Defence and Ukraine

Apparently someone has just woken up and realized the Foreign Office and MOD have been asleep on the job.  We’ve been told how GCHQ has been ‘protecting us’ by spying on us.  Yet it turned out that self-same organization apparently didn’t notice a huge military build-up on the Russian border with Ukraine.

We have real cause for concern with such a lacklustre crew in charge – the hugely complacent Malcolm Rifkind apparently completely out of his depth overseeing intelligence and Philip Hammond as foreign secretary fresh from his triumphs of sacking around 20,000 trained troops (simultaneously losing a significant resource and creating a social problem) as defence minister and fighting emission controls on vans at the EU. At the same time, rather than being smart about our defences, the MOD seems sometimes to be driven by the revenue requirements of organizations as BAE systems, paying out huge sums for enormously expensive, likely unusable units such as carriers and planes that could be taken out by a single missile or torpedo.

At every stage I think most people had assumed that ‘smart things’ were being done behind the scenes, that Russian troops would be caught red-handed etc.  Instead we repeatedly see David Cameron bumbling around outflanking himself with ridiculous posturing designed to reveal his hand at the earliest opportunity.

Doesn’t anyone play chess any more?