A second large aircraft carrier planned for the navy – the Prince of Wales – would make “little sense” unless enough money could be found to provide it with planes to fly from it and ships to protect it, a cross-party group of MPs warned on Tuesday.The verdict, at a time of intense financial pressure on Britain’s armed forces, is contained in a Commons defence committee report, entitled Rethinking Defence to Meet New Threats.
It is particularly significant as the Commons defence committee usually praises unequivocally even the most ambitious military project. Bringing the Prince of Wales into service “will involve very considerable additional costs, additional manpower, extra aircraft and the considerable amount of support and protection needed to make it viable”, say the MPs.
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I just love it when a rag like the Guardian prints these sort of things, they are obviously once more trying to denigrate the carrier programme, but all they are doing is to bring to the fore the pathetic underfunding of the UK's armed forces.
ReplyDeleteOf course we could afford to run the carriers and afford the aircraft, if only politics precluded this.
This is one of the rare times that defence is making headlines during a general election,and a damn good thing too.
Still the government keeps trotting out the same old mantra, of how we are still one of the largest spenders on defence, makes you wonder why other country's do so much better with smaller budgets
Still, as long as we ring fence £12bn in overseas aid, which is approx a third of the total defence budget,then all is well in the world.