Critical Mass: UK armed forces don't have it

We're potentially at a crucial juncture.  Enthused by his foreign adventures and how he is received overseas, Starmer talks openly about putting boots on the ground and planes in the air in Ukraine.  But he's also commissioning a review of our preparedness for a Russian attack at home.  ('But ...'?  Maybe that should be 'So' ...) 

Well let's save time & money and just tell him: we're horribly, horribly exposed.  No AA defence to speak of, for starters.  Much-denuded magazine depth.  Hugely vulnerable infrastructure.  Fewer battlefield drones than the Ukrainians expend in a day - and no experience or doctrine as to how to use the ones we have, past "experiments" having been a pitiful failure (Watchkeeper, this means you.)  No indigenous manufacturing capability to produce 90% of what we need.  Population demographics that could not underpin any type of call-up of the type needed to provide mass infantry.  (Don't be under any kind of illusion that drone warfare doesn't need many grunts at all.)

And - here's the biggie - no longer the critical mass in the standing army & navy (and probably not airforce, either) to mount either a major, sustained operation, nor a rapid build-up.  To the extent we are valued and even admired as a military power that can (genuinely) punch about its weight, it's because of (a) a number of specialisms that have - thus far - survived; (b) some plum overseas assets (Cyprus being top of the list); and (c) the ability to operate - thus far! - with the USA at our backs.  But - sustaining them gets progressively more difficult as critical mass seeps away.  Oh - and aside possibly from our increasingly worried Australian cousins, nobody is the slightest bit impressed by Gordon Bloody Brown's bloody aircraft carriers - a drain on the defence budget and an all-round vainglorious embarrassment.  

We've talked about critical mass before, in several contexts but most specifically including the military.  Here's a really interesting contribution on the subject.  Read it and weep.

Now, Starmer, how's your grandiose foreign policy / strategy looking? 

ND

Iberian blackout: all eyes on this one

Have been abroad this week, but fortunately not on the Iberian peninsular or southern France.  cascading blackouts like that are seriously no supposed to happen.  Speculation ahead of a proper post mortem is interesting only on an ad hominem basis: what explanation does a particular party instinctively reach for, and what does that tell us?

The continental TV I have been watching hasn't been slow to wonder whether grid decarbonisation doesn't have something to do with it, whilst carefully phrasing this as what "some people" are speculating.  Which suggests the green/progressive camp rather fears decarbonisation will ultimately feature in the account.  It kinda has to, because there is so much continual changing and tampering going on, and in the middle of all this, the Bad Thing has happened.

A couple of things are worth emphasising.  This genuinely is a very Bad Thing (albeit "could have been worse"), which isn't tolerable, even as a once-in-a-while event.  It's up there with Boeings operated by competent airlines that fall out of the sky.  Wholly unacceptable.

And: spin & framing notwithstanding, we will eventually get a proper account, which doubtless the greens (however technically ignorant) have been told.  There is a whole world of grid expertise out there, that (a) wants to know; (b) can detect BS at a thousand paces; and (c) won't be slow to let us all in on what's been found.  

ND  

Where do the smart, furtune-seeking graduates go?

The answer to this question goes in waves, according to the zeitgeist, and mirrored by the (ridiculous) starting salaries on offer.  Someone might put approximate years to these, but by my reckoning these are what we've witnessed over the past several decades, in rough chronological sequence of their peak vogue.  There's obviously overlap.

-  McKinseys and the like

-  Tech, of the NASDAQ tech-boom vintage: (various flavours during that run, but at one time B2B was the thing)

-  Investment banks

-  Green investment vehicles

-  Hedge funds

-  "Blockchain" (as a buzzword) /  crypto

-  Commodities trading (as a specific hedgie emphasis)

-  "AI" (as a buzz-phrase) / LLMs

Now, it seems, space flight has a massive vogue.  This one differs a bit, because to enter this field at least a high percentage of recruits will need to be decent engineers of one stripe or another - actual hard graft!  For some of the others, BS + "potential" were the criteria; although the ability to do Hard Sums also featured.

So - what do your bright young acquaintances all aspire after?  What is going to cream off / trendily waylay the next generation of ambitious wannabes?

ND

Father Ted: 30 years of comic joy

Some things that come your way are so engaging, they are automatically memorable, no effort required.  As with most memory-related issues, this is probably a stronger phenomenon with those of, errr, fewer years on the clock:  at a time where nobody could readily muster a tape recorder (and long before video), we'd all turn up at school reciting, word-perfect[1], the best lines of complete dialogue from the previous day's Round the Horn, Monty Python and Sorry I'll Read That Again.  And I can still give The Glidd of Glood (albeit that masterpiece is now available online now - but I've always been able to since first broadcast, long before ... etc etc).

Topping the charts, so far as I am concerned, is Father Ted.  So many extraordinary set-piece gags, many of them just a couple of seconds long [You let Dougal do a funeral?!], strung together in perfect half-hours strings of pure pearls.  And now it's been 30 years ...  scarcely seems possible.  Three short series, one superb Xmas Special; just 25 episodes.  And then Dermot Morgan dropped dead, 24 hours after filming the last one.  That's heavy stuff, as comedy goes.

A decade or so ago, business took me for a sustained period to Dublin.  To my delight, in the office where I was consulting, of a quiet moment[2] or in the staff canteen during lengthy ad hoc mid-morning breaks[3], someone would launch an apposite Father Ted line, and everyone would gleefully chorus the script that followed.  Happily, I was able to join in.  Taking care not to regale them with my attempt at an Oirish accent ... [4]  

Your nominations, please, for best Father Ted one-liner or five-second clip.  Here's a good one for starters.

ND

___________________________

[1]  At least that's how I, *ahem*, remember it ...

[2]  There were, just occasionally, quiet moments.  Mostly, it was uproarious.  A remarkable "working" environment - highly enjoyable & something of a career highlight in its unique way.

[3]  Over the massive rock cakes they would all eat.  "Mid-morning" pretty much started at 10:00. 

[4]  Unless the occasion called for the Cork accent, as some sketches do.  Dubliners (including Ted himself: A Song for Europe) affect not to be able to understand it, and they don't mind a bit of mockery in that direction.

PS: I can't resist one more story.  The department held a quiz night in a big upstairs room in one of those rickety pubs you get, even in the smarter reaches of Dublin.  Beer flowed, the craic was amazing.  Spot prizes were given throughout the proceedings, and one of these saw a likely lad summoned to the front to receive a smart little box.  This he ceremonially opened before the assembled host (senior management present), and exclaimed in disgust: Aaah, shoite! Feckin' commmpany cofflinks!  As they say in those parts, you Brits think Father Ted is comedy, but actually it's a documentary.

EDF and its nukes: "we're sh*t, and we know we are'

As so frequently stated hereabouts since forever (since 2007, to be precise), the whole point of French energy policy is to have someone else pay for France's humungous nuclear decommissioning liabilities. 

Now they'd like "negotiations" over Hinkley Point C and Sizewell C to be merged into one big financing deal.  Well, well.  

First of all, what "negotiations" are needed over HPC, pray?  We already have a definitive financing deal: a binding contract that clearly has EDF on the hook for the stonking cost overruns.  (Its alternative is to walk away: such is that inane deal, struck by the dickhead Osborne and signed by the fragrant May, that EDF is under no obligation to finish the thing at all.)  Do contracts signed by the French mean anything?  Silly question.

Second, why would we buy a second nuke - of the very same design - from the same imbeciles who clearly acknowledge they can't finish the first, under a different deal structure where we are on the hook for the inevitable overruns?

Is there any point in telling Starmer and Miliband to grow a pair - maybe just one pair between the two of them?  EDF are shit project managers; and successive governments have been shit negotiators.  Each deserves the other.

ND