to Iran, part 2This Martin Kettle op ed from the Grauniad regarding General Dannatt’s act of random reason and senseless honesty really annoys me. First up, this quote from Samuel “Clash of Civilisations” Huntington, and Kettle’s approving comments: In the end, although the generals might propose, it was the political leaders who disposed, even in the heat of…
Read More Dannatt, elite consensus and Samuel HuntingtonIn my head-on-the-block post regarding the unlikelihood of an attack on Iran, I mentioned that most of the Royal Navy is engaging in a large exercise off Sierra Leone, with the involvement of the Fleet Lead Commando Group, HMSs Ocean and Bulwark, and a large supporting cast. Now, many miles away indeed, the Royal Marines…
Read More Tony Blair: ChopperEvery blog and its cat has been discussing the tale that Richard Armitage supposedly threatened to bomb Pakistan back into the stone age, but no-one seems to have mentioned a very obvious fact about this: Pakistan has an estimated 20-60 nuclear warheads deliverable by various means. Now, you don’t go round threatening to bomb nuclear…
Read More All the Pakistan that’s fit to printJust a quick update on this one. The Nimrod MR-2 lost with its entire crew over Afghanistan was XV230, the first one to be delivered to the RAF in October, 1969. She was also the first to get the colour display version of the Thomson Searchwater 2000 radar, which is a detail. What is less…
Read More Nimrod Update