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by makomk
1239 days ago
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That article seemed to me like a microcosm of what's wrong with UK journalism since Brexit. Every one of those issues is shared with Europe as a whole (or in the case of "the ability to defend its skies against the level of missile and drone strikes that Ukraine is enduring", basically every country on the planet as I understand it), but the article makes the UK look uniquely bad by using a completely different framing when talking about the UK's military vs other countries like France and Germany. For the UK they talk only about the current problems, whereas for other countries they focus only on the fact that those countries have annouced plans to improve their militaries whilst ignoring the current state of their militaries and the question of whether those plans are realistically going to work or actually happen. Germany's military in particular is in an awful state and they've kept on putting off the supposed funding increase it's meant to be getting. Like, the UK is arguably the main military power in Europe at this point and a major contributor to Ukraine not being outright annexed by Russia, but you wouldn't get that impression at all from the article. |
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Many of the force composition decisions for the UK circa 1980, particularly the use of light "aircraft carriers" that the Harrier operated from, were controversial. The war with Argentina went very well for the UK but if they'd had worse luck those decisions would be seen differently.
In the US in the 1980s I remember seeing television documentaries about how the M-1 Abrams tank and the Bradley Fighting Vehicle would not be effective at protecting our forces but then in the 1st Gulf War these turned out to be superb.