Military

Britain and France have declared they are ready to deploy troops to Ukraine in the aftermath of a peace deal, a major new commitment that has been under discussion for months, although one which Russia is likely to block forcefully.

Boots on the ground, eh?

We don’t have enough troops to make a difference – either side here has been taking annual casualties larger than our entire armed forces. The only possible use of British troops here is as a tripwire. Which probably isn’t a good use of British troops.

You know, “If you’re overrun then we’ll draft a really stiff letter!”

Army officers have been warned by the deputy chief of the general staff that they must “disassociate” themselves with private members’ clubs that do not treat women equally.

Vry well done that man.

Lieutenant General David Eastman has ordered a review this week of any affiliation by a regiment with a private members’ club.

The review needed to ascertain whether the club’s rules and culture “align with the army’s values and the principles of equality and respect”, he said.

The first thing that happens in any proper shooting war is that the peacetime generals all get sacked. Because those who rise up the bureaucratic pole of the peacetime forces are not those able to actually lead men into fighting a war.

Jus’ one of them things…..

Britain is no longer a superpower and must deal with superpowers, as must all second-division states. But in one respect it is unique. Its soft power is probably equal to none, notably its cultural and teaching assets. It has educated more world leaders – apparently 50 – and takes in more Chinese students than any other country including the US. It also welcomes half a million Chinese tourists a year, many drawn by aspects of British popular culture. We do not measure soft power, but its influence cannot be negligible – and is certainly profitable.

It is therefore absurd that the British government is planning to splurge billions more on defending Britain from a purely notional third world war. At the same time it is slashing the budget of its overseas cultural institution, the British Council. The council is being forced to withdraw from 60 countries and sell its entire property portfolio.

As an artsy type Sir Simon doesn’t grasp that the arts don’t in fact matter. Not in hte sense he’s talking about here that is.

Sure, sure, Shakes and Milty and all are enriching for the soul. But they don’t stop J Foreigner stealin’ our stuff. Squaddies do do that stopping. So, the arts don’t matter in the sense of stopping J Foreigner etc.

But that’s the claim Sir S does try to make. Forget having even a regiment of foot left and send rainbow doldo butt monkey off to entertain instead.

Umm, No.

Despite his administration’s vow to launch “no more open-ended conflicts”, Trump has summoned an aircraft carrier to the Caribbean Sea and is already sending military helicopters provocatively near the Venezuelan coast. The Trump administration denies that its goal is regime change, but that certainly seems to be the purpose, as some officials privately concede. Ousting Venezuela’s autocratic leader, Nicolás Maduro, has long been a goal of Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state.

Getting rid of the bastard that has impoverished a nation seems like a good idea. No?

Pro-Palestinian campaigners have vowed to continue protesting, claiming the ceasefire agreement did not amount to a peace deal and branding “ceasefire” an “oppressor’s term”.

Several groups said the peace agreement brokered by President Trump last week was “not enough” and had done “little to change their demands”.

Who knew that it was really all about The Joos and not the kiddies, deaths nor starvations?

The secretary is going to outlaw beards in the military. “No more beardos!” he rejoiced. “We don’t have a military full of Nordic pagans.”

Beards are mostly already banned, but there are exceptions for religious reasons or temporary exemptions for medical conditions such as shaving rashes. It’s interesting to note that the ethnic group most susceptible to these skin conditions is not white men.

Dunno about anyone else but I do tend to think that the prevalence of shaving rashes can be left as just one of those things rahther than some signifier of a deeper racism. But maybe that’s just me.

Erm, who is doing the counting?

For you usually measure life expectancy through things like a census. And you need to have seen the entire generation pass through life before you can count the age at which the median death occured.

And how in buggery is anyone doing that in Gaza?

Now, you could be counting average age of death of those dying. Which isn’t life expectancy at all. Especially in a well conducted war where – at least you’d hope – the opposition is concentrating upon killing the young men carrying guns against them….

Adml Radakin’s intervention comes in the wake of a two-year-long Armed Forces recruitment ad campaign called “You Belong Here”, designed to show the military as a modern, inclusive employer. What has not evolved as fast, however, is physical selection criteria, which critics say is outdated and over-fussy.

In the past decade, for example, thousands of applicants have been blocked for conditions like hay fever, eczema and even acne. MoD guidelines from 2019 state that severe adolescent pimples can “affect the ability to wear military clothing or to operate military equipment”.

A seriously spotty back. Now carry an 80lb pack for 4 days. Doesn’t work, does it?

“There is a view that those joining the Armed Forces will be there till pension age, when in reality, most don’t serve anything like that long,” O’Neill says. “That drives a demand for physical perfection. There’s also an assumption that anyone in uniform must be able to pick up a weapon and fight – but there are probably some areas where you could change that.”

As B inND has said around here. The British army does so assume – everyone’s trained sa a soldier first. The American doesn’t – techs are techs, not soldiers. Either system works but you do need to pick one.

Macron: Trump air strikes against Iran ‘illegal’

Not enough is the answer to that question.

For there does come a point when the other question is “You and whose Army, Matey?”

These serious failings have caused the IAEA to express “grave concern”. Do they justify the current military actions? The IAEA has not determined that Iran has a nuclear weapon, or is capable of developing one, or even wishes to do so (although the evidence plainly points in that direction, it must be said). Nor is there evidence that Iran’s proxies are engaged in its nuclear programme. The board has noted the role of the Security Council, which has met to debate the issue but not acted.

Israel was not subjected to an armed attack from Iran, and on the basis of evidence publicly available it cannot be said that an attack backed by the possession of a possible nuclear weapon was “imminent”. It’s hard to see how attacks by proxies – however real – could be said to justify the nature, scale and direction of the targets in Iran. Regime change is not an objective that is permitted by international law. On the basis of the facts that are publicly available, it is difficult to see a legal basis for Israel’s far-reaching actions, or for the US or others to support Israel, or for Britain to authorise the use of the US military base at Diego Garcia to allow a B2 bomber based there to launch an attack on Iran’s Fordow nuclear site.

So you can only bomb the Mad Mullahs when they’re actually waving a completed atom bomb. Merely trying to build one, working to build one, isn’t enough.

This is to say that the right of self defence only starts when the bloke has already cut your arm off.

Bugger international law.

BTW, yes, they are. There is no reason – none at all – to be enriching up to 60% let alone beyond unless you want a bomb.

Iran could have built ‘15 nuclear bombs within days’, says Israel after strike

That’s not likely a recent development. They’ve had the bits and bobs available for some time now, no?

Israel to stop training female combat soldiers over ‘lack of fitness’

Not saying that every single one is a raging beauty but seem fairly fit to me.

Good, so now obvious joke is obvious:

Israel has stopped training female soldiers for combat over health and fitness concerns.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) ended a pilot programme for women to serve in “combat mobility units” after finding they were unlikely to meet the required standards after six months’ training.

The IDF said female trainees showed “very high” abilities in the “professional fields” but in combat and physical fitness they were “not expected to successfully complete the requirements for the profession”.

Lugging 80lbs around for 3 days just isn’t what the female physique was cut out for. Ho Hum.

And because Israel is actually fighting, continually, they care about such things rather more than our own elite does. Also Ho Hum.

Hamas has ordered Palestinians to stay away from vital aid delivered by a US-backed organisation, claiming it is part of an Israeli plot to gather intelligence.

The controversial Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which has ties to both the Israeli and US governments, has been approved by Israel to take over aid deliveries inside the Strip, despite strong opposition from the UN and most aid groups.

Witnesses reported that very few Palestinians were turning up at distribution centres, despite Gaza’s population being pushed towards famine following Israel’s three-month aid blockade.

The UN lot, UNWRA. are little more than a wing of Hamas these days. Hamas is not happy at not having a vice-like grip upon the population through control of the food supply. Therefore the instruction that everyone must starve in order to benefit Hamas by enabling it to maintain control.

That could be dubbed a tad cynmical by some but it’s closer to the truth than you might think.

Simon Mann, an Eton and Sandhurst-educated ex-SAS officer, who led a botched coup involving Margaret Thatcher’s son to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea, has died aged 72.

Mann led a group of 70 fellow mercenaries who were arrested in Zimbabwe in 2004 for attempting to topple Equatorial Guinea’s despotic president, Teodoro Obiang.

Mann and his friend Mark Thatcher admitted involvement in the attempted plot, which became known as the “wonga coup”. When the plot was revealed, Obiang threatened to eat Mann’s testicles and drag his naked body through the streets.

After all, absolutely every penny of that oil and gas money goes to Obiang and family, none at all to the people. Yes, yes, obviously, white boys and evil colonialism and all that but it still wouldn’t have been worse.

German car giants shake off their Nazi past to prepare for war
Berlin’s rearmament drive could see automotive assembly lines retooled to roll out tanks

Obviously there’s a similarity between a line for building cars and a line for building tanks. And a line for tanks does have to be in a building etc. But the technologies have diverged from 1941 when the Americans closed the car factories and reopened them a week later making tanks (etc). It’ll be very much more of a task now than it was then.

OK, so that’s that.

The RAF Centre of Aerospace Medicine in Henlow, Bedfordshire, has now conducted tests to determine if the tea cakes really do explode at altitude.

The chocolate-covered biscuits with a marshmallow filling were lifted to 8,000ft, climbing at 4,000ft per minute, inside an altitude chamber normally used for training new jet pilots.

The tea cakes were rapidly decompressed to 25,000ft in three seconds to see if they would explode.

In the test, while the marshmallow in the tea cakes did escape from the chocolate casing, they did not appear to explode and cause a risk to in-flight safety.

Impressive sciencey bit, no? Proper military boffins stuff.

However, they were added to the RAF’s no-fly list in the 1960s after some tea cakes were said to have exploded in a cockpit.

The story goes that during a training mission in 1965, a captain and student pilot forgot they had placed unwrapped tea cakes above their instrument panels.

When the captain pulled an emergency depressurising switch, the tea cakes blew up, causing pieces of chocolate and marshmallow to hit the windscreen, flight controls and the men’s uniforms.

Can’t have teacake on RAF uniforms now, can we?

An intern hired by GCHQ stole top secret data and took it home in a national security breach.

Hasaan Arshad, 25, was free to take his work mobile phone into a top secret area of GCHQ and connect it to a workstation inside the intelligence agency.

What?

Decades back I knew the little specialist computing company that made and installed the boxes for GXHQ. No ports – so that no one could download data. Do disk drives (that many decades back). No connections to the outside world at all from the computing system. An entirely and wholly closed world.

And he took a phone in and linked it?

It’s not just this individual who should be given a blank wall, a blindfold and a last cigarette.

The security breach is potentially embarrassing for GCHQ, based in Cheltenham. The intelligence agency runs a summer internship lasting 10 weeks that is only open to university students from ethnic minority backgrounds.

It is unclear whether Arshad was admitted as an intern through the diversity scheme.

Yes, they do require the languages, in proper argot, which means native speakers and also detailed knowledge of the place itself available only to those who grow up there. But still…..

British fighter jets will police the skies above Ukraine under proposals being discussed by Sir Keir Starmer’s coalition of the willing.

The Telegraph understands that key military planners discussed sending British Typhoons to Ukraine to provide air cover for troops when they met at Permanent Joint Headquarters on Thursday.

It comes as Emmanuel Macron explores alternatives to his plan with Sir Keir Starmer to put European boots on the ground to protect a future peace deal in Ukraine.

We really, really, don’t want to go to war.

Sigh.

Trans people are twice as likely as US adults overall to serve in the armed forces. But we’re regularly told our careers and lives aren’t worth saving

More true would be that people in the armed forces are twice as likely to become trans. After all, trans enlistment has only been legal since 2021 and now isn’t again.

Emmanuel Macron said the future of Europe and its security “cannot be decided in Moscow or in Washington” in a clear criticism of US-Russian talks over Ukraine.

After all, the last time we all went toe to toe it was the Russians and the Americans who won. Yes, yes, plucky little Britain fought alone and all that. But it was really that vast steamroller of the American economy wot won it. Even the Russian army moved in US trucks.

In his televised address to the nation on Wednesday night, the French president called for “long-term support to Ukraine”, which may include “sending European troops to Ukraine” in order to avoid a “fragile ceasefire”.

A peace agreement for Ukraine would be backed “perhaps, by the deployment of European forces”, Mr Macron said. “They won’t go to fight today, they won’t go to fight on the front line, but they would be there once a peace deal is signed, to guarantee it is fully respected.”

Oh. Right.