Thin Pinstriped Line

Humphrey is finally about to head off on his very late Summer Holidays, and as such will be away from all forms of blogging for roughly three weeks while he travels to some exotic and remote destinations with only a fully loaded Kindle for company!   The next update will probably be on the weekend of 10-11 November.            

    In a week dominated by defence matters, both business and personal, one story caught the authors eye as particularly thought provoking. It was announced that over £50 million of public funding will be provided to commemorate the 100 th anniversary of the start of the First World War in 2014. This high profile event will include commemoration, remembrance, and a chance for every school in the country to send students to the battlefields of the Western Front in order to see first-hand ‘Flanders Fields’.   Rarely do wars have such a dramatic impact on a national psyche, but the First world War continues to occupy a place in the heart of the British consciousness which will take generations to reduce. It is sobering to contemplate that across the whole of the UK, there were fewer than 50 ‘Thankful villages’ (locations where everyone who served came back alive). Even today, as a nation we have only just seen the last veterans of the conflict pass on, and there ...

The news this week has been dominated by the announcement that civil servants were allegedly responsible for the collapse of the deal to transfer operations on the West Coast Mainline from Virgin Trains to First Group. Reportedly the problems stemmed down to systemic errors by civil servants, some of whom have been suspended. This whole saga has focused attention on the civil service, and questions are being asked as to whether the system is able to generate civil servants of sufficient calibre to be able to handle immensely complex projects. Humphrey has followed the debate with interest for although he has no knowledge of the deal, nor the department in question, he does feel that this has focused a spotlight on the real challenges facing the civil service, and particularly the MOD, today. The key issue, in the authors mind at least, is that todays civil service seems heavily weighted in favour of developing generalist desk officers, and not deep specialists. In the MOD at l...

There was a brief flurry of announcements last week that the Royal Navy would be conducting a deployment into the Med with the Response Force Task Group (RFTG), to conduct exercises with a range of partner nations across the region (the official MOD press release can be found here - http://www.royalnavy.mod.uk/News-and-Events/Latest-News/2012/September/27/120921-Cougar-Preview ). This is a not insignificant deployment – sending some 3500 personnel into the Med represents roughly 10% of the Naval Services manpower total strength. At the same time, it is also being done while the RN continues to fill its other key deployments, such as the Atlantic Patrol Task, and operations in the Gulf. While this blog has never tried to put itself across as a ‘fanboy’ site, it is worth noting that there are very, very few navies in the world capable of sustaining on a permanent basis the number of operational deployments and training deployments that the RN does. The news of COUGAR 12 matters...