It seems to me that there are many people, (Newt Gingrich is an example that springs to mind) who wish to predict the next world war, a war of civilisations and goodness knows what else.
This seems to me in many ways a naked ambition to be the next Churchill, and frequently comes from people who seem to have a end timer ideology that scares me.
Whilst we may be heading into some sort of world war, I don't think it is inevitable, I think it can be avoided by the sensible use of diplomatic, covert, political and military means.
What does seem clear to me though is that we clearly do not have the troops, like the infantry to do the job at hand let alone deal with a world war.
We did have 200,000 in the army we now have of the order of 100,000.
We are tied up in Afghanistan without enough troops on the ground to do the job.
We did not have enough troops to deal with winning the military conflict in Iraq! (See my article here on why I think it all went wrong).
So, in short, if we want to avoid another world war we need more troops, (with some or all of the old regiments reformed), and if we want to fight one, we need more troops.
Either way we need more troops.
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My husband's cousin was made redundant from the army where he was a captain stationed in Germany a few years ago, surely they could have found him another job. My friend told me at the weekend that her applied to sign up at an army school, but he failed the medical on grounds of a muscular sprain on his knee due which his GP had referred to, but has since caused him no problems. My nephew wanted to sign up as a chef too, but failed too, so they are not short of offers.
They have also reduced the number of Ghurka regiments, and I do not think there is a shortage of recruits there either.
The issue seems to be that people think you can win wars from afar.
That idea is rubbish. You can't. At some point in most conflicts you are going to neeed boots on the ground.
I remember reading that this country has been at war for the last 100 years except for 1 year (sorry, can't remember which one). It seems we still will for the foreseeable future.
I don't suppose you remember where you saw that?
It sounds about right for low level war.
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