Where’s he getting his intelligence from then if not from his intelligence services?
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Fixed that for you
Yeah, but, they’re wrong? So why listen to them when Fox News says Iran has nukes?
Interesting that even the Church of England are now looking at war plans.
Archived address to circumvent paywall.
“Church of England prepares for ‘serious’ war involving UK” | The Times
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Nothing like ramping up the rhetoric or pressure
I’m with Trump on this one - think it’s actually appropriate what he has said for a change.
Russia & Medvedev keep referring to nuclear weapons as an intimidation tactic & has made reference several times to nuking Britain.
Trump has basically said “ you are an idiot & we we now have to be prudent in case you are even more of an idiot”
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Exactly this.
Being massively over blown in somr quarters.
Dont forget. nato has immediate nuclear strike capabiity on russia at any point at all times anyhow. This is just a ‘please shut the flip up’ message.
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“We are still here; we will not ignore you.”
Who do we trust more, Putin or Trump? Not sure at this moment in time
Knowing that we can’t trust them and having a high degree of confidence that they’ll act in their own self interest is the positive of the situation, though.
There’s a high probability that the Russians will bluff, or otherwise stop short of carrying out the full extent of any threats. But we cannot be seen to call it, because then what was a bluff might escalate.
Trump needs to not be weak while faced with this, and if the time comes that the Russians aren’t bluffing, probably won’t want to then be seen to be backing down.
Trump also is probably being advised to act to counter Russia as a positive story to balance against or distract from the mess back in the USA.
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I just wish both Putin & Trump would consider the human side of their actions before any further escalations.
This is a friend’s post on Facebook this morning, she’s one of two friends I have from Ukraine who are still there:
I started my RAF career as an AEOp, tracking Soviet machines……
Submarines, unseen & hopefully not tracked.
Apart from Russian ones - they will have an (un)friendly escort keeping tags on them.
Deploying USA subs has got to be in an area that would be of value if they had to launch any Tomahawks (typical range 1000 miles?) - but be in relatively safe waters. They probably wouldn’t position close to Vladivostok so maybe it would have to be east of Japan?? I wouldn’t call those “friendly”
waters though.
i guess this is the point of the nuclear deterrent - making the deterrent more obvious by parking it on the “front lawn” (close by) highlighting the deterrent is “real”
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Not the best thing to do with a submarine.
Yes, it needs to be in range for any strike package - but not so close that the launch site can be prosecuted quickly with ASW assets. You also don’t want to be loitering in an area where accidental detection could be a possibility - did that once with a USN attack sub whilst on Nimrods, boy oh boy, that raised a ruckus afterwards - luckily we hadn’t gone “active” which would really have given the game away to the Russkie that we were tracking! Dunno what JMSDF do in that general area, but I would assume that being relatively close to Russia, they wouldn’t be running just the occasional sortie, etc.
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Looks like I am going to have to read Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy again.
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Any excuse!
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Most popular book in the MOD during the first half of 2022 - and occasioning some frantic phone calls around what of 16 Air Assault, and whatever passes for 3 Commando Bde these days could be got to Iceland in a hurry…
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I know we have a book thread somewhere but also War With Russia by Gen Sir Richard Sheriff or go old school with The Third World War by Gen Sir John Hackett ‘and others’ (never found out who the others were!)
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Think it was published in 1986 - with regards to the submarine warfare, everyone with knowledge of that world went “How the heck did he put all that together??!!”
Well, it wasn’t the word “heck” but the perceived accuracy of the storyline / equipment / tactics, etc, was rather surprising.
Lots of post-book discussion as to whether or not any such conflict in the EU would have remained non-nuclear. I think that Soviet doctrine would have played the tactical nuke game relatively early on, especially in the Fulda Gap. Same for the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union (1989 onwards), they would have most likely played a defensive naval situation in the Baltic to protect second-strike capability from their boomers, rather than rush out for an Atlantic war.
A pull up a sandbag story - whilst on C130s, we were scheduled to take an Arms Control Inspection team to Moscow so that they could look at sites nearby. The Defence attache was looking at getting tickets for the Bolshoi Ballet, the works! Take mess kit for the big party. Yippee!
Too good to be true, plans changed to somewhere else in Russia, I won’t say where. We spent 2 days in a miserable hotel, middle of nowhere. On the return flight, chatted with a couple of the inspection team. They had been horrified (in a positive way) at what they had seen. Say that they had inspected a silo of 10 ICBMs - of these, they estimated that (at best) one bird might have flown. This was all down to extremely poor maintenance & shoddy personnel standards. Separate note - groundcrew at aviation were stealing (high alcohol content) windscreen deicing fluid & making hooch with it!
From military discussions at the time, the Soviet Union couldn’t afford the vast amount of money that they were spending on defence. They just let things get run down. Add in the inevitable corruption / protection rackets & I think we very much over-estimated their military might in the late 1980’s / early 1990’s.
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