Weapon Face by Anthony Micallef
This week David Cameron – and the Burmese military leader – will visit India. Mr Cameron will lead a delegation of cabinet ministers on a trade mission. The FT’s Defence Industries Correspondent surmises that he hopes to sell Hawk jets and design plans for aircraft carriers to India.
Mercenary companies and spying are seen as key growth areas
Britain’s defence exports surpassed £7bn in 2009, taking nearly 20% share of the global market. The UK security sector also performed well, with exports for 2009 of about £1.4bn, up about 14% on 2008. Security and intelligence are seen as key growth areas by companies in the sector.
But the world’s second largest defence exporter does not even provide adequate equipment for its own serving forces – “a lack of radios, water, food and medical equipment”
The latest in a long series of scandals: Lieutenant Mark Evison, 26, serving in Afghanistan, recorded the shortage of medical equipment in his diary. He had written: ‘As it stands I have a lack of radios, water, food and medical equipment. This with manpower is what these missions lack. It is disgraceful to send a platoon into a very dangerous area with two weeks’ water and food and one team medics pack. Injuries will be sustained which I will not be able to treat and deaths could occur which could have been stopped. We are walking on a tightrope and from what it seems here are likely to fall unless drastic measures are undertaken.’
Mark Evison bled to death after being hit in the shoulder. The soldier who first treated him did not have a team medical pouch on him – which contained crucial equipment including special bandages that stop arteries bleeding – because it had not arrived in time before they were sent out that day.
Applause and neglect
Lucrative subterfuge which breeds tension, profitable mercenary companies and trading in arms which facilitates oppression and the use of armed force – well away from our own backyard – is applauded.
Meanwhile our rulers neglect the equipment of young people sent out to die to protect a web of oil and gas pipelines.
