erm: Inquiry into 1982 Falklands Sinking...

[Mailman]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6111500.stm

Did they just forget about this till last week? I mean it was 24 years ago dammit! Let it go.

Well what did they expect after decades of cost cutting to the MOD?

The good thing about the war was that it highlighted the fact that defence is one area that should NEVER suffer from cut backs simply because any form of cut back always affects operational capability.

Mailman

[hattra]

The Sheffield was a legacy of the last Labour governments penny pinching. The Navy tried hard to get around a lot of the restrictions (the Government said "you can't build battleships or aircraft carriers" so the Navy started proposing 4000 ton "destroyers" and "through-deck cruisers" instead). What they couldn't get round was the fact that Old Labour had blown all the cash on keeping a bunch of useless, uncompetitive industries from collapsing, and they couldn't really afford to equip the ships properly. As if that wasn't bad enough, the Tories virtually decided we diodn't need a Navy and started selling off all the half-way decent stuff.

We were still dependant on Sea Slug (quite good, but very short range) and Sea Dart (accurate, and quite long range, but the fire control computers could only handle one target at a time) - the internal walls were aluminium, not steel. The radar was good, but fragile - it still had glass valve components. The only really good bits were the conventional guns and the engines (Marine Olympus IIRC - the same as Concorde)

[Goya]

Did they just forget about this till last week? I mean it was 24 years ago dammit! Let it go.

"Details of the inquiry into the sinking have emerged in previously classified documents released under the Freedom of Information Act."

[threaded]

Well, if my memory serves right the real reason was the ship was made of stuff what could burn real good, and some argie put a french match up its ass.

Crew "badly trained" indeed, utter utter bollox. Some civil servant under political pressure choose the wrong materials to put on the spec for the ship, and a real enquiry would tell us who she was and show all the memos of all the military types who said it was an accident waiting to happen.

threaded in "and I've seen those memos" mode.

[Sockpuppet]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6111500.stm

Did they just forget about this till last week? I mean it was 24 years ago dammit! Let it go.