What the HELL is Brown thinking?!

OK, the Territorial Army...

Currently, the TA supplies a massive amount of its' troops to assist our Regular Forces in places like Afghanistan.

Now, to save money, the T.A. has been told by the Government to cease any and all training, which includes the regular weekday Drillhall evenings, monthly weekend exercises/training and, in fact, all normal T.A. training, for six months.

See this article...

They say this will save twenty million quid.

What they DO NOT SAY is that it'll destroy unit cohesion. It'll ruin standards of training - these days, many T.A. soldiers are undertaking things like NVQs, safety courses, required skillset update courses, and so on. It'll completely wreck such training, resulting in increased costs when the T.A. soldiers return to their training schedules in six months.

They have, of course, said that continuation training, when a T.A. soldier is called up to serve in, say, Afghanistan, will not be affected.

Frankly, that's highly likely to be bunkum as well: I have now completely lost faith in this government.

They've cut public services, while voting themselves fat increases in salaries (that's a matter of public record). They've screwed up our Armed Forces, Police Services, Fire Services, and healthcare, while apparently fiddling their expenses (it's in the papers, and where there's smoke, there is invariably fire as well).

They have, in short, wasted money themselves.

And now they want to cut the training of one of the most important areas of defence spending?!

Words fail me. Well, they don't, but if I put down here what I really think, I'll be done under section 5 of the Public Order Act!

God help serving T.A. soldiers - because this bloody government won't.