Alternate Seat of TYR

Well, it’s not as if we weren’t warned; the Iraqi government had been threatening to move against Fadhila in Umm Qasr, and there had been increasing tension between the Iraqi government and the Sadr movement going back to Christmas. Not so long ago, there were demonstrations in Sadr City against Sadr; they thought the movement [...]

Continuing our Weekend of Defence Procurement, we’ve bashed the FRES vehicle program enough in the past. Costed at £14bn, meant to deliver a C-130 portable, RPG-tough, wheeled vehicle capable of carrying something equivalent to a tank main gun and providing reconnaissance, big gun, infantry, and utility variants, it’s so far failed to deliver anything at [...]

John Reid. Thank God we managed to avoid the nightmare; Prime Minister Reid. That really worried me in 2006-2007; Chris Lightfoot and I were planning to start a dedicated anti-Reid website at one point.
Anyway, Reid has been personally fingered by the coroner’s inquest into the death of RHA Captain James Philippson, as the Grauniad reports. [...]

I promised more serious content; here goes.
Right, everyone is vexed about the RUSI report (PDF download) that was recently published under the names of Gwyn Prins (a minor hero of this blog’s, for his The Heart of War: Power, Conflict, and Obligation in the 21st Century) and the Marquess of Salisbury (no less, who hasn’t [...]

It appears that the defence procurement stories we’ve been tracking are coming to a head. Recently, it emerged that the Astute SSN, Nimrod MRA4, and T-45 destroyer projects are going significantly overbudget again; the first two of these are, of course, the ones that were already £800 million over budget and several years later. The [...]

FT: the AirTanker bond issue has, not surprisingly, gone pear-shaped as the monoline insurers fall apart. The story includes some vital detail on precisely what the Defence Procurement PFI team and the consortium have been doing all this time; essentially, trying to finance the deal at an acceptable rate of interest in the middle of [...]

This just keeps getting worse: The Times reports that the Government has rejected 300 out of 700 Iraqi employees who applied for resettlement, mostly under the 12 month rule. That’s a rejection rate of just under half. Curiously, the Foreign Office’s own scheme has turned down 38 out of 180; this seems to suggest that [...]

This PPRuNE thread reminds me of something from the archives.
During a meeting we had not long ago, the increasing sophistication and cost of the Unpersonned Aircraft was raised - because by becoming too sophisticated and HVAA in nature, they were in some danger of becoming too valuable to risk in certain scenarios. Rather defeating their [...]

It hasn’t been in the papers much since the summer, but did you know that the Russian air force has been around the North Sea a hell of a lot lately? Between October and December, I’m aware of at least five visits to the UK or Norwegian ADIZ (Air Defence Identification Zone). Not just that, [...]

I’ve been reading old House of Commons Defence Committee reports - I was ill, forgive me.
This one, from February, is likely to spin up to relevance any time now. It covers the Army’s FRES (Future Rapid Effects System) project, which was intended to provide a new armoured vehicle that would be light and handy enough [...]