A suggested Email 'signature' - abolish the RAF
To manage the UK Defence Budget in these tough economic times requires radical change. As an island and major trading nation, with overseas territories and merchant ships to protect, the UK will always need a Navy, the Royal Marines and a fairly large Army, but it could manage without the RAF in its current form. Abolition of the RAF would mean transferring its roles, aircraft, assets and people mostly to the Fleet Air Arm and some to the Army Air Corps. The savings would be huge: currently there are some 41,400 RAF people running 1077 aircraft but the Fleet Air Arm runs 240 aircraft with just 6,200 people - a ratio of 38 RAF to 26 FAA people to run one aircraft. Furthermore, fewer than 10% of RAF people ever actually fly operationally and that means an awful lot of people, from air marshals to airmen, in support roles on the ground - most of whom never even leave the UK!
It's not the RAF that is the problem, for the roles it performs need to be done; it's the people in the RAF who manage it so inefficiently that are the problem. Every time a fighter has shot down an enemy aircraft since 1946, that fighter took off from a ship to do it! This lack of experience at the front line for 60+ years, where the majority of its people never get within hundreds of miles, let alone see the eyes, of the enemy, has led the RAF to assume a less military approach to its duties; fighting to win is now alien to most in RAF uniform. Write to your MP and demand the massive savings in defence spending that would result from the abolition of the RAF. See http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/08/slug_balancers_strike_again/print.html
Biting the hand that feeds IT
