Fighting the Last War - November 2010

Former Royal Navy chief Lord West, who was a minister in Gordon Brown’s government, has - along with Sir Julian Oswald, Vice-Admiral Sir Jeremy Blackham, Vice-Admiral John Mcanally and Major General Julian Thompson - written to the Times to call for the Government to reverse its decision to decommission HMS Ark Royal and the UK's Harrier jets as set out in the Strategic Defence and Security Review saying that the decision could result in the UK losing the Falkland Islands.

The danger is that generals (and admirals) often refight the last war rather than concentrate on the realities of the next one. It is true that we would now be unable to launch a task force as we did when the Falkland Islands were invaded. The world has changed, however, and as a consequence we wouldn’t need to launch such a task force. First, Argentina is no longer the military power that it was in the nineteen eighties. Second, the Falklands are far safer now than they were when we only had a small company of Royal Marines stationed there. Now we have fast jets based on the islands and protection from our hunter killer submarines.