Sunday 5 September 2010

Leading From The Front?


General Sir Richard Dannat is busy flogging his memoirs, published by Bantam Press on September 16, £20, by slagging off the incompetent numpties Bliar and McBroon in various interviews and articles.

Whilst I have a degree of respect for the General, who made his views about inadequate military funding public whilst he was still in the hot seat, unlike many of his predecessors, he badly let us all down by not marching a squad of troops through Whitehall and shooting the entire fucking lot of the Bliar / Brown cabinet for the outrageous "dodgy dossier" bollocks.

Would have saved a lot of trouble and a lot of worthwhile lives.

The Penguin

5 comments:

Oldrightie said...

He is doing us all a favour by placing these incompetents and their legacies of failure in the history books. Insurrection remains an option too.

sixtypoundsaweekcleaner said...

Great post. I suppose the General's only human.

Anonymous said...

He should have nailed them when he had to and saved a few squaddies lives. Save it for the memoirs eh what. To busy taking it up the shiter like the rest of you English poofs. Tally ho pip pip, bottoms up.

Anonymous said...

@21:39,
You have obviously rejected the free education offered to us all, but why advertise it?

Garry said...

Dannatt is as much to blame as any other politician.(And once above a certain rank you do become a politician.)

There are various reasons why Iraq and Afghanistan haven't gone well and Dannatt is right up to his neck in some of them. A lot of resources and direction have been wasted on EU integration projects that Dannatt supported. Money, time and opportunities were lost in the decades that the FRES project and others have rumbled on. It was only when Dannatt 'saw the light' on the Mastiff type vehicles after a lot of pushing from the Government that the MoD allowed itself to buy them. Evn then it has been a very slow process for getting a capability that British engineers were at the forefront of developing and the Army *used* to have but sold the old vehicles off.(They were used in Bosnia for bomb disposal duties.)

There is plenty of blame to go around and a lot of responsibility being shirked. Both wars were badly planned and under-resourced. A number of people in our military have gone on record as having warned of this but the Government decided we should do only what the US wanted. The Government also restricted the numbers of troops out there for political reasons and initially restricted the fighting budget.

It *was* a shameless exercise in keeping up appearances and the Army couldn't cope. It should not have taken 9 years to get a change of camo uniforms for Afghanistan.(Previously they were mixing green and sandy colour clothes and sometimes dyeing them different shades.) It should have been apparent very early on that the Taleban's rifles are accurate at greater distances than the SA80 and it should not have been only now that steps are being taken to rectify that. Once the IED threat became substantial they should not have been conducting patrols along regular routes in lightly armoured vehicles.

The shortage of available choppers *is* a disgrace that the MoD is partly responsible for. They have *loads* of choppers and *loads* of them either can't fly in Afghanistan or aren't equipped for front line duties. A lot of the former comes down to again and again putting off replacing old helicopters like the Puma and Lynx. The MoD seem to suffer greatly from buyer's remorse and would rather struggle on until mishaps spur action and extra spending money rather than take rational decisions in rational time frames and allocate the budget they are handed in a cost effective manner.