Gone Travelling...

Humphrey is currently travelling on business, and is unable to do any blogging updates. The next article will probably be posted around 28-30 March, jetlag permitting!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Is It Time To Close BRNC Dartmouth?

Image
The Royal Navy is on the verge of closing the prestigious naval training college at Dartmouth and merging training with ratings at HMS Raleigh. This would surely mean the end of the RN as we know it and is clearly an outrage. That basically sums up a recent tabloid story , which seemed surprisingly well informed, that suggested that the RN is considering merging training as part of the ongoing Defence Review. Once you get past the initial blood pressure raising ‘OUTRAGE’ that some clearly wanted to feel, its worth looking further at the idea and perhaps asking the question “surely this makes complete sense”? The MOD is one of the largest landowners in the UK, owning huge swathes of land from remote moorland training estate where live firing can be practised, to the Cape Wrath naval gunnery range off Northern Scotland – where only last week F35 aircraft from HMS PRINCE OF WALES dropped live bombs on Garvie island. It has enormous barrack sites, housing thousands of soldiers and dozens...
Read more

Rank Hypocrisy - The Military & 'Equivalent Rank'

Image
  There are a few easy ways to cause an outburst of “OUTRAGE” from service personnel and veterans on social media. Any announcement celebrating the appointment of someone who isn’t a white male into a senior role can upset people worried about ‘standards’. Suggest that the Army should have beards is another (apparently its about ‘standards’ and the risk of imminent NBC attack for a good gas mask seal – thank god all our troops carry their gas masks on them at all times to avoid this risk). The last one is to suggest that perhaps Civil Servants in different grades are the equivalent level of a member of the armed forces in their own rank structure. At this point its usually full-on pitchfork wielding mobs out in force to hunt down the heretics who’d suggest such a thing. UK MOD © Crown copyright 2023 The most recent people to benefit from the power of the mob was British Forces Broadcasting Service (BFBS), who committed the serious ‘crime’ of producing a chart that showed not only...
Read more

Sir Winston Churchill and the 1960s Ultra Security Breach

Image
  In 1960 the Joint Intelligence Committee found itself with an unexpected problem. Among the challenges of the Cold War and attempting to predict what the Soviet Union may attempt next, it was also identified that the content of some of Sir Winston Churchills papers, then under transfer to the   Archives   was potentially about to cause a major diplomatic incident with the USA. This led to urgent ‘action this day’ to resolve the matter. This is the previously untold story of the Churchill papers. Like many leaders, Churchill accrued a significant amount of files governing his personal life, as well as records of his time in public office. To this day they remain accessible via the ‘ Churchill Archives’ which stores thousands of papers linked to his time in public office including as Prime Minister during the 2 nd World War (known as the ‘Chartwell Papers’) and also the later period of his life after July 1945 (known as the ‘Churchill Papers’).   The Chartwell Pa...
Read more