Thin Pinstriped Line

The former Chief of the Defence Staff, Baron Houghton of Richmond (more widely known to many as General Sir Nick Houghton) has courted controversy in the media today by suggesting that Defence is not properly funded, and was not properly funded in 2015. In comments on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme he said: “ We have slightly deluded the public of late that we have a defence programme that frankly we know is unaffordable… We are to an extent living a lie” ( LINK ) These comments caused a veritable storm with some praising the General for his intervention, while others saw it as an untimely and potentially hypocritical position to take. Humphreys strictly personal view is that interventions by retired very senior officers have become a depressingly familiar theme in recent years. There appears to be a well-worn trend of Service Chiefs staying relentlessly ‘on message’ at every opportunity while serving, telling the men & women who look up to them for leadership, that all...

The Sunday Times reported this weekend that at the RUSI Land Warfare Conference, it was proposed that British Army should try to mask the onset of defence cuts by instead seeking to use a variety of deception devices, such as inflatable tanks in order to deceive potential opponents about the strength and location of UK forces. (article is  HERE ) Despite protestations that the article was meant in a ‘light-hearted’ way, it was supported by a fairly barbed editorial that suggested that this would only work if the Russians or other potential foes didn’t read newspapers, and that this was a poor way to conceal the impact of defence cuts. In reality the proposal about using deception techniques is an excellent one, perhaps too quickly forgotten by the armed forces. Deception is a tool that is as old as warfare itself, intended to try and convince an opponent of your potential course of action, only to prove them dangerously wrong as you instead do something very different. Th...

What is a ‘Tier One Armed Forces and why do we need them’? A simple question, reportedly reasonably posed by a Prime Minister and Chancellor seeking to understand why the UK needs to spend nearly £40bn per year on defence. It is a fair question to ask of the MOD – why does the UK in 2018 need this ‘Tier One’ armed force capability (which in itself is a truly dreadful phrase) and what benefits does the taxpayer reap from it? The argument goes that the UK is, along with other permanent members of the UN Security Council one of the few nations able to deploy armed forces in numbers and capability globally at a time and place of their choosing. In reality Humphrey would argue that when you break the other four nations down, outside of the US (the only truly global superpower), Russia has at best a limited capability to deploy at distance away from its own borders, while China may be more capable, but remains focused on a predominantly naval global approach, not mirrored by wider land...

What price a PR opportunity? A question that has been asked a lot in the last 48hrs on social media over the suggestions that the UK is missing a trick by not inviting Donald Trump (POTUS) during his visit to the UK in July to go onboard HMS QUEEN ELIZABETH. The argument put forward is that the UK is missing an opportunity to influence the President, and showcase QEC and F35 in front of the world, sending a strong message of Anglo-American co-operation during the run in to the NATO summit. Such a move would apparently visually impress POTUS and reassure him of the UK’s continued commitment to defence spending and burden sharing. The problem with this idea is that it involves an enormous amount of disruption without any guarantee that it would actually happen. This short article is an attempt to capture the challenges and risks involved. Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright To start, the proponents of the plan seem to have assumed that QEC is available for ...

Another day, another poorly researched article by a journalist about the state of the UK’s armed forces. Todays article comes from the Sunday Times ( HERE) where their political editor (Tim Shipman) has published a short piece about the visit of President Trump to the UK, suggesting that he won’t visit HMS QUEEN ELIZABETH due to concerns that she’d have no planes onboard, and that it was damning compared to the state of the US armed forces. The problem with articles like this is that they rely more on emotion and clichés than basic fact. For example he states that ‘ Britain has taken delivery of just four of the state-of-the-art Lightning fighter’ and none of them has yet been deployed’. Unfortunately this is a mistake – at present the UK has taken delivery of at least 15 F35s ( INFO HERE ) the majority of which are in the US and working up as part of the complex process of introduction to service. Four aircraft from 617 Squadron arrived in the UK last week, and they will be jo...

Humphrey was lucky enough to spend the last weekend hiking in the Cairngorm mountains with friends, including the defence blogger known as ‘Fighting Sailor’ his Twitter profile here , one of the UK’s best naval authors and well worth a follow on social media. One of the highlights of the trip was a visit to the battlefield museum at Culloden, scene of the last major battlefield in the British Isles in 1746, and today an excellent museum run by the National Trust for Scotland. One of the surprising things about the museum was the manner in which many of the lessons and themes from the wars of the 1740s and in particular ‘45’ rebellion continue to be relevant to the modern Royal Navy and MOD. While Humphrey is in no way an expert on this period of history, he was struck by the similarities of operations nearly four centuries apart and wanted to capture his thoughts on this in a short article. A Global Navy – then & now It was intriguing to note that in the 1740s th...

‘Much vaunted ‘all weather capability aircraft grounded by the weather’ – a comment on the RAF F35 arrival in the UK? No, instead it was reports in the media last year after the arrival of the Israeli Air Forces first F35 aircraft into Israel was delayed due to bad weather in Italy ( LINK HERE ). The media is awash today with various stories claiming that the RAF has somehow been left embarrassed owing to the fact that due to poor weather and sea state, it chose not to send the first RAF F35 detachment over to the UK on Tue 5 June. The papers are full of comments by an unknown former service person who sounds like they have loathed the RAF for many years, suggesting that somehow the Royal Navy would have done it better for ‘reasons’. This in turn is apparently embarrassing for the RAF and bad for the UK, and there is ill informed comment on the internet about the failure of the RAF to do its job. What a bunch of utter codswallop. Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyr...