Teribus, if you'd bothered to read my other postings you'd see I parted company with the light green jobs over something currently under criminal investigation in NI, but was brought back when they needed a safe pair of hands running ops financing in the European defence HQ, where I stayed 18 years.
I understand your viewpoint if you were RN - my family was Pompey, Cumberland Road, grandpa was CPO Mess Steward for Jackie Fisher. You don't get an objective viewpoint when at sea, and you'd not have met the ex-Army types around Pompey or Plymouth, they stayed in the Home Counties within reach of St James clubland, where they did and do pull an unwarranted amount of weight. They don't know the back streets of Edmonton, let alone Gosport.
My generation was taught by the next wave, an Aussie major fresh from Nam and the aftermath of Bloody Sunday, which was one hell of a wake-up call to all the aspirant Ruperts. Some of my mates were in the Falklands, but by that time I was gone, in civvy steet with Schweppes - production chasing for NAAFI amongst others, one little thing was getting the drinks in for the task force. About the only thing they didn't run out of, coke cans.
Trouble wuth that arm is that if you've got it, you never lose it - I showed WEU how to use other sources, faster than the usual. Even this summer, three years after retirement, something came up which had the US SD and UK refresh my clearance.

The question is, at root, who did you work for when push came to shove? Your attestation oath's to the heirarchy, but after that? One reply above, pure squaddy, is your mates. Your family, if like me you've been military for a few hundred years. An uncle was one of the youngest RMs on the Vindictive raids in 1918. Peter Carrington, I got to know on first-name terms, one of a fistful of Statesmen. Tom King, Douglas Hurd, yes. David Davies, former SAS trooper, much undervalued. But for the rest, yugh. Robin Cook was in particular a nightmare, utterly isolated in the European diplomatic corps. You could talk to people like George Papandreou or Carl Bilt, but Cook? A prickly, insecure pipsqueak.

What went wrong is at the heart of the political nightmare to this day, politicians wanting to use the power for themselves rather than the good of the Nation writ large. Power to claim expenses for duck houses. Power to sell uniforms to troops (that was one WWI abuse). This week we've seen the NAO paste our local GPs in North London for an abusive structure designed to milk their budgets into their own pockets without justification (one weekend a short while back there was just one GP on call for 650 000 people in North London). A similar problem has just been found in Tower Hamlets where no end of contracts and assets have ended up in the hands of the Mayor and his cronies through what seems to be maladministration in mechanism, I leave it to you to define the motive. Abstract this and you'll see that the Nation as a whole is an untidy mess of businesses and leisure, services and support, infrastructure and intangibles, banking and bonking, and the entire politican and civil service machine should support the lot, from cradle to grave, from the dimmest moron to the greatest genius. Political parties start to twist it for their support, and with 730 billion pounds at play, that's one tempting jackpot to target. The figures were smaller in 1914, but the value every whit as tempting, and one of the figures not discussed is just how much was creamed of by politicians doing exactly the same thing, giving themselves the big contracts.

Now, you can be a naive optimist and believe that politicians are benevolent folks doing it out of the purest goodness of their hearts. And you can also believe in the tooth fairy. The point is that out of the mess and chaos comes something we call a Nation, and it is that we defend. You may iconise it as a Monarch, or as business, or people, or... but beware those who try flogging you their image, as they may not have your wellbeing at heart. At the moment we suffer from a people in peonage and business doing rather too well by comparison. In Germany in 1930 the adoption of the latest Pied Piper would have dire consequences. It has happened before, it is up to those who have heard the tune before to say don't dance to it.

And that is the gist of this, not to swallow Joss Stone's siren song. The electorate has far more say now that it had 50 years ago, and we must beware that the State doesn't cut it back. They try, they try.