Britain’s depleted Air Force ‘no longer has capacity to carpet-bomb Germany’
Air Marshal Sir Roderick Stanley has launched a withering attack on the politicians who have consistently held the RAF at a capacity below the levels of May 1945.
According to Sir Stanley, the air force has been pared back so harshly that it no longer has the capacity to ‘carpet-bomb the towns and cities of Germany relentlessly, night after night.’
Britain’s armed forces are facing all sorts of financial hardships, including a costly re-enactment of a stalemate in Afghanistan. Stanley believes we must learn the lessons of history, and maintain a force capable of repeating any of the classic conflicts of the 20th Century at a moment’s notice.
‘If an Indian village was to protest about the brutality of the Empire, I suppose we could just about manage to machine-gun them from biplanes’ admitted Stanley. ‘But if we were ordered tomorrow to send 753 Lancasters to re-flatten Dresden, I have to say, I think we’d find it a struggle.’
Stanley’s comments came just days after Rear-Admiral Woodford claimed that the Navy no longer had the ability to defend the Falklands.
‘Let’s pretend that absolutely no lessons have been learned over the last thirty years and ignore our massive garrison, sprawling airbase and flotilla of ships defending the islands’ proposed Woodford. ‘Then we just need to assume Argentina doesn’t remember we have submarines’ he went on, ‘and imagine David Cameron isn’t aware of the islands’ oil or that defending them could win him an election. I think it becomes clear that we could, under those very specific circumstances, risk losing the Falklands.’
And while Faulkes-Stanley admits that a war with Germany is by no means certain either, he’s just as keen as the Navy to speak at length about how we might lose such a conflict.
‘Europe may have changed massively in the last 67 years, but that’s no reason not to amass thousands of Spitfires in the countryside of Kent’ he announced. ‘I’ve already starting blowing up the barrage balloons and ripping out the road signs. If we can learn one thing from the History Channel, it’s that repeats are inevitable.’
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Posted: Mar 23rd, 2012 by waylandsmithy
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