On UK defence policy

Useful background points. Post-Brexit we need to decide on what our role in the world is (finally answering the point Dean Acheson made all those years ago), and then decide on priorities for defence. I'd suggest we need to return to the focus on the Royal Navy as our 'shield', followed by the RAF and Marines, with a smaller army (historically the only parts we kept in peacetime were the sovereigns guard unit plus those essential parts like the Royal Engineers, that would form a core that could be rapidly expanded), but a larger Milita/Home guard as a backup for domestic emergency support. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

On covid-19 death statistics

Image
 I became aware of this published data a few weeks ago via this  Unherd  column. Since then I have checked occasionally for updated figures, and last week started to analyse the data. First I downloaded every data set from this  archive  page, going back to May 2020 (where the archived data begins, so note that Month will also include all deaths earlier in the year). I was particularly interested in page 3, the deaths by age, and pre-existing conditions. I put each week's figures into a single spreadsheet and made monthly total tables. I then calculated the percentages and made some graphs. I have just updated my data with this week's figures, which I present below.  First, here is this weeks data ( source ) And here is my % calculations for the totals to date: And here is my monthly summary data. Top left is total deaths with or without a pre-existing condition. The bottom left is broken down into age, I have simplified it into under or over 60. To the right in orange are per
Read more

On what if scenarios: London goes boom!

 Scott Lowther ponders this after viewing a clip of London getting wipe out by an orbital kinetic weapon (AKA Project Thor ). I started to leave a comment but as it got longer and longer I decided to post here instead. So, let's go through some of his questions and try to make a realistic prediction: First, he posits ' would this utterly trash Britain?' he also states ' London is responsible for a whole lot of the British economy, but it’s sorta the “fake” economy of financial stuff, not growing stuff or making stuff.' Well, first off there is the issue of all the banks being vaporized, along with all their ICT systems. I'd hope they have backups but it could be that the entire payments system ceases to function. The result for the rest of the UK would be no one would be able to use a credit or debit card, withdraw cash or even access their accounts. Guess we'd be back to cash pretty sharpish.  In addition, all the insurance underwriters (Lloyds, etc) wou
Read more

On murder stats

Image
 After reading Longrider's post earlier I had a look at the ONS data he linked to and decided to present it visually.   From the data set mentioned above, here are the figures of interest: And here is it presented graphically: Finally, here is the data for last year as a pie chart: Consider this whenever you hear someone in the media going on about how women are 'unsafe in our streets'
Read more