Posted on 11/13/2010 11:58:07 PM PST by sukhoi-30mki
Head of Navy made last minute plea to save Harriers from scrap-heap
The head of the Navy furiously protested to the Prime Minister, David Cameron, about his last-minute decision to scrap all Britain's carrier aircraft, it can be revealed.
By Andrew Gilligan
The highly-controversial cut to the Harrier force – condemned last week by several former heads of the service as "perverse" and risking "national humiliation" – was decided only three days before the final announcement of the defence review, sources said.
Until then, the plan had been to scrap the RAF's Tornado fleet, the oldest strike aircraft currently in service.
In a tense meeting, Admiral Sir Mark Stanhope, the First Sea Lord, told Mr Cameron that he "could not endorse as his military advice" the decision to axe the Harriers and considered it a "political, not military decision."
The early retirement of the Harrier force next year will leave Britain without any aircraft to put on its carriers for at least nine years until 2020.
Senior defence sources said much of the £4.7 billion of cuts in the review was only decided in a series of meetings at 10 Downing Street over the weekend of 16/17 October, two to three days before it was announced.
"There was little more than some PowerPoint presentations and Excel spreadsheets for financial planning," said one source. He said the MoD was left "starting from scratch" that weekend on some of the contentious issues.
For the four months of the review until that weekend, the sources said, the plan had been that the Tornado force would be retired.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Mohammed has become the most popular name for newborn boys in Britain. What does that portend?
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No it isnt.
Havent you been reading the threads on it recently?. It has been debunked.
Debunk these.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1324194/Mohammed-popular-baby-boys-ahead-Jack-Harry.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/27/mohammed-britains-most-po_n_775145.html
By the same logic, me and scotsman should believe Barack Obama is wonderful because the New York Times says so.
Yes there will be lots of helicopters.
Mohammed is no 1 ONLY if you take every variant.
On its own, its number 16. And the same for the story last year.
As you asked, naturalman1975 did a superb job shedding the myth in previous threads. Here is what he said:
‘OK, let’s look at what they did here. To make their claim, they combined the numbers for every variant spelling of the name Mohammed they could find - and then compared it to single spellings of other names. They didn’t consider the possibility those other names might have variant spellings as well.
I have - I’ve got the data. If you total together all the variant spelling of Mohammed (example: Mahamed), you get a total of 7552 baby boys named that in England and Wales. No individual variant has more than 3300.
Now, let’s look at what happens if we count all the variants for some common English names (I just selected a few I thought would be common).
John - when I count up all the variants of John I can find (example, Jon), I get 11,598 baby boys with name in England and Wales.
Henry (example variant: Henri), total comes to 8,389.
James: 9689
William: 8589
I also did Charles - it comes in just behind Mohammed, at 7081.
I chose 5 common names and compared them properly with Mohammed - comparing like with like, counting variations - and 4 of them came out ahead of Mohammed.
Now, I’m not going to spend any more time on it, but Edward, Thomas - there’s a few others as well that would probably come out with high numbers.
So what’s the real story here?. Simple......it’s yet another example of how the media can manipulate facts to generate a sensational and not particularly honest story, if it chooses to.’
......of 708,000 live births in England and Wales in 2009........7600 were muslim baby boys named Mohammed.
So just over 1% of all births in England and Wales were Muslim boys called Mohammed.
I concede. Then you don’t have a Muslim problem. Great!
(Hoping that someone will photoshop some felines landing on an aircraft carrier.) So the Brits have never had anything other than harriers or helos on their carriers? And they don't know how to cat and trap? Who's going to train them?
LOL.
Oh, we have a problem. It just not remotely the dhimmi state a lot of people think it is and the hype makes it. We have a problem with a minority of extremists who are recruiting a minority of young Muslim men. Especially in certain British towns and cities: London, Leeds, Bradford, Birmingham.
So the Brits have never had anything other than harriers or helos on their carriers? And they don't know how to cat and trap? Who's going to train them?
The Brits pioneered several aspects of carrier operations. They invented the angled flight deck for landing, they developed the steam catapult for launching aircraft, they launched and recoverd the first jet aircraft, and they developed the stabilized glide slope indicator.
Until the 1978, the Brits operated F-4 Phantom IIs from catapult carriers.
They'll be fine.
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