Quotulatiousness

October 26, 2009

Must be “British military” week – MoD backs down on Territorial Army cutbacks

Filed under: Britain, Military, Politics — Tags: — Nicholas @ 17:11

Sometimes, calling attention to a stupid move can cause the government to reconsider. As I mentioned several days back, the British Ministry of Defence was considering huge training cutbacks for the army’s reserve formation, the Territorial Army. The opposition in Parliament appear to have forced the government to at least a partial backdown:

Ministers have scaled back planned cuts to the Territorial Army and made concessions over their training after fierce criticism from the opposition.

The Ministry of Defence wanted to cut £20m from the TA budget and halt all training for six months except for those due to be sent to Afghanistan.

But it now says every unit will get one night’s training a month while the TA budget will not be cut by as much.

The Conservatives said the plans were a “shambles” and should be dropped.

The Lib Dems said the government had shown poor judgement and that the move could do long-term damage to the TA.

One night per month is still less than what is necessary, but at least it provides some continuity. Back in the mid-1970s, the Canadian government tried something similar with their reservists. Our officers and senior NCOs paraded without pay for months to ensure that the junior ranks were paid for training. It was a sacrifice on their part that shouldn’t have been necessary, but it did eventually force the government to re-instate something more like normal training activity.

An alternative spending plan for Britain’s MoD

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:16

Lewis Page looks at the Ministry of Defence and comes up with innovative ways to both save money and increase military capabilities:

Under the plan as laid out in the Times, the Ministry of Defence would still buy the two planned new carriers, to be dubbed HMS Queen Elizabeth and Prince of Wales. However the Prince of Wales would not be operated as a strike carrier with a force of jets; instead she would be a “commando carrier”, a floating forward-mounting airbase full of marines, helicopters and drones. This would mean no need to replace HMS Ocean, the navy’s current helicopters’n’marines ship — which would, according to the Thunderer, cost £600m in the 20-teens. (That seems pretty steep as Ocean herself only cost £150m in the mid ’90s).

This is the same story I linked to yesterday, although I said I suspected that the MoD had probably decided that their best plan was to scrap the carriers altogether. Part of the problem is that the Royal Navy can’t depend on the Royal Air Force to join with them in the larger purchase of aircraft:

It has long been known that the RAF doesn’t want to replace its own Harrier force — it would rather spend that money upgrading as many of its Eurofighter Typhoons as it can. The horrifyingly expensive Typhoon was designed as a pure air-to-air fighter, and at the moment it mostly still is — though a few RAF ones have been given an “austere” bombing capability.

The RAF would like to rebuild and re-equip as many of its largely irrelevant Typhoons as possible, giving them such things as trendy electronically-scanned radars and air-launched cruise missiles of various sorts. This would, perhaps, enable the Typhoon force to tackle tough enemy air-defence networks of the sort possessed by nations such as Iran and Russia.

There’s another over-priced item on the MoD budget that could be cut without seriously impacting military capabilities:

But there are many better ways to cut money from the MoD than crippling our new carrier force. To give just one example, our new fleet of refurbished De Havilland Comet subhunters (sorry, “Nimrod MRA4s”) will cost at least £700m a year to operate. If we put the whole Nimrod force on the scrapheap for which they are so long overdue right now, by the year 2019 we will have saved the £7bn needed to buy the missing eighty-odd JSFs for our second carrier — and the Prince of Wales isn’t actually going to be afloat much before then, so that’s not a problem.

[. . .]

There are many, many other such stories. We could buy cheap Sky Warrior auto-drones off the shelf rather than expensive Watchkeepers. We could equip the carriers properly and so buy cheaper F-35 C tailhook planes rather than pricey B-model jumpjets — this would save money straight off, and save a fortune on the vital carrier radar planes. Indeed, we could buy much cheaper Super Hornets to begin with, if we wanted to save a lot of cash. We could bin the expensive, feeble A400M transport and buy nice cheap C-17s instead. Rather than upgrading squadrons of Eurofighters into superbombers at a cost of billions we could buy a force of vastly more cost-effective turboprop strike planes to back our troops in Afghanistan. The list goes on.

I rather agree about the A400M . . . although Britain isn’t paying as much as South Africa for their planes.

Related: Strategy Page looks at the costs involved in refitting current USN aircraft carriers, and in designing and building the next generation of CVNs.

QotD: Neither full veritas nor much lux

Filed under: Media, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:37

Notwithstanding all this, The Cartoons That Shook the World is an informative read. But you won’t find the actual cartoons in it. There’s a cartoon mocking George W. Bush; there’s a death threat against the cartoonists. But Yale University Press refused to publish Klausen’s book as she submitted it — with the 12 Danish cartoons. Yale ordered her to remove the cartoons, citing unnamed “experts” who claimed the book “ran a serious risk of instigating violence.” Several American newspapers, like The Philadelphia Inquirer, published the cartoons without incident. Yale has had no actual threats, but it pre-emptively surrendered. If Klausen wanted to live up to Yale’s motto — “light and truth” — she would have done what the entire editorial staff of the New York Press did in 2006 when their publisher vetoed their reprinting of the cartoons: They resigned en masse.

Given Klausen’s burning derision for Fogh Rasmussen’s decision to stand for freedom, it’s no surprise she collapsed immediately herself, academic integrity be damned. Her surrender — and Yale’s — is not a detail but a central part of the story, for it is exactly the outcome desired by the Danish imams, the Saudi diplomats and their chorus of rioters.

Ezra Levant, “Review: The Cartoons that Shook the World, by Jytte Klausen Cartoon logic”, The Globe and Mail, 2009-10-24

A partial answer about increasing body weight

Filed under: Economics, Food, Health — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:20

Here are some useful images that help to explain why North Americans have been getting heavier over the last few decades:

Over the past few decades, portion sizes of everything from muffins to sandwiches have grown considerably. Unfortunately, America’s waistbands have reacted accordingly. In the 1970s, around 47 percent of Americans were overweight or obese; now 66 percent of us are. In addition, the number of just obese people has doubled, from 15 percent of our population to 30 percent.

While increased sizes haven’t been the sole contributor to our obesity epidemic, large quantities of cheap food have distorted our perceptions of what a typical meal is supposed to look like. These portion comparisons, adapted from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute’s (NHLBI) Portion Distortion Quiz, give a visual representation of what sizes used to be compared to what they are today.

Pizza_then_and_now
Bagels_then_and_now

H/T to John Scalzi for the link.

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