Fitaloon at MicroShaft

An RAF Chinook helicopter in Afghanistan. Recent conflicts have left the armed forces unable to take on new tasks, say MPs.

According to the Defence Commitee:

Army at full stretch, navy over-committed and RAF pilots short of planes for training

That just about covers the full gamut. The Guardian goes onto report:

Britain’s forces need a period of “effective recuperation” after operating at a rate well above official planning assumptions, a report by the Commons defence committee says today. “The MoD was unable to tell us how long it would take before the armed forces return to satisfactory levels of readiness”, it says.

It describes how RAF pilots are unable to train because aircraft are tied up on operations, the navy has too many commitments and major exercises are having to be cancelled.

The report quotes Lieutenant General Sir Graeme Lamb, a senior commander, as saying that his fellow senior officers believed the army needed to expand from about 102,000 troops to 112,000 to meet demand.

This is the state our dithering and delaying Prime Minister has brought  our Armed Forces to by his years of mis-management, first as Chancellor and lately as the Prime Minister.

The shadow defence secretary, Liam Fox, said the report

“exposes the damage that has been done across the armed forces by Labour’s refusal to hold a proper review for over a decade.

It is clear that radical reform is needed to ensure that our armed forces are best configured to defend British interests and that our procurement programme gets our troops what they need, when they need it,”

This is something I have been saying for a while, and despite this Ainsworth wants to ring fence spending on items such as Trident and the new Aircraft Carriers BEFORE the SDR is carried out. This is political posturing rather than strategy as they attempt to bribe voters in marginal constituencies.

General Sir Richard Dannatt, the former head of the army, said war in Iraq and Afghanistan had taken its toll on troops and echoed Lamb’s call for a boost to land forces.

“There is quite a strong argument to say that our land forces are not large enough, particularly units that may have done two or three tours in Iraq and are now on a second or third tour in Afghanistan,” he told GMTV. “Inevitably and sadly we have taken a number of casualties and people are tired. So those units need to be stronger. If they were 10% or 15% stronger they would be more resilient to casualties and if people become ill or injured.”

It is time to get the SDR done and sort out proper long term funding for our forces. How we sort out the shorter term problem of  knackered soldiers and equipment is much harder without a substantial withdrawal from Afghanistan. It is time to get our supposed allies to help us in Afghanistan.

Iraq and Afghanistan wearing down the military, MPs warn | UK news | guardian.co.uk.