France and Britain downsizing and combining defense operations

[marmar]

from the Guardian UK:



Britain and France today signed a landmark 50-year treaty on defence and security that envisages the joint use of aircraft carriers, a 10,000-strong joint expeditionary force and unprecedented new levels of co-operation over nuclear missiles.

The deal, signed in London by David Cameron and the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, has in part been forced on the two countries as they struggle with tightening defence budgets, but also reflects a level of mutual trust not seen for decades.

At a joint press conference at Lancaster House, Cameron repeatedly stressed that the agreement strengthened British sovereignty as he said it opened a new chapter in Anglo-French relations.

Seeking to defend himself from a Eurosceptic assault, with one Tory MP describing the French as "duplicitous", Cameron stressed the treaties would not weaken British sovereignty and did not amount to a sharing of the UK's nuclear deterrent.

He said: "Britain and France will be sovereign nations able to deploy our forces independently and in our national interest when we choose to do so. ..............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/nov/02/britain-france-landmark-50-year-defence-deal

[BeyondGeography]

1. Conservatives cutting defense and never dreaming of touching National Health

Wonder what our crowd over here thinks of that.

[LeftishBrit]

5. Oh, Cameron is cutting lots of things...

Welfare benefits. Help to disabled people. Higher education. Council (public) housing. Public services in general - with plenty of anticipated job losses. And although the NHS is not being explicitly cut, there are a lot of planned 'reforms' that would amount to partial privatization.

[BeyondGeography]

6. He's still a liberal compared with our primates over here

[Hannah Bell]

7. .

[Hannah Bell]

8. they've been 'touching' national health for years. uk is making draconian cuts

in social spending.

[treestar]

2. And to think they were at each other's throats in 1415

[kick-ass-bob]

9. Amazing what a little time will do.

:P

[pscot]

3. Now all they have to do

is figure out how to agree on when and where the joint strike force will be used.

[stevenleser]

4. Which is a good thing. Had this been in place 7 years ago, britain might not have participated in

Iraq. That might have scuttled the whole thing.

[SoCalDem]

10. How utterly civilized of them.. Now.. if we could only end the wargasm here in the US

People forget that time really does march on, and the constant ratcheting UP of war-toys...especially war toys built in the modern-day likeness of the war toys of the "BIG ONE", is little more than foolishness³.

Some will say that Europeans can afford to abdicate military defense, because they know that WE will do it for them, but it's well past the time for countries to give up the WWII warfare modeling.

Current & future wars will be at the opposite ends of the war spectrum. At one end we have the boxcutters, machetes, cellphone bombs, exploding people, el cheapo RPGs, and maniacal religious zealots chopping off body parts, stoning & raping. At the other end we have diabolical computer-people sequestered in cyberville, hacking away.

The expensive stuff in the middle ? well that's the stuff from the Cold War , Korea, Viet Nam & WWII. The OLD-timey wars of yesterday. Updating the weaponry necessary to re-fight old wars is a luxury we can no longer afford.