In 1982, the garrison consisted of 20 Royal Marines with light weapons. It now consists of 1,000 troops, 4 Eurofighters, Rapier AAA batteries, helicopters, support aircraft, at least one warship on rotation and a river class patrol boat permanently stationed there, plus a highly trained militia force (FIDF) and the strategic capability to airlift in thousands of reinforcements at short notice if tensions were to rise. Not to mention the fact that Tomohawk Armed SSNs gives the British military a conventional deep strike capability that it simply did not have in 1982. Meanwhile, the Argie military forces have stagnated and they are less capable of mounting the kind of operation they did 28 years ago in absolute terms, never mind relative... They could send the entire Argentine Airforce in all its hopelessly obsolescent glory against the Falklands and
Faith, Hope and
Charity could knock them all out of the sky whilst the pilot of
Desperation sat about in the NAAFI bar at Mount Pleasent and had a brew....
That Falklands Islands has nothing to fear from the economically illiterate Argentines for the foreseeable future...