I wish we'd stop thinking of the territorials as main stream soldiers. IMO, they should be used for home land defence. Arguably, the Falklands fall into that remit, but I strongly disagreed with sending them into Afghanistan/Iraq.

yes an that was: " you bend over and we'll............"

I'm sure the French are rubbing their hands, maybe the Argies will buy some more missiles off them to sink our ships.

Really we should immediately up the millitary capacity there to 4000 troops, a nuclear sub, a few normal torpedo submarines, an aircraft carrier, 2 destroyers, and 4 frigates in what is legally our waters and that'll keep them out of our faces for a while.

Just considereing 60bn barrels of oil is definately something to have an argey bargey over.
With a total current value after all extraction of over $4,000,000,000,000. And with oil prices rising in the future probably more.

I'll bet there's a nuclear attack sub in the area already. We don't have any diesel subs any more, we sold the last of them to Canada in 94.

Surely they aren't all nuclear missiled I would have thought nuclear reactor with more nomal torpedo rather than ICBM trident style.

I think the government should threaten to keep pablo zabaleta and carlos tevez from leaving the country for the world cup aswell.

Even if we don't have one down there, we should send a submarine tender down to freak em out.

A nuclear sub is simply a sub with a nuclear power plant.

To be fair to the French, whilst they wouldn't provide us with the codes to blow up the Exocet missiles, they did tell us how best to detect them and shoot them down.

They also provided us aircraft to train with, so we'd be better prepared against Argentine pilots. Really it was a case of one former imperial power helping out another.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/ ... -Nott.html

As for Thatcher, I once heard that she was prepared to use Thermonuclear weapons...

That was the last oil rig I worked on........... Terrible food on there.

Ye go on l3v1ck get down there and show the argies something rambo style.

If I could get a drilling job there, I would.

Could we afford to have them do anything useful with all the money being spent in the Middle East though?

I suppose however it will probably cost no more to have them as a deterrent on standby than to have them sitting around in germany, cyprus, seirra leone, saudi arabia and other middle eastern countries.

Whether we can afford to use them all in armed combat.

With soft power alone they could and would deter the Argies from launching an invasion, just the standard set of embargoes would do the trick. They would also be easily able to fly resupply operations for us to move troops and equipment in much faster and more safely than we could do with our own resources. They might well supply AWACs which is something that Britain would desperately need in a conflict. And there are many other ways they could help without placing any troops in the combat zone. If you were the Argentine air force, would you leave that zone to attack the US navy?

The Argies would shy away from using their naval vessels for obvious reasons, but would be unable therefore to launch a swift invasion. They would have to soften the UK garrison up with days of airstrikes before they could land on the main islands. With American help we would be able to resupply the islands before the current garrison was close to surrender, without it we would not very likely be able to do so. In consequence, their help would enable us to fight the Argies off cheaply, the alternative would be that we must once again assemble a task force, and we would remove our troops from Afghanistan if we had sovereign British territory to regain. For that reason we would be in a very strong position to negotiate with America, and they would have a strong desire to intervene quickly.

It is also not in anyone's best interests that any nation should be launching territorial wars in support of weak historical sovereignty claims. It would encourage greater belligerence in eastern Europe, and the far as well as the middle east, which all involve American interests that are very concerned with maintaining status quo right now.

The reason why the yanks aren't showing us all that much love right now is a matter of realism. They know Bush milked us for all the all we were worth and there is nothing more to get from us. They also know that historical and cultural ties between the two nations are strong enough that we aren't likely to especially difficult allies. So there's simply more to gain by spending their love elsewhere right now. They do however know that we are overstretched on their behalf, and I strongly doubt they would leave us in the cack if we were subject to an unprovoked and opportunistic attack because of it.