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 Disciple of Fate wrote:

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Shocking. In this age of mass migration, Islamic extremist terrorism, the rise of the Russian Empire, and nationalist authoritarianism in Turkey, it's absolutely disgraceful that the UK is not cutting itself off from EU defence co-operation.

Of all the people on dakka, you'd be the last person I'd expect to buy into the myth of the 'Russian Empire.'

But they invaded Ukraine!

Yes, they did, but what about those 100,000 US Marines and British soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan?

They must have gotten lost en route to Artic warfare training in North Canada.

I must have missed the part where the US held a referendum confirming the people of Iraq and Afghanistan wanted to join the glorious United States

Alternative: what if they took a massive vacation for the group discount?

In what way does your argument address the point about collective security?

 Mozzyfuzzy wrote:
The Scottish nationalist is worried that we'll lose national identity if we end up merging into a European super state. Colour me exceedingly confused.

This reply is also for reds8n as well.

My political position has not changed one inch. Out of the UK and out of the EU has always been my vision for Indy Scotland.

But I'm fighting one battle at a time here, and the current battle is against the EU.

I suport indy Scotland, but that doesn't mean I don't care about the rest of the people on this island and Northern Ireland as well.

And I'll be damned if I see them getting humiliated by pen pushers in Brussels trying to shake them down for 50 billion!


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jouso wrote:

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:

Fake news. 100% fake news. Remainers have been telling me for years that the EU has NEVER been interested in EU defence cooperation or an EU army or anything like that.

So defence cooperation means an EU army?

How come the UK hasn't merged into the US army with NATO and all that?
Or worse, with the French: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_Joint_Expeditionary_Force
Or with Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, Norway and the Baltic countries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_Joint_Expeditionary_Force

The realities of modern warfare make cooperation a must. No country other than the USA can go at it alone.

It's the EU. Mission creep and expansion of powers is their middle name.

The EU, and this project in particular, reminds me of America in Vietnam.

We'll send advisors. Then it's advisors to advise the advisors.

We'll need a base for those advisors. Then guards to guard the base. Jets and helicopters for air support.

More guards to guard the airfields, and before you know it, 150,000 US troops are in Vietnam and Westmoreland has a fool proof plan to gain victory...

This is not unique to the EU, but its the nature of these things to take more. People in power want more power.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:

jouso wrote:

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:

Fake news. 100% fake news. Remainers have been telling me for years that the EU has NEVER been interested in EU defence cooperation or an EU army or anything like that.

So defence cooperation means an EU army?

How come the UK hasn't merged into the US army with NATO and all that?
Or worse, with the French: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_Joint_Expeditionary_Force
Or with Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, Norway and the Baltic countries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_Joint_Expeditionary_Force

The realities of modern warfare make cooperation a must. No country other than the USA can go at it alone.

Because NATO and none of those other entities are a Political Union with a shared Government and political structure, slowly coalescing into a super state. NATO is strictly a military alliance. Cooperating closely with military allies is one thing; cooperating closely and establishing integrated chains of command and task forces with countries that you are closely politically integrated with is quite another thing entirely, and arguably a precursor and building block to a future European Union Army.


Comparing NATO to the EU is disingenuous, they are not at all equivalent and you bloody well know it.

Well said

 Ketara wrote:

jouso wrote:

I have to disagree. Modern procurement and development of defense equipment makes it very difficult for small and medium-sized countries to keep a modern military.A few decades back any decent-sized country could afford to keep a domestic defence industry. Build and design their ships and combat aircraft almost to specification, with today's development and unit costs that's just not possible anymore.

With all due respect (and I mean that sincerely, I'm not being sarcastic, patronising, or offensive), unless you have some degree of specialism in the field of military procurement, you will find it difficult to convince me otherwise. My preferred area of historical study/research is military procurement within the pre-WW1 era; but I read very widely and generally outside of that time period on the subject. I have to, in order to contrast and apply different methodologies and perceptions of military-industrial interaction over technological development and military procurement.

If you do have that knowledge, then please do say, and we can have a damn interesting discussion/debate on the matter via PM! Otherwise, I'll leave this one there, as it'll spin off track exceedingly fast, and far OT from British politics.

Not too cheapen your expertise, which is well beyond mine, but military tech is vastly different from 100 years ago When tanks were introduced they were little more than tractors with plate armour added, and until the 50's were pretty much so simple you could change a tractor/shovel/whatever factory over to tank production and still produce something usable (like the T-34). Now they can cost upwards of £10m a piece and are full of very sophisticated (and export controlled) computerized equipment. You can't realistically build a modern tank equivalent without being one of the few companies with the patents and production facilities.

The same applies to aircraft, ships, etc. They've all become far too specialist to just crank them out when needed. I suspect the same applies to infantry stuff as well - an SA-80 is going to be a lot harder to make than a carbine, and the rest of the equipment is more advanced and specialised. Even jeeps/trucks are more complex.

If it was so easy for anyone to have a standing army, why are we sharing aircraft carriers with France? We're one of the biggest armies in the world, and we still aren't capable of independent military action.

I'm sure any country to cobble together a well organized militia on their own, but I doubt many would be able to hold of an invasion of anything more organized than pirates.

I take a pragmatic and IMO realistic approach in dealing with the world as it is.

err, no, you really do not.

For example when it comes to Brexit or Scottish independence all you do is bleat on endlessly about some mythical vision and plans for the future that we should have but blatantly do not have in any way shape or form, whilst making halcyon appeals to some nostalgic era that never really existed.

Every practical argument with regards to things like actual economics is simply waved aside with a shrug of the shoulders and yet another appeal to some romantic notion of Albion's messianic destiny.

You're more than happy to slate Farage, Bojo, Corbyn, Gove etc etc and agree they they are seemingly clueless or flailing around with no regards except for their own careers/financial worth and yet your one of the people who voted to put the countries future in their hands.

In none of your postings on here have you ever come across as being " pragmatic or realistic" when it comes to politics.

At all.

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:

But human nature is what it is. I know it, you know it, and NM certainly knew it what he wrote the Prince and was demonised for it.

If you believe you do, you're all wrong about it.

Herzlos wrote:

Not too cheapen your expertise, which is well beyond mine, but military tech is vastly different from 100 years ago

I'll try (and likely fail) to keep this short and sweet, to stop it spinning far off course.


Putting aside Kaldor's wafflings about the lack of technological spin off and corresponding economic benefits of more modern day munitions (which I disagree with), she establishes something of reasonable value in discussions over modern day military R&D; namely how the life of an armament in this day and age involves it becoming ever increasingly more complex and difficult to manufacture/maintain whilst providing an ever correspondingly smaller increase in performance , strategy and utility.

To completely make up an example for illustrative purposes, let's say that someone invents a bomb. It costs $10,000, has a yield of 1 kiloton, and is relatively simple. The nature of how our defence industries are constructed and economically stimulated to be constantly 'improving' upon munitions means however, that fifty years down the line, that bomb now has a yield of 20 kilotons, a delivery system twice as good, and a price tag of $5,000,000 ( to account for covering patents, staff development costs, new rare metals involved in the targeting system, enhanced maintenance and storage costs, etcetc).

The logical equation is that financial spending being at the same level, I now have one really great bomb, but it costs as much as two hundred and fifty of the old bombs. The result is that which you and Jouso have picked up on; namely that we can afford far fewer of these weapons. This pushes us towards defence co-operation, because when every single weapon costs many times over what the old one did. Yet from a military perspective, is the increased cost and complexity of this new munition (which can now only be manufactured by one specialist facility staffed by a hundred people with doctorates) better than the old one (which could be thrown together in any factory with machine tools)?

The answer is: yes and no. It's a better weapon, sure. More efficient. More deadly. But somebody who gets hit with this new weapon is just as dead as they were with the old one. And we could afford to drop two hundred and fifty of the old bombs for one of these new ones. From a tactical perspective, assuming the target is reasonably well known, I could have just dropped fifty of the old ones to make sure the target is dead, with a combined much higher explosive yield, and saved a crapton of cash.


Now, before you reach for your keyboards, the point of outlining the above isn't to say that we should go back to bashing each other with rocks because it's all the same at the end of the day. It's demonstrating the material consequences of the military procurement strategy currently prevalent in the West. Some of those upgrades on our hypothetical bomb were doubtless of great use and increased the utility vastly. But here's the key; most of them will have occurred around the first ten years of our bomb's life. After that, you pay increasingly staggering sums for increasingly minor improvements, which build up until the bomb is just so ridiculously expensive, yet not really achieving that much more than that bomb did at first.

The reason behind this is a doctrinal one. It goes back to conceptual military strategists like J.F.C. Fuller, the slow embedding of scientific method into the military from 1880's, and the cultural impact of two world wars, where technological innovation was proffered and afterwards hailed, as the key to success. The belief was that superior technology offers victory. It makes the difference between a victory and a loss. Our military institutions and private contractors were correspondingly stimulated with ever greater sums of money to keep up research, to keep developing existing weapons to get even that most marginal increase in effectiveness at any cost. The Cold War helped considerably with ensuring that the funding flowed untrammelled, and inertia/people who still believe those things have kept it going ever since. The American military frequently struggles with this dilemma, because military procurement has become such a politicised issue over there. The result being vast sums expended upon munitions with exceedingly limited utility. (trying really hard not to use the term military-industrial complex here, can you tell?)

Yet we have seen on multiple occasions how 'Better Tech' does not automatically translate into 'Victory'. Vietnam is the classic case in point where superior tech had nothing to do with 'winning' or 'losing'. The Falklands are a good example of where despite fighting a military considerably less advanced than their own, the British had to end up borrowing considerable quantities of munitions from the States, because they couldn't afford to stockpile the quantities needed for even that small scale conflict.


(I'm going to speed up the end of this post because I've already gone on waaaay too long).


It is clear that the current model is relatively unsustainable when it comes to fighting wars between two even remotely equivalent opponents. Neither would be able to sustain a conflict for any period of time with such high end munitions involved. The manufacturing logistics and expense make it impossible. Unless the war is settled in the space of a week (Blitzkrieg style), the inevitable result would be to fall back upon older, cheaper, more easily produced munitions (assuming that the manufacturing base is there to make it a possibility).

Likewise, a nation which explicitly and deliberately geared for war in this day and age could quite easily win a war against an opponent of the same or even larger stature as themselves with superior technology, so long as they were capable of sustaining a solid flow of cheaper and more easily manufactured weaponry. Within reason of course, I'm not talking about throwing Sopwith Camels at Harrier jump jets. But to carry on with this (arbitrarily picked and thoroughly unresearched) aircraft example, if I have a means of producing lots of Harrier equivalents at a rate of knots against my opponent's small handful of the new F-35s? The natural result in a sustained conflict is that the F-35's will break down, run out of their (very expensive hard to produce) munitions, get destroyed on the ground, and generally suffer the many vagaries of war. Whilst my Harriers might take vastly increased casualties, I can keep producing them at a rate of knots (where you need to source slowly internationally), conduct multiple missions (where your limited number of craft restrict your operating area at any one time), and afford to keep doing so (whereas your economy will break after losing that first handful).

You might argue that it's not an issue, because our F-35 owner can borrow aircraft from and utilise the manufacturing capabilities of the rest of NATO. Which is true. Much like Britain/America in the Falklands, allies make wars considerably easier from a procurement aspect. But the logical result is that you then become dependent on those allies, and unable to fight a war without that massive international support. You gut your own manufacturing base to become part of a whole, to specialise in producing a handful of munition components, and so on. That's largely what we've done here, and again, it's why the perception is that we can't fight a war on our own.

As outlined above however, the reason we've fallen into that position is as a direct result of a procurement strategy designed upon the assumptions that even minor technological increases are the most important factor in design, that we have many allies to produce goods for us, and that we are never going to have to fight a serious sustained conflict. If our government abandoned those motivations/assumptions tomorrow, they could quite easily begin to restructure affairs, to design simpler, cheaper, and more easily produced (if slightly less advanced) munitions. In such a way, we would become capable of going to war in an independent fashion. It's why places like Iran can sustain a domestic armaments industry under even the most trying of international sanctions.



And I'm going to stop now, because I never intended to write anything of this length.

The tl;dr of the above is that most nations in the West can't fight a proper war independently because we've very deliberately (for many reasons) structured our military procurement to be that way. But it's not a permanent thing, and could easily be reversed given five year's notice.

Thats what you call short and sweet?

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:
Thats what you call short and sweet?

Yikes, I know.

The problem with convoluted topics like this is that there's really no quick and simple way of explaining it in any detail. Apologies to anyone who doesn't care and came here for British politics!

I get what you're saying, and agree that volumes of lower tech stuff is usually better than less of the higher tech especially in the realms of diminishing returns, but even to make functional knock-offs, you still need a lot of the facilities that just aren't worthwhile.

You also have the risk that whatever you can make is functionally useless against it's younger relatives. Can a T34/76 penetrate the armour on a Chieftain? Can it even keep up with one?
Does a 70's MIG have a chance of engaging with a Eurofighter and actually take it down?

Should hypotheticlandia engage in a war, does it then have the ability to drop back a couple of decades worth of tech to churn out the cheaper stuff?

More importantly, could the UK, with it's non-existing steel and marginal heavy engineering industries?

I'm pretty sure any state could keep a functioning military, but would it on it's own be capable of any serious military action?

I actually think we're agreeing here, in a roundabout way. As do most of the states, hence the sharing of resources.

If Britain was so damn sensitive to legitimacy as that Quora article believed you wouldn't have made a referendum that was impossible to draw conclusions from and then drawn conclusions from it anyway. Or still be using first past the post, for that matter. Or running Brexit referendum campaigns with blatantly ridiculous messages. Or... etc etc ad nauseum.

The notion that Britain cares about legitimacy while the EU does not is borderline fetishism.

I'd argue that the UK's defining national trait is stubbornness or, more charitably, tenaciousness. Churchill was almost an incarnation of this, being brilliant when he got it right ("We shall never surrender!") and a downright disaster when he got it wrong (Gallipoli). 14 years ago experts told you that Iraq had no WMDs and that going in with troops was dangerous. You didn't listen to the French or Germans then, because you had stubbornly decided you were right and that's that. Take care that you don't get another Iraq -03 rather than a Dunkerque -40.

 Ketara wrote:

Likewise, a nation which explicitly and deliberately geared for war in this day and age could quite easily win a war against an opponent of the same or even larger stature as themselves with superior technology, so long as they were capable of sustaining a solid flow of cheaper and more easily manufactured weaponry. Within reason of course, I'm not talking about throwing Sopwith Camels at Harrier jump jets. But to carry on with this (arbitrarily picked and thoroughly unresearched) aircraft example, if I have a means of producing lots of Harrier equivalents at a rate of knots against my opponent's small handful of the new F-35s? The natural result in a sustained conflict is that the F-35's will break down, run out of their (very expensive hard to produce) munitions, get destroyed on the ground, and generally suffer the many vagaries of war. Whilst my Harriers might take vastly increased casualties, I can keep producing them at a rate of knots (where you need to source slowly internationally), conduct multiple missions (where your limited number of craft restrict your operating area at any one time), and afford to keep doing so (whereas your economy will break after losing that first handful).

You might argue that it's not an issue, because our F-35 owner can borrow aircraft from and utilise the manufacturing capabilities of the rest of NATO. Which is true. Much like Britain/America in the Falklands, allies make wars considerably easier from a procurement aspect. But the logical result is that you then become dependent on those allies, and unable to fight a war without that massive international support. You gut your own manufacturing base to become part of a whole, to specialise in producing a handful of munition components, and so on. That's largely what we've done here, and again, it's why the perception is that we can't fight a war on our own.

As outlined above however, the reason we've fallen into that position is as a direct result of a procurement strategy designed upon the assumptions that even minor technological increases are the most important factor in design, that we have many allies to produce goods for us, and that we are never going to have to fight a serious sustained conflict. If our government abandoned those motivations/assumptions tomorrow, they could quite easily begin to restructure affairs, to design simpler, cheaper, and more easily produced (if slightly less advanced) munitions. In such a way, we would become capable of going to war in an independent fashion.



And I'm going to stop now, because I never intended to write anything of this length.

The tl;dr of the above is that most nations in the West can't fight a proper war independently because we've very deliberately (for many reasons) structured our military procurement to be that way. But it's not a permanent thing, and could easily be reversed given five year's notice.

Not with 2% GDP of spending.

Your basically advocating Russia's approach to defence. Maintain and prop up independent defence capabilities no matter the cost.

Where is English Electric? Hawker? De Havilland? Fairey? Blackburn? Supermarine? Gloster?

We aren't in an age where a visionary could build a fighter plane in his shed and expect to receive an order for 200.

All that's left of the British aircraft industry is making bits and bobs (very important ones at that) leaving Rolls Royce as the only really global player left but even them have had to partner with turbomeca to make helicopter engines, with GE and PW to make civilian engines and so on.

When not even RR can profitably develop a new engine that should tell you everything about today's cost of development and manufacturing.

Things have gotten exponentially more expensive to develop leading to smaller unit productions runs, which in turn makes them even more expensive. It's a vicious circle with no likely end unless we go back to prop planes, coal boilers and machine guns with the odd dumb rocket.

Herzlos wrote:
I get what you're saying, and agree that volumes of lower tech stuff is usually better than less of the higher tech especially in the realms of diminishing returns, but even to make functional knock-offs, you still need a lot of the facilities that just aren't worthwhile.

You also have the risk that whatever you can make is functionally useless against it's younger relatives. Can a T34/76 penetrate the armour on a Chieftain? Can it even keep up with one?
Does a 70's MIG have a chance of engaging with a Eurofighter and actually take it down?

Should hypotheticlandia engage in a war, does it then have the ability to drop back a couple of decades worth of tech to churn out the cheaper stuff?

These are all excellent questions; and the answer to all of them has to be; it depends. Some new technological improvements will be of more importance to others. One given strategical situation will favour a crap ton of lower tech stuff whilst another would not. And so on.

The primary point that I was addressing earlier was the concept that in this day and age, a military cannot function independently due to the expenses of modern military technology. What I was trying to outline above was why a country can be in the position whereby that technology costs so much, the upsides and downsides of that approach to procurement, and that alternatives can (and in fact do) exist. The best response to any given procurement situation is usually dictated by certain strategic, economic, and political imperatives which generally hold true across the ages, be it now or back in Napoleon's day.

We exist in a fashion at the moment which shares our defence burden, prioritises continual scientific and technological advancement (or 'the machine' to use Lewis Mumford's words)and assumes that barring nuclear catastrophe, we are safe. That is our strategic situation, and we have geared our procurement methodology and munitions design accordingly. But just because things are that way at the moment does not mean that it is the only way of doing things, and if the situation changes again in the future, so likely will our approach to procurement.

Remember, all things change.






Automatically Appended Next Post:

jouso wrote:

Not with 2% GDP of spending.

Your basically advocating Russia's approach to defence. Maintain and prop up independent defence capabilities no matter the cost.

Judging by your response, I don't think arguing with you will get either of us anywhere, because I'm not 'advocating' anything. I'm not putting forward an argument myself, so much as attempting to briefly outline about seventy years worth of complex academic thought on technology, finance, and their relation to military procurement in one forum post.

You are however, free to disagree of course.

People keep asking me why I'm against the EU, but gak like this is the reason why I'm against the EU!

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/nov/10/uk-given-two-week-deadline-to-make-concessions-on-brexit-divorce-bill

Why does Britain always have to do the running on the money issue? Somebody needs to tell Barnier that in a negotiation, both sides negotiate!

Is it beyond the EU to tell Britain what it owes the EU? Is it beyond the EU to say, Britain, you owe us 2 billion for pensions. 10 billion for budget payments until 2019 and 5 billion for science programmes or whatever else.

It's like Britain is a customer walking into Asda or Tesco, looking to buy some groceries, and then finding they have no price tag, and then Britain has to tell the store manager what Britain thinks their worth, and the store manager is shaking their head.

Pull the plug on this




Automatically Appended Next Post:

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:
If Britain was so damn sensitive to legitimacy as that Quora article believed you wouldn't have made a referendum that was impossible to draw conclusions from and then drawn conclusions from it anyway. Or still be using first past the post, for that matter. Or running Brexit referendum campaigns with blatantly ridiculous messages. Or... etc etc ad nauseum.

The notion that Britain cares about legitimacy while the EU does not is borderline fetishism.

I'd argue that the UK's defining national trait is stubbornness or, more charitably, tenaciousness. Churchill was almost an incarnation of this, being brilliant when he got it right ("We shall never surrender!") and a downright disaster when he got it wrong (Gallipoli). 14 years ago experts told you that Iraq had no WMDs and that going in with troops was dangerous. You didn't listen to the French or Germans then, because you had stubbornly decided you were right and that's that. Take care that you don't get another Iraq -03 rather than a Dunkerque -40.

Most of the British population was against the Iraq war. I myself was against it.

 Ketara wrote:
[
Judging by your response, I don't think arguing with you will get either of us anywhere, because I'm not 'advocating' anything. I'm not putting forward an argument myself, so much as attempting to briefly outline about seventy years worth of complex academic thought on technology, finance, and their relation to military procurement in one forum post.

You are however, free to disagree of course.

Let's reword advocate as present lower tech mass production as a viable alternative. I don't think those times are coming back. Especially if your country intends doing some power projection, however modest it may be.

Some countries are trying the old tech approach (super tucanos have been relatively successful), some countries are basically subcontracting air power entirely (Ireland, New Zealand, etc) and there's always the option of picking up scraps of the USAF for peanuts but clinging to old tech has its own set of setbacks as Australia proved lack of spares was a major issue in retiring their F-111.

And of course there's the perennial discussion on how manned air power will be a thing of the past entirely. But that's reading tea leaves.

In any case I'm just providing an economic and industrial explanation on why military procurement costs have ballooned. I'm leaving the whole historical and political conjurings aside.

 reds8n wrote:

I take a pragmatic and IMO realistic approach in dealing with the world as it is.

err, no, you really do not.

For example when it comes to Brexit or Scottish independence all you do is bleat on endlessly about some mythical vision and plans for the future that we should have but blatantly do not have in any way shape or form, whilst making halcyon appeals to some nostalgic era that never really existed.

Every practical argument with regards to things like actual economics is simply waved aside with a shrug of the shoulders and yet another appeal to some romantic notion of Albion's messianic destiny.

You're more than happy to slate Farage, Bojo, Corbyn, Gove etc etc and agree they they are seemingly clueless or flailing around with no regards except for their own careers/financial worth and yet your one of the people who voted to put the countries future in their hands.

In none of your postings on here have you ever come across as being " pragmatic or realistic" when it comes to politics.

At all.

Naturally, I disagree with this. When I talk vision, of building ships and bridges, or motorways or train stations or whatever, of course I know that these take time, need planning permission, and above all, cost money.
But this nation has become bogged down with inertia, and red tape, and a political class that are like bank managers fretting over boxes of paperclips.

You need somebody that is prepared to burn through the red tape, and give our civil servants a boot up the rear and get them doing things.

Did Brunel sit around all day? Or Faraday or Newton? No, they rolled up their sleeves and got stuck in.

When I use examples like that, people accuse me of wanting Britain to return to a mythical age and send the gunboats to Africa and re-launch the Empire. That's absolute hogwash

I say these things, because I want us to be inspired by their work ethic, their intellectual curiosity, to be inspired by their achievements, and to remember where we came from and where we can go.

It's the fabric of our national story.

Every time somebody proposed a new runway at Heathrow, what did we get? Delay after delay and the Green party moaning about a rare flower in the Scottish Highlands being affected by extra pollution or something equally as daft.

Somebody needed to take that project by the scruff of the neck and start demanding some tarmac get put down.

Hundreds of years ago, people were content to have trade ships hug the coast and go short distances. Nothing wrong with that.

But from time to time, you need a Chris Columbus to come along and say to hell with this- I'm heading for the new world.

Some of the greatest innovations and inventions have come about because our ancestors took risks. It's why I'm typing this message to a stranger on the other side of the country, who I've never met.

No disrespect to the naysayers on this site but thousands of years ago, I'm the kind of person who'd be curious about what was over the next hill.

You lot would be warning me not to leave the cave.

jouso wrote:

Let's reword advocate as present lower tech mass production as a viable alternative. I don't think those times are coming back. Especially if your country intends doing some power projection, however modest it may be.

'Lower tech' is frankly a conceptual misnomer to begin with if you actually consider any given munitions technology in depth. I think we've dragged this thread OT enough however, so I'm leaving it there.


Moving swiftly on, from what I've been reading, apparently we've more or less settled the european citizens right thing, they've mostly worked out the Irish issue, and everything is boiling down to the money now before EU trade talks can advance. It will be interesting (if catastrophic) to see if that Quora article is right on the whole affair.

A day or so ago, Laura Kuenssberg's analysis was that Citizens' Rights was a green light, Irish Border an amber, and Money a red.

The thing is, the money question is the easiest one to solve in practical terms; "Here's loads of wonga!"
It's the most difficult in political terms, though, because the emphasis in the referendum campaign about the EU sucking our cash and so on, means that a lot of people wuold rather pay nothing and Brexit Hard.

However, I think enough of the cabinet know we are heading for a cliff edge and need to swerve around very soon. Businesses (and Customs, etc) will in March 2018 start to configure things for the worst option if nothing has been decided. They won't be able to avoid it. Therefore the talks need to get un-log-jammed before Christmas.

We've got two weeks to cough up £60 billion, or Merkel and Macron send round the men with the baseball bats.

£60 billion? As Kryton from Red Dwarf would say, they can swivel on this mid-digit!

£60 billion? They've pulled that number from their rears!

What are we going to get in return for that cash? If we just hand over a massive wad of cash, we've lost our leverage and the EU could simply fob us off with a crap trade deal.

Paying our [alleged] bills is a bargaining chip that we should be averaging to our advantage.

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:
What are we going to get in return for that cash? If we just hand over a massive wad of cash, we've lost our leverage and the EU could simply fob us off with a crap trade deal.

Paying our [alleged] bills is a bargaining chip that we should be averaging to our advantage.

I'm glad that somebody is alert to the danger of handing over vast sums of cash in return for a vague promise about some 'future' trade deal.

On the 2 week deadline, I know you see it is the EU overreaching because you're against pretty much everything the EU does. Try to see it from their side, or even just be pragmatic about it.
The EU gave us a list months ago, and we (as far as I can tell) have yet to respond to it in any detail. Why should the EU give us a £ breakdown when we're refusing to pay or discuss any of it? Pragmatically, a deadline is the only way to move onto stage 2 - it forces team UK's hand to actually produce something. All this stuff gets done in the last minute remember, so all they've done is bring the last minute forwards.

Or would you rather they just let this clown show drag on?

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:

I say these things, because I want us to be inspired by their work ethic, their intellectual curiosity, to be inspired by their achievements, and to remember where we came from and where we can go.

Inventing was an awful lot easier back then, when mechanical machines could be designed by any old toff in their sheds, and constructed by an army of barely paid peons.
We've hit a technical barrier where the old shed invention is largely a thing of the past (hacker-space style electronics being the outlier here), and a workforce issue in that we have to treat them like humans now.

It's the fabric of our national story.

Getting rich off the back of others certainly is.

Every time somebody proposed a new runway at Heathrow, what did we get? Delay after delay and the Green party moaning about a rare flower in the Scottish Highlands being affected by extra pollution or something equally as daft.

Somebody needed to take that project by the scruff of the neck and start demanding some tarmac get put down.

NIMBYs are a huge problem, but we also have things like the environment to concern ourselves with. We can't just slap down a few acres of land and think "to hell with it".

Some of the greatest innovations and inventions have come about because our ancestors took risks.

Again, different world. There's very little I can discover or invent by reading a few books and swanning off to explore with my fathers money.

You lot would be warning me not to leave the cave.

Nah, leaving the cave is fine. But at least gakking look where you're going.

Though I have to say, all of this is wildly idealist and not in any way pragmatic. You keep talking about how we should do big things and then say it's not up to you to determine the petty details, when it's the petty details that contain all of the hard work.

"Leaving the EU" may be a good plan on paper, taking all of 8 seconds to think up. But it requires the analysis, negotiation and confirmation of literally hundreds of thousands of little details. Some may make it a brilliant plan, some that may sink it.

So here's a question for EU supporters:

how can the EU justify a £60 billion price tag?

That's more than our budget contribution until 2019.

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:





Automatically Appended Next Post:

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:
If Britain was so damn sensitive to legitimacy as that Quora article believed you wouldn't have made a referendum that was impossible to draw conclusions from and then drawn conclusions from it anyway. Or still be using first past the post, for that matter. Or running Brexit referendum campaigns with blatantly ridiculous messages. Or... etc etc ad nauseum.

The notion that Britain cares about legitimacy while the EU does not is borderline fetishism.

I'd argue that the UK's defining national trait is stubbornness or, more charitably, tenaciousness. Churchill was almost an incarnation of this, being brilliant when he got it right ("We shall never surrender!") and a downright disaster when he got it wrong (Gallipoli). 14 years ago experts told you that Iraq had no WMDs and that going in with troops was dangerous. You didn't listen to the French or Germans then, because you had stubbornly decided you were right and that's that. Take care that you don't get another Iraq -03 rather than a Dunkerque -40.

Most of the British population was against the Iraq war. I myself was against it.

Which in turn proves that a concern over legitimacy as an intrinsic British value is bollocks.

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:
What are we going to get in return for that cash?

That cash absolves us from our ongoing liabilities within the EU. Paying it over gives us a clean break from the EU from which we can start negotiating a new agreement.

Why do people still keep treating this settlement figure as a made up "leaving EU service charge"? If you do, you're going to be pretty upset when it's settled.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:
I'm glad that somebody is alert to the danger of handing over vast sums of cash in return for a vague promise about some 'future' trade deal.

You're supposedly quite politically alert, so why do you still regard this as a palm greasing payment to negotiate trade? The 2 negotiations are entirely unrelated, except that the EU wants to know the terms of the split before it negotiations the terms of the new relationship.

 Ketara wrote:

jouso wrote:

Let's reword advocate as present lower tech mass production as a viable alternative. I don't think those times are coming back. Especially if your country intends doing some power projection, however modest it may be.

'Lower tech' is frankly a conceptual misnomer to begin with if you actually consider any given munitions technology in depth. I think we've dragged this thread OT enough however, so I'm leaving it there.

It's easy to disagree if you're talking munitions and I'm talking fighter jets and aircraft carriers (even though a smart 155mm artillery shell costs some 50K$).

It's not about the booms anymore, but shooting those booms first exactly where you want them.

But sure, let's leave it here.

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:
So here's a question for EU supporters:

how can the EU justify a £60 billion price tag?

That's more than our budget contribution until 2019.

It's roughly our contributions for the next 7 years. Presumably that's what they feel we owe.
The figure is to cover our liabilities until (a) planned projects are completed, (b) the next budget cycle, or (c) the MEPs up until now cash out their pensions.

Questions for you:

1a. How much should we pay them?
1b. How can you justify that figure?

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:
So here's a question for EU supporters:

how can the EU justify a £60 billion price tag?

That's more than our budget contribution until 2019.

Because we agreed to fund things beyond 2019.

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:

 reds8n wrote:

I take a pragmatic and IMO realistic approach in dealing with the world as it is.

err, no, you really do not.

For example when it comes to Brexit or Scottish independence all you do is bleat on endlessly about some mythical vision and plans for the future that we should have but blatantly do not have in any way shape or form, whilst making halcyon appeals to some nostalgic era that never really existed.

Every practical argument with regards to things like actual economics is simply waved aside with a shrug of the shoulders and yet another appeal to some romantic notion of Albion's messianic destiny.

You're more than happy to slate Farage, Bojo, Corbyn, Gove etc etc and agree they they are seemingly clueless or flailing around with no regards except for their own careers/financial worth and yet your one of the people who voted to put the countries future in their hands.

In none of your postings on here have you ever come across as being " pragmatic or realistic" when it comes to politics.

At all.

Naturally, I disagree with this. When I talk vision, of building ships and bridges, or motorways or train stations or whatever, of course I know that these take time, need planning permission, and above all, cost money.
But this nation has become bogged down with inertia, and red tape, and a political class that are like bank managers fretting over boxes of paperclips.

You need somebody that is prepared to burn through the red tape, and give our civil servants a boot up the rear and get them doing things.

Did Brunel sit around all day? Or Faraday or Newton? No, they rolled up their sleeves and got stuck in.

When I use examples like that, people accuse me of wanting Britain to return to a mythical age and send the gunboats to Africa and re-launch the Empire. That's absolute hogwash

I say these things, because I want us to be inspired by their work ethic, their intellectual curiosity, to be inspired by their achievements, and to remember where we came from and where we can go.

It's the fabric of our national story.

Every time somebody proposed a new runway at Heathrow, what did we get? Delay after delay and the Green party moaning about a rare flower in the Scottish Highlands being affected by extra pollution or something equally as daft.

Somebody needed to take that project by the scruff of the neck and start demanding some tarmac get put down.

Hundreds of years ago, people were content to have trade ships hug the coast and go short distances. Nothing wrong with that.

But from time to time, you need a Chris Columbus to come along and say to hell with this- I'm heading for the new world.

Some of the greatest innovations and inventions have come about because our ancestors took risks. It's why I'm typing this message to a stranger on the other side of the country, who I've never met.

No disrespect to the naysayers on this site but thousands of years ago, I'm the kind of person who'd be curious about what was over the next hill.

You lot would be warning me not to leave the cave.

So, once again, nothing practical or realistic, just some nostalgic longing.

Did Brunel sit around all day? Or Faraday or Newton?

that would be Newton whose most famous discovery occured whilst sitting down under a tree yes ?

I want us to be inspired by their work ethic, their intellectual curiosity, to be inspired by their achievements

which we'll do by breaking off the closest links we have with our neighbours and driving out the brightest minds who work here...?

thousands of years ago, I'm the kind of person who'd be curious about what was over the next hill.

You lot would be warning me not to leave the cave

No, it's much more you're the guy saying we should stick with flint and don't need that new fangled bronze as, after all, did not Great Ugg kill the hairy beast with a humble flint spear ?! Sure that bronze is shiny and sharper and better than what we have been using but, you know, it was fine in the past !

Every time somebody proposed a new runway at Heathrow, what did we get? Delay after delay and the Green party moaning about a rare flower in the Scottish Highlands being affected by extra pollution or something equally as daft.

Once again -- and this'll shock everyone ! -- you're lying.

It's nothing to do with rare scottish flowers, and more to do with things like £17.5 Billion is not a sum to be casually thrown around. A lot of people might not want their homes forcibly purchased, they might like living there.
Then there's the noise issue too of course, but why let a trifling thing like people's quality of life get in the way of whatever rhetoric you want to throw around , once again, instead of actually making a reasoned argument.


It's quite funny watching you now demand that London be the beneficiary of this govt. largess given the number of times before you've banged the drum -- and not not incorrectly at times TBF -- about how London soaks up too much of our infrastructural spending.

Some of the greatest innovations and inventions have come about because our ancestors took risks.

Yes, that's why many of us are keen to try things like the EU as an attempt to try and do things differently than the usual murderous horror stories we've had to endure before.

You're the one who wants to run away from the future and hide in the glories of the past.

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:
So here's a question for EU supporters:

how can the EU justify a £60 billion price tag?

That's more than our budget contribution until 2019.

They don't need to. They have all the cards.

Are you surprised by this? At all? The negotiation is going exactly as pretty much the entire remain side said it would. To the letter. You might have just missed their predictions behind the wall of babbling about how they'd be offering us everything on a plate in the easiest negotiation ever because they need us more than we need them.

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:
So here's a question for EU supporters:

how can the EU justify a £60 billion price tag?

That's more than our budget contribution until 2019.

Because we agreed to fund things beyond 2019.

The idiocy of David Cameron knowns no bounds.