PRONOUNS

Pronouns.

Very dangerous things.

They can now get you a visit from the cops, should you be unwise enough to employ any that someone on the Left might conceivably be ‘offended’ by.

And now we learn that, courtesy of our ‘Conservative’ government, shiny new pronouns have even been issued to the nation’s Armed Forces for use against our enemies. Wow! Take that, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping!

Not all that long ago, Britain’s Armed Forces were something with which every other state on earth had to reckon; the largest and most efficient navy on earth (and the pride of the entire nation) an army that had -on three separate occasions- helped to thwart the ‘European Union’ ambitions of France and Germany; and an airforce that produced dauntless heroes like Douglas Bader and Guy Gibson.

In actual fact ‘Royal’ navy is something of a misnomer. From the time of our first Hanoverian monarch, the navy was the armed service under the direct control of Parliament. Well before the end of the 18th century it was the single biggest industrial enterprise in the UK, as well as the largest single consumer  of British agricultural produce. Curiously enough, in the entire history of the Royal navy there are no ‘diverse’ names. Scandalously, it appears that this great, complicated, highly skilled, infinitely prestigious institution was somehow created, led, and run exclusively by the indigenous inhabitants of the UK.  Appalling, and doubtless a fact of which we should all be thoroughly ashamed.

In consequence, the Royal Navy’s current First Sea Lord, Admiral Tony Radakin, is a lawyer by trade. The successor to such hardened seadogs as Mountbatten, Jackie Fisher and Lord St Vincent, the valiant Admiral has now decided the best way that he can defend the seas around our island is to eliminate all ‘sexist’ Royal Naval terms, and replace them with appropriately Woke ‘gender-neutral’ substitutes. I’m quite sure this tactical master-stroke (am I still allowed to say ‘master-stroke’?) will strike terror into the hearts of Russian and Chinese sailors (once they’ve stopped laughing, that is).

But of course the navy still has a couple of aircraft carriers - those giant, leaky white elephants built primarily to safeguard Scottish jobs (and, with rather less success, Scottish votes), but with little thought for what we were actually going to put on them. So in place of British-designed strike aircraft we now have the US’s much-vaunted F35.(An aircraft, incidentally, that the US has now decided to waste no more money developing). Undaunted, the MOD has announced a commitment to having 24 operational F35 strike aircraft in service by 2023. That’s precisely twelve planes for each of those enormous floating runways…

2019: the Royal Navy terrifies China by 'sailing past' in an aircraft carrier without aircraft

  

It should not be forgotten that, historically, the main achievement of the Royal Navy was not in the fighting of set-piece battles, but in performing its centuries-old task of keeping the world’s sea lanes open for trade – a job no less important today than it has ever been, given the huge volume of international maritime trade. For this strategic purpose you need a reasonable number of Frigates and Destroyers.  Unfortunately the modern RN imagines its primary role to be acting as air support for our land forces, which is actually supposed to be the role of the RAF, not the RN.

That’s why we’ve ended up with a navy whose principal weapons consist of just two huge aircraft carriers (or as the Russians, Chinese and Iranians call them, ‘targets’) with the rest of the navy’s ships confined to the role of protecting them. Two carriers of 60,000 tons each which are, unfortunately, incapable of supporting aircraft from other friendly carrier nations such as the French and Americans. These carriers can't accommodate any jet-based early warning aircraft able to fly high and for long periods, relying instead on low-altitude helicopters; and they employ a particular variant of the F-35 which has limited duration over the target, and can't land with its weapons still on the aircraft. 

THE HMS QUEEN ELIZABETH Aircraft Carrier (Aircraft not included)

Given the eye-watering cost of an F35 aircraft (£92 million), and the time it takes to assemble one, you have to wonder if we could actually afford to use them in combat, in case we lost them to enemy action. From what I read the F35 has trouble identifying and responding to threats, and due to its limited weapons storage (it can only hold two missiles or bombs at a time) will require additional aerial support from some other source “if operations are contested by enemy fighter aircraft.”

We could instead have had US F-15’s (the USA will almost give them to you and make their money from the support contracts) but then the Queen Elizabeth carriers would have had to have been fitted with catapults.  The Americans offered to fit their new maglev catapults for a fixed price, and briefly the government ordered the necessary design changes to support this.  But the decision was overturned after extreme pressure from the builders of the vessels, who said that would cost an additional £2 billion.

Incidentally, as of 2021 the Royal Navy has a total of just thirty-four combat ships – twenty-three surface vessels and eleven submarines- but no fewer than forty-one Admirals to command them. But never fear – if the Russkies ever try to invade, presumably our lawyer First Sea Lord will serve them with an Injunction.

               [Readers looking for a career in the Navy can apply by clicking HERE]

 

REACH FOR THE SKY

Back in 1989, the final year of the Cold War, the Royal Air Force still had more than 850 fighters, interceptors, and fighter-bombers. Today, it possesses around a hundred front-line combat aircraft. There were just 26 RAF and Fleet Air Arm qualified fast-jet pilots as of the end of 2017 according to the MOD, though I’ve so far been unable to discover the numbers for 2021.

According to the much-quoted (Western-based) Institute of Strategic Studies, in 2016 the military budget of the Russian Federation – a nation of 144 million with a land frontier stretching from Poland to China - was $48.2 billion. That of the United Kingdom was $56.2 billion. Since then, the Russian budget has just crept above that of the UK. But in the recent Syrian conflict the airforce of the Russian Federation somehow managed to deploy over eighty strike aircraft to fight Islamic State, while the RAF deployed just six ageing Tornados, with bits falling off of them. Those vintage aircraft have now been replaced by the ‘Eurofighter’. France of course, realising early on what a dog the Eurofighter was turning out to be (two years ago only four of the Luftwaffe’s 128 Eurofighters were still airworthy), wanted nothing to do with it, and instead built its own attack aircraft, the much superior Dassault Rafale. 

 

The UK however, with stunning foresight, had already sold all our Harriers to the US Marines, who were delighted to snap up yet more useful combat aircraft. As a result neither the RAF or FAA have no  domestically-designed combat aircraft, either in service or at the design stage. And yet I can remember a time when the British aircraft industry, which produced such legendary aircraft as the Spitfire and the Lancaster, and pioneered jet propulsion amongst the Allied nations, was churning out newly-designed state-of-the-art aircraft for the services practically every year. Even little Sweden, with a population not much bigger than that of London, still designs and builds its own strike aircraft, the SAAB JS39 Gripen. Oh, well…

But never mind; the RAF’s current Chief of Staff, Sir Mike Wigston, is fully onboard with ‘Extinction Rebellion’, and tweeted thus on March 16th this year – ‘’Climate change threatens our way of life and  @RoyalAirForce is responding by changing what we do & how we do it. I want to be the first net-zero air force by 2040 #GreenFuelGreenSkies is critical to that’’. How reassuring to know that the successor to Air Marshals Trenchard and Dowding has his priorities in such ‘correct’ order.

One aspect of the RAF’s ‘Diversity’ agenda has not, however, worked out too well, despite the way its current TV recruiting adverts are angled. I read, a couple of years’ back, that the Red Arrows’ only female pilot resigned following the trauma she suffered when a fellow-pilot was killed in an ejector seat accident. A wise decision on her part one might say, as the lady probably wouldn’t have been much of an asset on those occasions when squadrons suffer combat losses on a daily basis.

GENERALITIES

At the head of the British Army – the entire personnel of which you could now fit into Wembley Stadium with 10,000 seats to spare-  we have Lt. General Mark Carleton-Smith.  Yet another Old Etonian, surprise surprise. Oddly, we are informed that he used to regularly wear as a 'trophy' a cowboy belt that formerly belonged to Saddam Hussein's barmy son Uday. Precisely why our general did so is difficult to guess, because Uday was disposed of in a shootout with the American 101st Airborne, not the British forces. Weird.  

In his first interview since being appointed Chief of the General Staff, Carleton-Smith claimed that Russia was “indisputably” a bigger threat than Islamic terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and IS, the BBC reported. Quite where he gets that idea, comparing the scorecards of casualties caused by the former as opposed to the latter on British and European soil in recent years, is rather difficult to say. I note that just last November General Smith managed to get himself lost on Salisbury Plain when, on a visit to ‘boost troop morale’, he leapt out of his helicopter in entirely the wrong location. Only after the chopper had disappeared, did Smith realise he had no idea where he was.

Another of our current military heroes, Lt Gen Richard Nugee, gallant head of the military’s ‘Climate Change and Sustainability Review’ (huh?) reveals ‘’The character of warfare is changing fast; so is the climate. Both issues are changing the way our military fight, live and train in unfamiliar ways. Linking these issues together, they both demand that we adapt to the new circumstances that we face and take transformative action now. Now firmly a Defence problem, climate change is a significant challenge.’’

But while we're busy designing appropriate maternity uniforms for female soldiers, appeasing male squaddies who self-identify as pregnant hermaphrodites, and the valiant General Nugee names his pet dog after Greta (I kid you not), the rest of the military world is rather more concerned with the way Azerbaijan-operated Turkish and Israeli autonomous ‘suicide’ drones totally destroyed the Armenian army in a matter of days last November. But then the rest of the military world, unlike ours, is not living in cloud cuckoo land.

GET CARTER

Finally we come to the overall head of the UK’s armed forces, Chief of the Defence Staff  General Sir Nick Carter. A veteran, by the look of him, of many a hard- fought battle with the knife and fork. Army rations must be considerably more 'nourishing' these days than during my dad's service. Did Carter get those four stars on his general's uniform from the Michelin guide, I wonder? 

The very Woke Globalist Carter lectures us that Covid-19 could well lead to more wars, as he seeks to extract more dosh from Johnson for such grim military necessities as an agreeable £60,000-a-year Kensington flat. This at a time when army barracks are deemed unfit to house even illegal immigrants.
Carter was, shall we say, not exactly immune to criticism when he commanded in Afghanistan; US commanders there have commented that Carter never seemed to visit anywhere in his command where there was any actual shooting going on.

General Carter (he/him/his)

So now all three Armed Services of this country have meekly adopted the entire ‘Woke’, ‘Inclusive’, ‘Diverse’, ‘Gender Neutral’, ‘Climate Crisis’ vocabulary that Johnson’s allegedly Conservative government insists on imposing upon all Public Servants. Adopted by everybody except, I note, the army’s Guards Division.

Historically, the Guards have always prided themselves on possessing rather different standards to the rest of the Army in terms of tradition, discipline (including self-discipline), and attitude towards their core job of fighting wars. I’m not entirely astonished, then, to learn that the Commanding Officers of  the Coldstream, Grenadier, Welsh, Irish, and Scots Guards have all greeted this latest set of PC instructions from the MOD’s Common Purpose - trained Civil Serpents with a collective ‘I don’t think so.’ But I wonder how long even the Guards will be able to withstand the evident determination of the UK’s 'leaders' to totally neuter us all? 

But then what sane person, nowadays, would risk joining the armed forces? You don’t just have to fear the enemy; nowadays you face the prospect of a Conservative UK government (having handed out grants of immunity from prosecution to our sworn, vicious enemies) sticking you in the dock forty years down the line for the crime of following a Conservative government’s orders when fighting those very same enemies.

And in future, you can be sure, for the crime of using the wrong pronouns.

 AUBREY