Thin Pinstriped Line

  Britain has too many senior military officers and we need to get rid of them for ‘reasons’. We don’t quite know what those reasons are or why we need to get rid of them but we need less apparently. This appears to be the consensus of editorial writers and armchair illuminati combined who feel that the fact that the British Armed Forces have just under 500 senior officers at 1* level and above is, apparently, a bad thing. There is, it seems, a school of thought in the UK that says that senior ranks are bad and that they are probably inept drunks who have no idea what is really going on. More Melchett than Mastermind, these old duffers are the reason everything is going to the dogs these days. The fact that the Armed Forces have been going to the dogs since, well, forever, is neither here nor there... The subject of numbers of officers in certain rank billets seems to be one of those subjects that triggers a great deal of existential angst by some. People seem genuinely affronte...

Official statistics indicate that the MOD Civil Service has grown in size over the last year, adding around 740 staff (roughly 1.2% of headcount) to reach a size of 60,640. According to breathless tabloid commentary, this ‘blob’ will ‘push pens’ in Whitehall at a time when the regular armed forces face cuts in their headcount. Is this true, have the Mandarins succeeded in their quest to make the MOD a civilised department free of those nasty armed forces ruffians, or is it perhaps a bit more complex than this. The size of the Civil Service is a perennial source of concern to some commentators. There seems to be some kind of bizarre equation in force which means that they see military headcount as a good thing, but civilian headcount as a negative force that detracts, rather than adds to the outputs of Defence. This is borne from a totally erroneous perspective that all Civil Servants push paper, they don’t do any work and they all exist in Whitehall where in their ivory towers they slo...

The British Government will supply Ukraine with Storm Shadow cruise missiles, significantly expanding the Ukrainian ability to defend themselves against the illegal and unprovoked Russian invasion. This is a significant step up in the military support offered to the Ukrainian armed forces and is significant for several factors. While it will not, in isolation, lead to the imminent defeat of the tyrannical Putin regime, it will play a key part in helping secure the victory of good over evil. The Storm Shadow is one of the most capable missiles held in the British inventory. Intended to provide a long-range penetration capability to hit fixed targets, such as command bunkers, major installations, and potentially static warships alongside in harbour, the missile has a range of around 300 miles. Designed for air launch from UK jets including the Tornado and latterly the Typhoon, it is an extremely capable missile proven in combat over many years. What is notable is that Storm Shadow is a...

  The Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) is the pinnacle of British strategic intelligence assessment. This body sits to consider intelligence assessments produced by the Joint Intelligence Organisation (JIO), a body staffed by experts drawn from across Whitehall and who specialise in fusing together intelligence analysis from a diverse range of intelligence material. The main output, the so-called ‘JIC paper’ is a high level paper written for the Prime Minister and senior government members setting out the intelligence communities assessment of global situations. JIC papers are vital documents whose findings can, and do, shape the decisions made by Cabinet on national policy. To succeed they must be accurate, timely, and free from bias, presenting analysis on complex issues in a readable way. They use precise language and carefully drafted text to set out JIO’s (and by extension the wider intelligence community) understanding on an issue. As anyone involved in the crafting of su...