Whilst my admiration for the armed services down at the tactical level knows no bounds it seems to me that the further up the chain of command you go the worse it gets. Today we have the appalling story of the RAF 'Brass' allowing Prince William to fly a Chinook helicopter on a "training mission" that included collecting his brother Harry from London and then setting off for a piss-up on the Isle of Wight. Quite apart from the £15k price tag for this jolly, there is the harsh fact that our troops in Helmand are desperately short of helicopters. Was there no RAF officer available with sufficient commonsense to immediately halt this silliness? We have already suffered utter humiliation in the Persian Gulf when the Royal Navy allowed several of its sailors and marines to be captured and mocked by the Iranians, and then permitted them to sell their stories to the newspapers. It is impossible to know precisely what is going on in the Ministry of Defence but my overwhelming impression is of a bunch of useless Generals promoted beyond their intellectual level. The manner in which they cling, silently, to their top jobs until the pension and the Lordship is in the bag stands in contrast to their trumpeted complaints once they are out of the service. The day one of them resigns on principle whilst in office, I will drop dead from shock! The almost unbelievable waste of money on just about every weapon system program ever initiated by the MoD would probably pay for five times the number of helicopters we now possess.
Of course, it is the job of the 'Frocks' to grip the 'Brass' but the likes of Alistair Darling couldn't grip a sponge. The current Minister of Defence is only part-time in the job and is a complete nonentity. The only 'gripping' that Brown went in for was simply to say no over and over again for ten years to any demand for more money. The dismal fact is that the 'Frocks' are such a bunch of second-raters they are incapable of running the mythical whelk-stall. The history of the Iraq imbroglio has yet to be written but if it began as tragedy it has now ended up as farce. The recent travesty in Basra which is part of the British sphere of influence and in which we were studiously ignored by both the Iraqis and the Americans with the result that 4,000 British soldiers sat at the airfield presumably polishing their boots, is almost worthy of pantomime if it wasn't so serious. Considerable portions of the American armed services, to say nothing of the political classes, now place us at the same level of trustworthiness as 'the cheese-eating surrender monkeys'!
God help us all! Two sets of useless incompetents running the most serious side of our affairs.
My father's experience in The War was that officers who had been in the Army before the war were routinely useless; good officers were usually reservists or had come straight from civvy street.
Posted by: dearieme | Wednesday, 16 April 2008 at 21:36
Yes, that matches everything I have read of WWII. Also, I remember Montgomery, after a fairly ruthless cull, decided that he could not sack any more of his Divisional or Corps commanders because there was nothing better available to take their places. 'Plus ca change' ... and all that jazz!
Posted by: David Duff | Thursday, 17 April 2008 at 11:35