Hillary Clinton 'worried' by UK defence cuts

To be fair she was responding to a direct question posed to her by a BBC reporter. It wasn't an unsolicited statement. I have to say that compared to the defence cuts announced by the French and even more dramatically the Germans, perhaps she should have been directing her concerns elsewhere.

The cuts will not be as bad as some pundits are saying and Clinton will be reported as the person who saved the day, for She is Great and has a PR department bigger than the UK defence budget.

There will be cuts and a few programmes will be scaled back and the RAF will shrink, as will the RN and the armoured parts of the army. The BOAR (i.e. presence in Germany) will be reduced to nothing. Hopefully, the opportunity to reduce the numbers of very senior officers flying desks and doing work a qualified civvie can do at a tenth of the price!!

Regards

reply to post by Fang


Now I suspect that she is worried that the game the US and UK have been playing for a long time will come to an end.. like playing switcharoo with arming fuses on the Trident that make them hard target capable.. I mean, it wasn't like it was an upgrade or manipulated any treaties as long as both the US and UK keep their fingers crossed behind their backs

But the lack of congressional oversight the US military industrial complex has in the UK might have a few concerned as to what that would mean if the UK and US stopped having such a close relationship, or if the UK shifted to a more European bias.

The top-tier threats to British national security have been reorganized. British forces and the overall defence strategy will be restructured to meet the following change in priorities:

1. Terror attack
2. Cyber attack
3. Natural disaster (?)
4. Military conflict with foreign nations

According to a Defence source in the MOD, the following is very likely to happen:

The Army will be reorganized into 5 Brigades; down from 8, but the predicted loss of around 20,000 troops has now fallen to around 8000.

The Navy surface fleet will be cut to 15 or 16 craft but the Royal Navy will get both super-carriers, one most likely to be used exclusively by UKSF as a helicopter carrier.

The order of F-35 Lightning II JSF fighters has been cut to ~40.

It is predicted that the MOD will not face cuts as high as 20% due to an intevention by David Cameron. A huge amount of funding is likely to be directed towards the intelligence services, GCHQ in particular are expecting a massive expansion.

The changes largely mirror the two ex-SAS Officers' analysis discussed in this thread