Monthly Archives: February 2024

Britain, Gaza, History, Israel, Middle East, Palestine, United States

Israel has been drawn into a trap by Hamas

MIDDLE EAST

Intro: Following the events of October 7, Israel’s enraged response has plunged the Gaza Strip into a humanitarian disaster. The southern city of Rafah has suffered the brunt of the crisis with a five-fold population increase, vital resources lacking, and no sign of the violence abating. What can be done? Analogies are being drawn with Nazi Germany

AT the southern end of the Gaza strip, lies the city of Rafah. It might be the most densely populated place on Earth right now.

Five months ago, before the bloody atrocities committed by Hamas terrorists on October 7, and then Israel’s enraged response since, the city was already overflowing with people.

Since then, its population of around 280,000 has increased five-fold to almost 1.5 million, crammed into 23 square miles. Refugees are living ten to a room, if they are lucky enough to have shelter at all. Most are on the streets.

Vital resources including medication, fuel, food, and water, are in desperately short supply, and what little exists is ruthlessly controlled by the Hamas criminal network.

Rafah is also a terrorist stronghold. If Israel remains intent to wipe out the leaders of this fanatical Islamist regime, Israel Defence Forces (IDF) will have to attack the city.

The cost of civilian lives will be heavy. And the cost to Israel could be catastrophic, too, if Western governments withdraw their increasingly equivocal support. It really is not clear just how much support Western nations are willing to give Israel.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, is under intense pressure domestically to finish off Hamas. But, if he attacks Rafah, he will be falling into a trap.

Israel is facing a hate-filled enemy willing to use human shields. Hamas’s ringleaders are happy to see women and children slaughtered, because they think this will provoke an avalanche of Arab rage that will finally wipe Israel off the map. The Palestinian warlords only have one aim.

For those looking on in horror from around the world, events in Gaza have close and unsettling parallels to the destruction of Berlin or Dresden in Germany at the end of World War II: one Hitler’s capital, the other a military transport hub, with beautiful baroque architecture housing an incalculable number of refugees.

Stalin’s Red Army fought its way to Hitler’s bunker while the RAF razed much of Dresden to the ground in a series of firebomb raids, killing some 25,000 civilians. The Allies were deeply divided over this tactic, and historians still argue over its morality.

Nazism posed a dangerous global threat. By contrast, many perceive the war in Gaza as nasty but local. Israelis, however, living under the shadow of the Holocaust, recognise Hamas as a mortal threat, and one with strong regional support.

For most Israelis, then, debate of any kind is unnecessary. They know that if Hamas is not defeated and crushed, their country is doomed.

This is a war of survival. The October 7 massacre was so steeped in wickedness that Israelis are justified in believing the terrorists want to see every Jew perish in much the same way: raped, burned alive, dismembered. That’s the level of fear and evil that Israelis are faced with.

Prior to events in October, Netanyahu was widely seen by the electorate as a paranoid and corrupt politician clinging to power to avoid prison. But since the Hamas rampage, most in Israel now blame him for not being tough enough on Palestinian violence.

Hamas strategists assumed that their atrocities would draw Netanyahu into a trap. Israel would hit back hard, but its Western allies would forcibly shudder over civilian casualties. Our leaders held their nerve while the IDF invaded from the coast and the north of the Gaza strip, an area 25 miles long and as little as seven miles across at some points. Now, though, the West is losing its stomach for this campaign.

Many of the 29,000 killed so far have been non-combatants. In Gaza City to the north, every other building is reported to be destroyed. Bordered on one side by the Mediterranean, with all exit routes blocked and with residents unable to flee into neighbouring Israel, many had no choice but to trek south to Rafah.

Once in Rafah, they can migrate no further. Egypt has closed its narrow border, fearing a massive influx of Hamas fighters among displaced refugees, risking an Islamist insurrection in Egypt that would overthrow the regime of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

TWO

SO, what is to be done?

In this international crisis, each country is thinking first of its own priorities.

In Washington, President Biden’s team are all-too conscious of the forthcoming election in November.

The pro-Israel lobby in America is traditionally very powerful and the Jewish electorate tends to back the Democrats – but the growing number of Muslim-American voters could turn crucial swing states against the incumbent.

In Britain, the Labour Party is undergoing its most serious internal crisis since Keir Starmer took over, with the hard-Left demanding its MPs endorse an immediate “ceasefire” – a euphemism for Israeli surrender.

On Britain’s streets, and across the West, hundreds of thousands of marchers have been shouting inflammatory and often vile anti-Semitic slogans for months. A radical sub-culture is definitely spreading, with race hate at its core.

The disgraced former Labour candidate in the Rochdale parliamentary by-election peddled obscene conspiracy theories that Israel encouraged the Hamas massacre, and that all the Islamic world is under attack by Jews.

An audience in a London theatre hounded out a Jewish man who refused to cheer the Palestinian flag. They were whipped up by the comedian on stage, shouting “Get out” and “Free Palestinian” with added expletives. That is a scene redolent of Berlin in the 1930s.

Netanyahu’s ferocious counter-response to the provocation in October has led to a humanitarian disaster in Gaza, but that has played into his enemy’s hands. International courts are considering charges of “genocide” against the Israeli government and military. A Dutch court has already blocked the export of spare parts for the Israeli air force.

Pressure has begun to mount on Jerusalem to accept an “immediate pause in the fighting”, a polite phrase for a ceasefire. British Foreign Secretary, Lord Cameron, is adamant one can be reached. He is seen as a friend of Israel.

Netanyahu, however, shows no signs of responding to such appeals. The Israeli PM and his generals appear determined to carry on at all costs. It does beg the question: what would constitute an Israeli victory?

After all, even if the IDF does succeed in capturing or killing the leader of Hamas, Yahya Sinwar, and his fighters, this would then leave them with the problem of what to do with the 1.5 million embittered Palestinians left to contemplate a miserable future in the devastated Gaza.

Faced with a similar quandary in the closing months of World War II, the Allies opted for a strategy of winning hearts and minds – distributing medicines and restoring water supplies in western Germany even before Berlin finally surrendered, and then funded a massive restructuring programme via the Marshall Plan.

In much the same way, the world’s best hope now might be a deeply counterintuitive one. If Netanyahu reverses his blockade of aid and lets humanitarian relief flow into Gaza – food, water, medicine, and fuel – he might just persuade Palestinians that Hamas is their mortal enemy, not Israel.

True, a rump of Hamas insurgents might seize many of the aid lorries. Those who need this precious cargo most, the women and children, would likely get very little.

But it would be an important gesture for Israel to say: “We do not hate all Palestinians – only our hate-filled enemies who want to kill us.” Such slim hopes are the best we have – and it will take the most dexterous statesmanship, as well as military planning, to avert a host of new catastrophes.

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Britain, Defence, Government, Military, Politics, Society

Defence spends millions on woke policies

BRITAIN

Intro: The Ministry of Defence’s “diversity networks”, some 93 in total, are rightly coming under attack

COLONEL Tim Collins OBE, the former Commanding Officer of the 1st Battalion, Royal Irish Regiment, wrote publicly this week and rightly attacked the multitude of woke policies that have been implemented by the Ministry of Defence in Britain.

Of all the ceremonies that bind the British people to their past, he says, none is more emotive than Remembrance Sunday.

Powerful and enduring, it pays tribute to the millions of ordinary people who made the ultimate sacrifice.

Some on the Left of politics, who fail to understand that our Armed Forces protect us all, have long sought to do away with this annual and time-honoured communion with the nation’s fallen and the poppies that symbolise our attachment to it. For them, the ceremony is seen as a jingoistic sham.

Not surprisingly, and with thankful regard, our men and women in uniform still enjoy widespread support, so any such move by the Left has always been impossible to implement.

Now, however, there is a new attempt to undermine the central role of the military – and, shockingly, it has come from within our Armed Forces.

According to a British Army document that has come to light, entitled “Policy, Guidance and Instructions on Inclusive Behaviours”, soldiers have been ordered to avoid “religious elements” in Remembrance Day services. The document states, “Acts of Remembrance should be agnostic.” Unorthodox and bizarre to say the least.

Defence Secretary Grant Shapps, recently appointed to Defence, who is Jewish, is said to be “furious”. It has been reported that he is not offended one bit by Christian remembrance services and believes it’s at the core of our nation’s history and who we are.

Mr Shapps is right, of course, to appreciate the central importance of Remembrance Day, but it is by no means the only target the woke warriors have in their sights.

The current fad for “diversity” and “inclusion” is one of the most effective weapons in the hands of those who would seek to undermine our military.

This week, it emerged that defence spending on personnel devoted to these causes has doubled to nearly £2 million over the past five years.

These modern virtues – which may have their own merits in certain settings – have an emphasis which is actively inhibiting the Armed Forces from recruiting the very people who have traditionally filled its ranks: white males.

The phenomenon first came to light in 2022 when it was revealed that the RAF’s head of recruitment had quit in protest at what was deemed to be an “unlawful” order to put female and ethic minority candidates onto training courses ahead of white men.

The top brass evidently felt that it was more important to increase the percentage of Air Force personnel who were women or from non-white backgrounds than to select the candidates best suited to carry out their duties.

Currently, white male servicemen are increasingly being made to feel deeply unwelcome by being drilled in “unconscious bias” on courses which convey the unspoken message that they are inherently racist, sexist, and homophobic.

Sure, nobody wants any of our Armed Forces personnel to be sexists, racists, or bigots. But when national security is at stake, pandering to the woke brigade should not be the priority.

To his credit, Shapps has again bemoaned this practice – seen in all three services – as an attempted takeover by activists with “a political agenda”.

The Defence Secretary has held crisis talks with military chiefs to address the “extremist culture” that promotes diversity and inclusion at the expense of national security.

And, perversely, there is already evidence that this approach is having a damaging and entirely counterproductive effect on recruitment.

Despite the fact the Army has been cut from 100,000 soldiers in 2010 to a planned complement of 73,000 today, it is troubling that it has been unable to find enough recruits to meet even this diminished total.

Worse still, so many of our service personnel are not fit for duty because of injury or other issues that the overall muster at any one time is little more than 50 per cent of the desired figure. This means that we no longer have an Army capable of protecting the nation.

The same is also true of the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force. The £3 billion aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales has finally departed for a major NATO exercise this week, but only after an embarrassing last-minute delay. Its sister ship, HMS Queen Elizabeth, is still in port with a broken propeller shaft.

The UK is also decommissioning ships, even ones recently refurbished at great expense, because too many servicemen and women are leaving. Scandalous, yes. But more than that, it is dangerous.

If the primary role of the military is to provide an inclusive experience for people of different genders and religious persuasions, then it neglects its duty of care to the nation.

If it devotes more energy like this by ensuring soldiers, sailors, and airmen/women, feel more comfortable about expressing their sexuality than defending our shores, it is simply not fit for purpose.

The MoD’s 93 diversity networks, includes seven concerned with LGBT issues, 14 with race, and ten with gender. What will these avail us in the event of a deadly attack? Easy answer. Not a jot.

Tolerance is one of the great strengths of British society – and, of course, like Colonel Collins, many of us will be proud that women, gay people, and people from ethnic minorities, serve their country in uniform.

China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and other despotisms are all intolerant. But this great British value must not be used against us.

In an effort to increase ethnic minority representation in its officer corps, last March the British Army issued a “Race Action Plan”.

The ends may have been reasonable, but the means were not. The document advocated reducing the level of vetting for officers from Commonwealth countries.

Security-clearance vetting, it claimed, was “the primary barrier to non-UK personnel gaining a commission in the Army”. Military rigour has therefore been forced to give way.

Colonel Collins has first-hand experience of where that can lead. In March 2003, at the start of the Iraq invasion, he was with his men in Kuwait.

A series of explosions shook the air, as an Islamist renegade soldier in the U.S. 101st Airborne Division threw four hand grenades into tents where his comrades were sleeping, and then opened fire with a rifle. Two men were killed, and 14 others seriously injured.

Traitors within the ranks who evade security checks are an ever-present danger.

In the last few days in Mogadishu, Somalia, four soldiers from the United Arab Emirates, and one from Bahrain, were killed – murdered by the very recruits whom they were training to protect civilians from terrorist attacks.

How had members of the Al-Shabab terror group managed to infiltrate the camp? Because the level of security checks had been reduced – exactly what is being proposed for our own Armed Forces. Inclusivity should never trump commonsense.

Overwhelmingly, the young people who are eager to enlist and serve in His Majesty’s forces are white and male. Some will be from backgrounds where a life in the Forces is a family tradition.

Others have grown up in an education system that penalises them for being white, male, and working-class. They want the chance and opportunity of adventure, comradeship, and travel.

Britain needs these men. If we reject them because they fail to fit the military’s vision of inclusion and diversity, we will soon have no protection against our enemies.

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Britain, Defence, Government, Military, Politics

The British defence budget is recklessly squandered

BRITAIN

Intro: At over £50bn a year, Britain is the sixth biggest defence spender in the world. But something has gone terribly wrong. Our Armed Forces are badly equipped and humiliatingly hollowed out. Incompetence and reckless squandering at the Ministry of Defence is largely to blame

THIS year alone, Britain will spend more than £50 billion on its military. This makes us the sixth-largest defence spender on the planet, and the biggest in Europe. That’s still not enough in these increasingly dangerous and perilous times, with wars, hostile dictatorships, and security threats on all fronts. For once, there is now a welcome consensus on the mainstream Right and Left in British politics that we need to spend more.

Yet, even those most enthusiastic about bigger defence budgets, are troubled by a vexing and nagging question: where do the billions we currently spend on defence actually go?

On the face of it, we don’t seem to be getting much for the billions spent.

After all, despite being a big spender on defence, Britain somehow has a navy – which once laid claim to rule the waves – with fewer frigates and destroyers than its French, Japanese, or South Korean counterparts.

The British Army, which is now the smallest it’s been since Napoleonic times, is about to get smaller still. It is apparent that it would currently struggle to deploy one fully equipped armoured division.

The RAF, meanwhile, which thirty years ago could proudly boast of 31 fast-jet squadrons, can now muster only seven.

Underpinning our weakness is that all three services are crippled by serious shortages of skilled manpower.

The United States, our most important ally, regards Britain as a declining military power with limited resources that are spread too thin. That’s a view that is shared by many of our other NATO allies. They fear our forces are now so small that they would lack “critical mass” in any major military confrontation.

A recent report by the House of Commons defence select committee concluded that our military is “hollowed out”, and seriously “overstretched”. Not a healthy state of affairs for £50 billion a year.

So, what are we actually getting for that money? Quite clearly, the answer is not nearly enough.

Any competent auditor would quickly point to the waste, incompetence, mismanagement, stupidity, and reckless squandering of our money by those at the Ministry of Defence (MoD) responsible for the procurement and servicing of the military equipment and weapons systems our forces need to defend us and project British power.

On just about every major defence project, the MoD’s default operating stance is to deliver late (sometimes very late) and over budget (often way over budget).

There’s nothing new about this. This is how defence in Britain has been conducted for decades: Never on time, always above budget. Despite bromides that “lessons have been learned”, nothing ever seems to change. The Department is populated by congenitally slow learners – if they ever do indeed learn about anything.

The culprits never face any penalties for their staggering incompetence or extravagance. Nobody is ever demoted, disciplined, humiliated, much less fired. It’s just on to the next disaster or through the revolving door to a lucrative job in the private sector with a defence contractor who’s no doubt been complicit in some botched programme. The whole farrago is a public-private sector cosy club funded by the taxpayer.

TWO

THREE YEARS AGO, the National Audit Office reviewed 20 defence projects costing a combined total of £120billion. In nine of them, costs rose substantially between the moment the initial case was made for them and the decision was taken to proceed – in other words, before they even got off the ground.

Thirteen of them showed cumulative delays of 254 months between contract signing and entering service. The longest delay was for the A400M transport aircraft – 79 months late.

A litany of recent disasters stretches as far as the horizon and beyond. Where do we start?

Let’s begin with something very visible, the Royal Navy’s pride and joy, its two massive new aircraft carriers, HMS Queen Elizabeth II and HMS Prince of Wales. Pride and joy? They’ve become a national embarrassment.

Costing £3.5 billion each (excluding the expensive aircraft to be deployed on their decks), naturally they were delivered late and over budget. Both ships have been bedevilled by problems, mostly to do with their propulsion systems. The Prince of Wales has spent more time during its short-commissioned life in repair docks than it has on the high seas.

The Queen Elizabeth did make it out into the North Atlantic and the seas off Norway last autumn as part of a NATO Carrier Strike Group. Though it has capacity for 36 F-35B fighter jump jets, it was only able to carry eight, minimising the lethal force it was designed for. But it was better than the year before, when more often than not it went to sea with no fighter jets at all.

Going to sea, with or without jets, is currently not an option. The Queen Elizabeth was earmarked to lead the maritime arm of Steadfast Defender, one of NATO’s biggest ever exercises involving 40 allies. The aircraft carrier has been unable to leave Portsmouth because of propeller shaft issues, the same issues which took the Prince of Wales out of service 18 months ago.

The autumn of 2023 was not the Royal Navy’s finest hour. All five of its nuclear-powered Astute class attack submarines were docked awaiting essential repairs, as was its Trafalgar class submarine.

With all six out of action the Kremlin was basically given the freedom of the North Atlantic. Two new Astute class submarines are on their way. But not before 2026, late of course.

Sometimes matters descend into farce. Two Royal Navy minesweepers managed to bump into each other while in port in Bahrain, making them inoperable to continue doing the vital work of keeping the sea lanes in the Gulf, through which much of the world’s oil moves, open and safe.

You’ll see now why many of our allies sometimes despair.

Yet, perhaps most significant of all in terms of naval waste and inefficiency, was the recent experience of Vanguard, one of our four nuclear-armed submarines, the very core of our independent nuclear deterrent. It was taken out of service for a major refit. It took 89 months, longer than the 83 months it took to build her, at a cost of £500 million.

All four of our nuclear-armed submarines will eventually be replaced by a new class of Dreadnought. These are already subject to delay and huge cost overruns – up by an incredible 62 per cent in just one year. A third of the MoD’s £306 billion budget for its Equipment Plan over the next 10 years will go on the future nuclear deterrent. That starves our conventional forces of much needed investment.

It is probably right Britain remains a nuclear power, but it cannot do so at the cost of undermining our non-nuclear capabilities. We boast politically of spending over 2 per cent of GDP on defence, among the highest in NATO. But exclude nuclear spending and it equates to about 1.75 per cent.

When it comes to delays, cost overruns, and squandering of scarce resources, the British Army takes Olympic gold. The forlorn and sorry story of Ajax, its troubled armoured vehicle project, is emblematic of all that is wrong with British defence – and indicative of why it goes wrong.

Ajax was meant to be an off-the-shelf replacement for the ageing Warrior armoured vehicle, based on an existing Austrian-Spanish model, and to be in service by 2018.

But defence chiefs and the MoD added 1,200 additional requirements, including a unique 40mm gun placement, during its development. It has become a bespoke project.

As a result, after 12 years and more than £3 billion spent of a £5.5 billion project, led by the UK arm of General Dynamics, a US defence conglomerate, not a single Ajax is yet fit to be deployed. And none is likely to be ready for at least a couple of years yet.

True, some have been handed over for training. But the noise and vibration inside these vehicles was so bad that crews manning them suffered various ailments, including hearing impairment. None have been declared fit for the battlefield.

The grim saga and debacle of Ajax is revealed in all its gory detail in a devastating and damning 172-page investigation entitled “Lessons Learned”, which is optimistic since lessons are never learned when it comes to defence procurement.

THREE

With China and Russia currently developing hypersonic missiles which can travel at speeds of 6,500 mph, we need to work with our allies to develop the technology to stop them. But it hardly builds confidence in our ability to do so when we can’t even get an armoured vehicle right.

The lessons are transparently clear. It is the propensity of the British top brass, with the MoD’s complicity, to want everything gold-plated, customised precisely to their needs. That is the root of the problem.

In its constant fiddling with the specifications, or by insisting that because “the Americans have it, so must we”, costs are pushed up and delays are inevitable. All kit has to be high-end – and then they complain when we can’t afford enough of it.

Our friends in Poland are in the midst of a massive rearmament programme following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It is buying hundreds of tanks and fighter jets “off-the-shelf”, mainly from South Korea.

Poland will soon have the most formidable land forces in Europe, having acquired over a thousand new tanks and 600 artillery pieces. Britain is upgrading its Challenger tank but at such expense we can only afford 148 of them and they will be delivered from 2027. The numbers were cut because the cost rose by 60 per cent. A familiar story of British defence procurement.

In similar fashion, Poland will soon have 1,000 new fighter jets. Britain have ordered only 48 F-35Bs. They are hugely sophisticated, state-of-the-art jets. But they are also very expensive and 48 isn’t even enough to give our two aircraft carriers a full complement of fighters.

More will no doubt be ordered, slowly, in the years ahead. But it is these sort of measly numbers which make US generals wonder if, even as a small military, we are any longer a top fighting force.

For the foreseeable future, our carriers will depend on F-35s provided by the US Marine Corps.

In the past two decades there have been five attempts to reform defence procurement. On each attempt, it has been nothing more than a rearranging of the deck chairs, and none made a demonstratable difference. Radical action is needed.

FOUR

THE largely useless Defence Equipment and Support Unit within the MoD should be scrapped and replaced with a new powerful Procurement Agency, one which operates at arms’ length from the MoD (which should lose power over procurement) and run by people – professional project managers – whose careers, positions, and level of remuneration, would depend entirely on overseeing projects that are delivered on time and on budget.

There really isn’t any time to waste. In 2021, the UK Government decided to reduce some of our military capabilities, including the early retirement of Typhoon fighter jets (so they could be cannibalised for spare parts), phasing out the C-130 heavy lift aircraft, and inexplicably cutting the number of new early warning aircraft from five to three – even though they are an integral and vital part of any deployment in a war zone. That’s difficult to understand given Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the growing threats across the globe.

Britain needs to do better than this. It needs to rapidly increase defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP. But only if that is accompanied by the radical reform of our pitifully poor procurements processes.

Political parties need to have a clear plan about how to do this in these perilous and dangerous times. It is a serious matter.

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