The Water Bowsers are empty in Gloucester

One of the things that struck me about the effects of flooding in Gloucester is that the water bowsers are empty a lot of the time. People are hunting for water, and yet there is none. Some of this is down to vandalism of a couple of bowsers, but for the most part, they are not being refiled often enough.

This is obviously causing much angst in Gloucester as it is making life much harder.

It seems Gordon Brown has ordered more tankers in, but the rather obvious answer would be to get in the Army to look after the logistics, except that we can't do that because the army are just far too busy being overstretched.

MOD admits military overstretch

After Sir Richard Dannatt's memo talking of military overstretch was leaked last Sunday a government minister has admitted that the military is a bit stretched. Bob Ainsworth said that the view was both widely spread and known.

"I don't think it's any secret that with the amounts of people we have deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan that there are not huge resources around for contingencies and other things that might arise," he told the Commons defence committee.

That's nice. Any chance of the more resource for our military, and please don't send them into wars your not prepared to pay for.

For more, see yahoo news here.

Hat tip to Yokel for the link.

Army short of troops and equipment

The Daily Telegraph has been leaked a memo by Sir Richard Dannatt Chief of the General Staff to other senior defence chiefs.

The situation is that our military is severely overstretched and has not got any capacity to handle the unexpected.

To put this in perspective during the cold war, and at the time of the Falklands war we had something like 250,000 men in the army, now we have about 100,000.

What is more regiments are no longer moving with their equipment, for example the Parachute Regiment has had to leave most of its equipment in Afghanistan so that their replacements can use it. This has two knock on effects. Firstly it means that can't train with their own equipment out of theatre, to ready themselves for a return, and secondly the equipment gets worn out, because it is in constant use without the downtime for maintenance. There seems to be little or no budget to replace battlefield losses either.

Being engaged in a long war does involve a lot of expense, as well as extra equipment. Despite promises the forces in Afghanistan still do not have what they need to fight and do the job.

In short, the problem is we have peace time defence spending whilst we are fighting wars on two fronts. In short, it is nuts.

The BBC also has this.