British Army Live Fire Exercise

himoney

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Jan 3, 2016
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In October 2015, the British Army staged a brigade level exercise as part of a Land Combat Power Visit on Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire. The exercise involved armored vehicles, air support, and ground troops.

 
The British armed forces are some of the world's most professional and are superbly trained and, man-for-man, are as good as anyone.

But they are shrinking to the point of being negligible in importance.

Some background.

In the early 1980s, the British Army had 20,000 troops on duty in Northern Ireland during the height of the "Troubles" there, another 20,000 on active duty in West Germany ("British Army of the Rhine"), and, in 1982, was able to send an expeditionary force of another 20,000 to the south Atlantic to retake the Falkland Islands from Argentina.

Today, the British army couldn't do any one of those missions, much less all three at the same time.

And the British (along with the French) are the backbone of non-US NATO military forces. Europe has, for the most part, demobilized over the last couple of decades. So much so that "NATO" missions in Serbia/Kosovo in 1999, in Afghanistan in the 2000s-2010s, against ISIS in Syria-Iraq currently (OK, not an official "NATO" mission) are typically 80-90% American.

Germany has gone from having 2,000 tanks to about 50.

Latvia and Estonia, NATO members since the late 1990s, are fearful of being brought back under Russian control but spend less of a percentage of their GDP on defense than does the US. Same with Lithuania and Poland. Hungary. Romania. Bulgaria.

After the Paris terror attacks the French president said his nation was "at war" with ISIS. Its been two months and, other than a relative handful of air strikes launched with much US support, the French don't appear to me to be a nation that is "at war".

Some of NATO's bigger spenders on defense, Turkey and Greece, armed themselves to fight EACH OTHER, not external, common foes.

"NATO" has become a paper tiger, something I'm certain Mr. Putin, the Taliban and ISIS are well familiar with, and I don't think anything will change that in the future.
 
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