Mark Nicol

Very true and very concerning. Stifles creativity and initiative. Too centralist. Policies dictated by beancounters.

Blades makes for uncomfortable reading considering the subject matter. Its content must be understood by those standing in judgement over SAS soldiers. The incidents represent a failure by the state to support counterterrorist operations against a ruthless enemy. #specialairservice #specialforces

The hard bit will be defining ‘unjust’.

Thank you Colin @TheUCS473 for this opportunity to push back against the SAS ‘rogue unit’ narrative. Blades is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the most controversial series of incidents in modern British military history. Don’t scapegoat the soldiers for strategic failures that Whitehall is eager for everyone to overlook. @BitebackPub @PFDAgents @DailyMail

BREAKING: Nigel Farage has scolded his friend Donald Trump for ‘failing to keep promises’ in his first remarks since the US midterm elections.
 
The Reform UK Leader also condemned the US’s eight-month conflict with Iran as a ‘mistake’ which cost the President’s party at the polls.
 
Asked this afternoon what was the lesson for President Trump following the seismic defeat of the Republican party, Mr Farage said: ‘Yes, keep your promises.
 
‘Trump was very good in his first term and second term at keeping his promises. But he broke a promise, and that was no more foreign wars.
 
‘We are eight months in and the result is a rise in gas and diesel prices. More than anything else that it was did them in.
 
‘The key is keeping your promises and, of course, the cost of living is key.’
 
In a remarkable turnaround in US politics and after a decade of dominance for President Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ movement, his party lost control of both houses of Congress.
 
The staggering defeat to the Democratic party was widely interpreted as a vote against the eight-month conflict with Iran which President Trump and his cohort boasted they could win in days.
 
Farage has previously criticised the notion of the UK involving itself in the conflict, on the grounds this country’s armed forces are over-stretched already, but he has not previously questioned President Trump’s judgement on this major policy area.
 
But at the Reform UK in central London today he said: ‘Absolutely it [the war] was a mistake. To try to have tactical strikes to try to, maybe not halt, but at least to slow the nuclear weapons programme, I totally agree with that.
 
‘But would I have said to them ‘Yeah, come on, let’s go to war for the next eight months or three years?’ No.
 
‘That is so bizarre. Trump always said ‘I was against Libya, I was against Iraq’.
 
‘It was extraordinary that the man who came from nowhere to twice become the American President and one of the biggest reasons he got there was ‘no more foreign wars’, so there you are.’   
 
Mr Farage was speaking at a press conference heralding the appointment of former RAF wing commander Angus MacIntyre as the party’s defence spokesman.
 
Mr MacIntyre, who resigned from the armed forces after 40 years to take up the post, insisted the UK should do more support Ukraine in its four-year conflict with Russia.
 
However, his remarks prompted Farage to repeat his controversial explanation of the causes behind Russia’s invasion – a view that has previously led to claims he was appeasing Vladimir Putin’s actions.
 
Farage referenced the opinion of the late US foreign policy advisor Henry Kissinger regarding how NATO should respond to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
 
Following the fall of the Berlin Wall many eastern European countries, that were previously part of the Warsaw Pact, were granted entry to NATO.
 
Farage said: ‘Kissinger felt very strongly that when the [Berlin] wall came down we should not expand aggressively to the east.
 
‘Kissinger believed it was that, in many ways, that made Putin act aggressively against us.’