The Navy would be mad to slash the fleet for a couple of aircraft carriers … The Navy has offered to slash the fleet to its smallest numbers since Henry VIII's day. Have our admirals taken leave of their senses? It certainly seems like it to me after their offer to slash the size of the fleet to its smallest size since Henry VIII in their desperation to hang on to their wildly expensive plan to secure two new aircraft carriers. As I wrote in my column earlier this week, the aircraft carriers are looking increasingly like a luxury we simply cannot afford in this dire economic climate … But what I find really astounding is the Navy's offer to sacrifice a whole range of other, vital capabilities to pay for the carriers. If the Navy is really prepared to slim the surface fleet down to just 12 ships, it would essentially be surrendering control of the high seas. It would no longer have the capacity to mount anti- piracy patrols in the Gulf of Aden, were Somali-based pirates continue to harass international shipping, or mount counter-narcotics operations in the Caribbean. – Con Coughlin/UK Telegraph
Dominant Social Theme: What on earth is the British military brain trust thinking?
Free-Market Analysis: We have written in the recent past about how the EU is actually an Anglo-American invention and is likely controlled behind the scenes by the Anglo-American axis. We pointed this out in the context of the British City – the world's most famous financial center. The power in Britain however is shifting to Brussels, and our argument was that this would never have been allowed to happen if Britain didn't essentially control Brussels as well. Sub dominant social theme: "There is nothing we can do about the EU power grab. Too many people in Europe want this progressive political entity to continue and expand."
Of course it is not that simple. At this point we doubt whether or majority of EU citizens want the EU – certainly not in its current bloated form. Almost every time the EU puts any power-expansion to popular vote, the Eurocrats lose. This necessitates multiple votes – a truly ludicrous scene – that are taken to ensure the populace finally "gets it right." As a result we question at this point how much moral authority the EU has in its current incarnation. This is something like the 16th year in a row that the EU has resisted its own lawfully mandated audit.
But still the "great experiment" grinds on. It is nothing at this point but a power elite gambit covered in the promotional coating of spurious necessity. It is said (and we have been told) that EU bureaucrats that want to stand up to the inevitability of EU power are often given a "visit" by various shadowy EU minions who suggest emphatically that it might be better to go along with program than resist it. Observers of the EU tend to discount the amount of hard power that is directed at putative opponents of the EU. Virtually no one is immune in this day and age (no one with any real power) and this is part of the reason so few speak against the process from the inside out.
Con Coughlin of the UK Telegraph is not part of the EU power structure, per se; like other "conservative" British reporters he tends to speak on behalf of Britain. In this article, excerpted above, he makes the point that British military power is diminishing rapidly. But of course he refuses to take the next logical step, which is that the British elite brain-trust obviously has in mind replacing British military power with the EU military power. This a simple enough conclusion for us to arrive at, but we were surprised to find an article about this very subject in a recent Huffington Post report, excerpted as follows:
Will the UK Government's Defense Cuts Make a European Army More Likely? … The UK's government's swift Strategic Defence and Security Review is now widely accepted to announce cuts of up to twenty percent to the annual defense budget. As the Parliamentary Defense Committee has been quick to point out, the Review is being done too quickly with too little consultation with the public and the defense industry.
Unfortunately, it seems that such rash cuts are not unique to the UK, but are actually happening all over Europe. Defense spending has been the first casualty of the austerity measures in the face of out of control government debt … Why in the face of such uncertainly are EU nations so willing to cut their defense budgets? There are two main reasons for this:
Firstly, most EU nations are happy to let the United States provide the necessary security umbrella to ensure a stable international environment. After all, even during the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo — Europe's worst ethnic cleansing conflicts since World War II — Europe was wholly impotent and had to rely on the United States to provide the aircraft for the bombing sorties. In fact, 97% of all aircraft on this 'NATO mission' were American. The military thinking seems to be that "The US came out to rescue us before, and it will again."
Secondly, many EU countries have been discussing the possibility of 'burden sharing' and exploring the prospect of creating an EU army controlled by Brussels. France, Germany and Poland in particular are keen on this idea and see it as a key building-block for a future European state. President Sarkozy already seems to be laying the groundwork with the creation of the EU Rapid Reaction Corps which consists of 1500 troops from member countries which take turns to be on standby for emergencies.
Angela Merkel, in an interview with Bild in 2007 went further and said that the creation of an EU Army should be a 'key goal' for the next 50 years. She explained, "In the EU itself, we have to come closer to creating a common European army."
Of course as Brussels gradually drains power from other European countries and from Britain in particular, a chorus of complaints will rise up claiming that Germany is actually in charge of military affairs and that the EU is the completion of the German Nazi dream. (Sometimes the mainstream media will include the term German/French power axis, as if these two countries are the twin engines behind the EU.) It serves the purposes of the Anglo-American axis to let the furor mount – and the British press will do its part. Increasingly the fingers will be pointed at Germany.
But as we pointed out in our previous article on the subject (regarding financial matters) Germany and France were in no condition after World War II to mount a campaign for what would eventually turn into the European Union. There have been plenty of reports, of course, (especially lately) maintaining that the Germans, in their death throes, planted the seeds for a rejuvenated civil version of their military "Fourth Reich" but we know a promotion when we see one. The EU is an Anglo-American invention.
The US provides the military muscle for the Anglo-American alliance, which also controls NATO – which is to be the military enforcer for a kind of Western-oriented "global governance" that the elite is busily building. Afghanistan, as NATO generals have bluntly stated, is the first full test for NATO's global capacities as a military arm of the UN.
An EU army would no doubt be a feeder to NATO – and thus the EU military (even with Germany in a leading position) would reside under the larger umbrella of NATO from a strategic standpoint. A standing EU army would be helpful to the elite in many ways. It would tend to do away with the pesky European pacifism that currently informs so many contributing NATO countries.
Once one accepts that the EU is an Anglo-American invention, everything else falls into place. Brussels itself is a kind of British protectorate and there is simply no way that British financial and military power would siphoned off by Brussels if the British and Americans were not firmly in charge. The Anglo-American elite is merely trading up in terms of its effective, informal control – from two countries (US and Britain) to an empire that extends across the Western world.
Of course, the corollary to this is that the power grab is taking place against a backdrop of a severe financial crisis (expected) and the truth-telling of the Internet (not expected). The EU is a classic power elite, fear-based promotion; it also provides investors and interested onlookers with the kind of classic "Internet vs. elite" paradigm that the Bell suggests is shaping the 21st century from an economic and sociopolitical perspective.
We have no idea if the elite will be successful at maintaining and strengthening the EU, or whether it will break apart, a victim of the current "austerity" and information about the authoritarian reality of what the elite has in mind. These are the decisions that one will have to make as history unfolds.
