UK military problems & policies

[davidbfpo]

I missed PM David Cameron's response. Rather oddly amidst a wider article, ah well here it is!

Britain is still:

a very strong partner for the US

Economy of effort there!

From the article:

But that is a long way short of saying he will commit to maintaining defence spending at 2% of GDP

Link:http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2...fence-spending

Then I found a longer story, apparently given in Colchester as part of election campaign (the town is the ome of an army brigade) and apart from the laudatory list of projects is this:

And as for working with the Americans, I know because I spend time with President Obama and others, how much they appreciate the fact that Britain is a very strong and capable partner and able to fight with them, when it's in our national interest, anywhere in the world.

Now I expect a few people would be puzzled at this claim:

You can see that very specifically today in Iraq, where the second largest contributor in terms of air strikes and air patrols is Britain by a very large margin. You have to add up several other countries to get to the scale of what we are doing, second after the Americans.

The RAF have six Tornados in Cyprus, so old it has been widely reported only two are available at one time. As the House of Commons Defence Committee reported last week the UK's on the ground presence in Iraq is three people (I assume that excludes SOF) and for example the Australians have many more. See:http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...state-iraq-mps

This report refers to the UK undertaking:

6% of the air strikes against Isis.....British drones used in Iraq and of those flying over Syria – from October, when they were introduced, through to December. Over that period the UK flew 100 armed Reaper missions, launching 38 Hellfire missiles.

Manpower in Iraq (not Kurdistan):

in December, found at that time there were only three UK military personnel outside the Kurdish regions of Iraq compared with 400 Australians, 280 Italians and 300 Spanish.