Military

‘Stuff starts to get real, real quick,’ recalls former US Marine, Tyler Flanigan. An Iraqi sniper had just shot out the tyres of his truck and a key member of his team had been killed. ‘We were sitting ducks.’ ‘I couldn’t easily name a single day in Iraq that I wasn’t shot at or didn’t have something explode next to me,’ says his fellow US Marine veteran, Nigel McCourry. Combat experience is hard to forget. Civilian life offers daily triggers that throw you back down ‘IED alley’, reliving the flailing feeling of being blown up and the horror of gathering friends’ body parts in bags. These former US Marines discussed

The United Kingdom’s immigration system is broken. Tens of thousands have entered the country who should not, and the bureaucracy which processes asylum cases is a creaking wreck. Those who do deserve a safe welcome are left in legal limbo for months, if not years. And yet the Home Office, which is responsible for this chaos, is not even the department in government with the most inefficient and unaccountable bureaucracy. That hard-fought distinction belongs to the Ministry of Defence, which combines profligacy in procurement with an inability to give armed forces families homes that meet even the most basic standards of decency. So when we learned this week that ministers

The SAS is under fire, not from terrorists or insurgents, but from ill-informed commentators and our state broadcaster. Our Special Forces are globally respected, they have been a vital part of Britain’s national security capability for nearly 80 years and they run enormous risks so that we might all be kept safe. Nevertheless, an exercise in making sure that they, like all who serve the Crown, are held properly to account risks being used by the ignorant, the sensationalist and the malicious to undermine the regiment and weaken our security. Panorama presents the footage as a sort of snuff movie, divorcing it from its purpose as a coaching tool In

President Donald Trump has again demonstrated his less than impressive grasp of history with a statement on his Truth Social site on the 80th anniversary of VE Day – the end of the Second World War in Europe – claiming that the US ‘did more than any other country by far’ to win the global conflict. In terms of cold statistics, it was the Soviet Union that did most to defeat Nazi Germany, suffering the colossal loss of 24 million military and civilian lives before the Red Army entered the ruins of Berlin to end the Third Reich. The US lost a total of 418,500 dead in fighting Japan and

Open arms Sir: The latest magazine (29 March) has two references to American military capabilities, from Rod Liddle and Francis Pike. Mr Liddle suggests that the prevalent attitude over there is that we ‘Yerpeans’ should have contributed more to the recent strike on Yemen (‘America first, Europe last’). He may not have known it was RAF tankers which enabled the US fast jets to attack. (This also escaped the Signal group chat.) Mr Pike suggests that the US navy’s carriers are suddenly vulnerable to modern weapons (‘Carriers of bad news’). As an excellent historian, he will concede that commentators have been writing off naval carriers’ effectiveness for decades. He is

Airport security was much on my mind last Friday afternoon. I had been due to fly from Heathrow to Zurich that morning, but the substation fire meant a switch to an afternoon departure from London City Airport. City is a business-oriented operation in every respect and one of its many efficient features is a baggage-checking regime that does not require you to separate your 100ml bottles of shampoo and shaving foam into a plastic ziplock bag. The X-ray machine and associated sensors are supposed to penetrate your luggage and identify anything dangerous with scientific precision. My heart sank when my carry-on bag was shunted off the conveyor belt and a

Rules Britannia Sir: Your rules for national survival in the realist world which we are now entering (‘Get real’, 22 February) make sense. However, they do not go far enough. Rule 1 (enhancing our military lethality) rightly identifies the need for better trained and equipped personnel, but it does not include the need to regain military mass in numbers of troops and battle-winning equipment. A fifth rule, covering the need to make durable alliances with friendly countries – essential for survival in a volatile multipolar world – could also usefully be added. Regarding Rule 2 (laser focus on the primary purpose of armed force), it may be that the type

How safe will this country be under Labour? The Strategic Defence Review (SDR) is supposed to provide the answers. It hasn’t been published yet, but may already be out of date. It’s expected to make the case for defence spending to rise from 2.3 per cent of GDP to 2.5 per cent – but that won’t be enough for Donald Trump, who has asked allies to devote 5 per cent of their national wealth to the military. And it’s not only what we spend but how we spend it that the government are struggling to get right. The upcoming SDR will be the fourth review in a decade. On past

Buying a tank is not as easy as you might think. When we started looking for one, people delighted in telling us: ‘Oh, you should have bought one in the 1990s. There were hundreds available for practically nothing!’ Well, not anymore. Especially not if you are picky about what sort of tank you want. I’m collecting artefacts for a new museum of totalitarianism and wanted a T-54 or T-55, two models which are pretty much the same as each other with just a few alterations and which are the most-produced tanks in history. They were used by the Soviet army to crush the Hungarian Revolution of 1956; they were deployed

When the late-night talk-show host James Corden asked Barack Obama about UFOs last month, there was as usual an air of nervous joviality surrounding the subject. Bandleader Reggie Watts pressed him as well and Obama, as if relenting, admitted two things. Firstly, that he could not divulge all that he knew on air; and secondly, that the slew of footage released by the Pentagon in the past two years showing UAP — ‘unidentified aerial phenomena’ — is in fact real. As if overnight, the fringe conspiracy air that has hung over the topic of UFOs for 70 years has seemed to vanish, and this month the Director of National Intelligence