Gregg Stoker

Irrelevant, irreverent and to the point! Follow me! I want to change the world for the better, but I appear outnumbered!

[Gregg Stoker @Iceyall]

@DominicFarrell With all these schools closing, the government can pick then up cheap to convert to illegal migrant centres.

[Gregg Stoker @Iceyall]

@LonsdaleKeith Birmingham Police @BrumPolice have now restricted replies as they realise they have been caught in a lie. Utterly corrupt policing.

[Gregg Stoker @Iceyall]

@Alexarmstrong If Tesla can automate cars with AI, how hard will it be to automate the tube.

[Maxi @AllForProgress_]

After the Second World War, anthropologists found islanders in the Pacific building airstrips out of nothing. They had watched American servicemen clear runways, put on headphones and wave paddles, and watched the cargo planes come down out of the sky with riches in their holds. So when the Americans left, the islanders built their own runways of packed earth, their own control towers of bamboo, headphones carved from wood, and waited for the planes to come. They had copied everything about the miracle except the part that made it work.

We call it a cargo cult, and this week the British state built one out of the Royal Navy.

The Defence Investment Plan cancels the Type 83, the destroyer that was meant to replace our ageing handful of Type 45s and give the fleet a serious air and missile defence for the 2030s. In its place we are promised six "Common Combat Vessels": smaller, cheaper ships that will serve as motherships for swarms of drones, on the surface, in the air and under the water. Drones are the cargo these planners have watched descend from the sky elsewhere. So they have started building the runway, and they are waiting.

Drones are a real revolution in the places where the expensive, vulnerable thing is the human being - the pilot in the cockpit, the man walking the minefield. Take the person out and the whole arithmetic changes. But a destroyer is expensive because of its radar, its missiles, and the magazine of vertical-launch cells that fire them; the crew is close to the cheapest thing aboard. Swap the ship for a budget mothership and a cloud of drones, and you have saved your money in the one place there was never much to save, while throwing away the very thing the ship existed to carry: a deep magazine of high-end interceptors, and a radar strong enough to see the threat coming. It is innovation aimed with perfect precision at the spot where it does the most damage.

And the timing is the part that ought to make a serious person despair. We are doing this in the same year a real missile war has been running in the Middle East, and the clearest lesson of that war is that air and missile defence is now the capability everything else depends on - and that the scarce resource in it is magazine depth. Israel, with some of the finest air defence on Earth, has been burning through its interceptors faster than the factories can replace them; the Americans' stocks are badly drawn down; and the people who know will tell you it takes years, not months, to build more.

Our own Type 45s already carry one of the smallest magazines afloat - 48 launch cells, against 96 on an American destroyer and 112 on a Chinese one. The Type 83 was our chance to fix that. We have cancelled it. You cannot play this game with cheap drones; magazine depth and high-end interceptors are the one thing a drone swarm cannot give you, and it is the thing we have picked this exact moment to stop building.

We have McNamarred ourselves again - can't afford the real ship in annual budgeting terms, so the real ship was dressed up as obsolete, and a fashionable word, autonomy, was wheeled in to make the retreat sound like a leap forward. At the end of it Britain, an island that once ruled the sea, will not have a proper navy. It will have a flotilla of motherships and a slide deck full of drone designations - the bamboo control tower of a country that remembers greatness as a set of costless gestures.

[Gregg Stoker @Iceyall]

@Iromg The £4.7 Bill hole in defence spending is something that will be quietly cancelled later. This is designed to create a promise for headlines today, that was never to be upheld later. Shameful and underhand.

[Gregg Stoker @Iceyall]

@ColinSpenc4257 Its not so much sewing the button back on these days, as much as threading the needle with my old eyes.

[Gregg Stoker @Iceyall]

@DaleVince Utter garbage. It could be a £1000 and it would still be garbage.

[Gregg Stoker @Iceyall]

@SandyofSuffolk A World Cup of what?

[Gregg Stoker @Iceyall]

@DrChrisParry
The £4.7 Bill hole in defence spending is something that will be quietly cancelled later. This is designed to create a promise for headlines today, that was never to be upheld later. Shameful and underhand.

[Gregg Stoker @Iceyall]

@Channel4News The £4.7 Bill hole in defence spending is something that will be quietly cancelled later. This is designed to create a promise for headlines today, that was never to be upheld later. Shameful and underhand.

[Gregg Stoker @Iceyall]

@thecarolemalone If it wasn't filmed, he would now be in prison. There is serious corruption in the Police.

[Gregg Stoker @Iceyall]

@Newrygal1 There is no expectation of privacy in a public space.

[Gregg Stoker @Iceyall]

@DrChrisParry As they are not ACTUALLY spending anything, it wasn't difficult to cost it.

[Gregg Stoker @Iceyall]

@UKCDS_MOD You gave it the wrong name. It should be called the Abolition of Defence by Cuts Plan.

[Gregg Stoker @Iceyall]

@defense_news China steals every technology it has. It will be American design anyway.

[Gregg Stoker @Iceyall]

@JohnCleese If a Hijab is a symbol of pride, why don't all the muslim men wear them?

[Gregg Stoker @Iceyall]

@TheGriftReport If BBC was to reflect modern Britain, then there would be fewer black people on TV. What a racist this Archbishop is.

[Gregg Stoker @Iceyall]

@joerichlaw If it wasn't for the video evidence, he would be in prison now.

[Gregg Stoker @Iceyall]

@LucyTCWife https://t.co/k5GX3BG63s

[Gregg Stoker @Iceyall]

@NavyLookout No Helicoptors, no armored personel carriers. Guess the Infantry are back on shank's pony. None of this due to total lack of funding, of course.