A Question of (Self?) Defence

As I'm you will have read, since the start of the month 15 British Soldiers have died in Southern Afghanistan, of which 8 within in 24 hours of each other. I normally avoid topics of the two major conflicts in the "War on Terror", but this I think is such a disgusting waste of human life I felt compelled to offer my opinion.

That is one of my issues with this conflict and the war for oil, politicians can only seem to see a body count as a number, and as you probably know I'm not one of tear jerking sob stories about the families left behind because they're not necessary; most normal human beings can understand the implications of a family losing a member without having Natasha Kaplinsky tell us how tragic it is. This government however refuse to admit that this latest operation is failing due to the simple reason that the task force in Helmand is not properly equipped in terms of both troops and hardware.

And yet, there are two projects that come under the title of Defence, although they don't both come out of the defence budget, which come to a combined total cost of over £50bn. Now I've written about the renewal of Trident, the first of these two projects (and the most expensive by a significant margin), before but I'll just go on to say that with Obama now in the White House this is the ideal time to not increase (as we are doing) but completely get rid of our stock of nuclear weapons if only because we simply cannot afford them. The second is probably less well known. It's known as CVF (no idea why) and is concerned with the replacement of the three Invincible Class aircraft carriers with two brand new, 65,000t Queen Elizabeth Class carriers. This CVF project is - according to figures released by something called the Defence Procurement Agency (which sounds horribly Cold War) - running up a bill of £2.9bn for the UK taxpayer.

- Just as an aside here I should mention that I can't find if CVF is coming out of the £42bn Defence budget, (I know most of Trident doesn't) but there doesn't seem to be anything about CVF not being within that budget so since it is a piece of military hardware I'd expect it to come out of there.

So you'd think if the government was spending that much on a Defence project then the Chiefs of Staff would be incredibly thankful? Actually no. They don't want a hideously expensive platform for air superiority because in the wars that we are involved in at the moment, Afghanistan in particular, that's not actually what our armed forces need. They need more support, helicopters in particular. For example, in the operation taking place in Helmand at the moment the army is having to rent helicopters from the US. Doesn't this beg the question of why not buy more support helicopters instead of a useless couple of boats that won't provide our Armed Forces with any more capability to fight the kind of counter insurgency battles that seem to be the only ones being fought all over the world.

Lord Ashdown, former leader of the Lib Dems, is saying basically all of these things but in a much more coherent and intelligent way. According to his assement;
"We went into Afghanistan with one-25th of the troops and a 50th of the aid per head of population that we put into Bosnia."

With that shocking level of support, how is Gordon Brown ever hoping that this final pillar of Blair's regime will ever slip inot the shadows.

This is a war that now we're involved in, has to be won, and can be. Yes we probably should have never gone into Afghanistan in the first place but we now have a chance to make right this wrong and fix a fuck-up. Just has Gordon the balls to admit it?