National Security

The United Kingdom once had an extremely powerful Armed Forces that had over 1,400 vessels including ships, submarines, destroyers and aircraft carrirs. We now have around 63. No, there are no missing digits here. The Royal Air Force, once with over 9,000 aircraft, now has less than ten percent of that amount. In 1990, we had around 1,200 battle-ready tanks. We now have 213 Challanger 2 tanks - of which several dozen are not operational.

We have also lost a lot of crew. In the forties and fifties, we had over four and a half million people in the armed forces. A lot of people saw the military as their career. By 1975 this figure had dropped to around 338,000 people - and today it is less than 137,000.

This however is happening at a time when Global stability is more precarious than it has ever been.

We also used to recruit based on fitness and aptitude. We now seem to ignore this if it means we can recruit people who *want* to join - but are not actually capable of being selected on the basis of "being the best".

For a variety of reasons we now find ourselves with a chronically underfunded Armed Forces and weak Inernal Security - with Private Companies attempting to handle our Prison Service.

This is not a criticism of any single Party, the issue has been growing for decades, rather than years.

At the moment, it is difficult to see which service needs investment more than the others - and it is also clear that there is no abundance of spare money. We do need to DO something though, we are in a position where the stability of the World is lower that it has been for a very long time, while our armed forces are weaker than they have ever been before. This should concern us.

An idea.

A new Fourth Armed Service, which during peacetime is kept busy building Prisons, Power Stations and other vital infrastructure that we desperately need - and need both as quickly as possible and also bypassing the habit that Private Contractors seem to be allowed to increase the price mid contract - in exchange for delaying completion. In wartime, we have thousands of trained people ready to provide the logistic support for the other three armed forces - and for those that have chosen to have extended training, the ability to cross-deploy into other forces.