You know, Yimmy, AR was not entirely out of options.,  Chilean card, eh?  How would you like to have a dozen 7/7 type events go off?  How hard would it have been for Argie secret service to run some guns, money, plastique to the IRA and show how they could do you in the eye?  Be glad it was as limited as it was. 

Hell, be glad Carter wasn't in office!  After Iran you think he wouldn't have screwed you if his 'conscience' or whatever told him to?  You should have a big statue of Reagan somewhere and sacrifice sheep to it dancing naked painted in blue woad.

As to the dentistry vs consanguinity stereotype question:  either way it's rather mean, is the point.  And dehumanizing.  And not the point.  Oh they're only niggers wogs kikes fags micks dagoes evangelicals gipsies papists cousin-shaggers and far away, who cares what happens to them?  You have a disturbing tendency to write off YOUR OWN PEOPLE when they're not your set or of no use to you or a little different from you.  And since I read you as at most a lower-middle-class product of the English class and educational system, you should know jolly well that next time to Whitehall or Downing Street maybe "it's only Yimmy."  Or Yimmy's family and all his neighbors and everybody he knew growing up.  My lifeboat only has room for blue- or green-eyed survivors, you brown-eyes go tell it to the next boat or to Davy Jones.

All or none, lad.  I would not have cheered if 9/11 happened in Harlem or Appalachia or Kansas, or England or France or maybe even Germany.  Blessedly neither Appalachia nor Kansas (nor all of Harlem) seemed to enjoy it happening in NY and DC and PA.  One minute FI are sacred English terrain, the next their inhabitants are worthless.  No conflict there?

Thanks for the laugh, I appreciate it.  It is always nice to relax for a few moments, turn the computer on, browse some facebook and read the rantings of internet forums.  I'm not quite sure if your argumentative and talk sh!t for sh!ts and giggles, like me, or if you actually believe yourself though.  If you presume to know me and my education through gibberings on the internet though, well, that says enough in itself.

Good stuff though, comparing some colonials who don't pay British taxes to any British person of different ethnicity as though they are in the same boat.

I don't think there is any serious and competant doubt that CNS was precipitate in dispatching his TF.  Of course he had good 'political' reasons, for him it was a heaven sent oppurtunity to demonstrate the relevance of RN in the face of yet another round of defence cuts.  In my view if CDS had been in town it wouldn't have happened in the way it did.  The CDS actually knew a bit about landings, he'd been a platoon comd when his bn landed in Normandy on D+1 and the vulnerability of the beachhead seems to have made an impression.

Nobody had seen an air force opposed amphibious attack since 1945. His experience was NOT relevant. Nobody had seen a modern  air force try to fight a coast defense campaign since the Vietnam War.

I think that constructing a new hard runway to take Etendards in the FI winter by Arg forces in the face of a submarine blockade is in the realm of fiction.  While construction of Mt Pleasant was a bigger task the logisitics were non trivial.  And then there's the matter of doing it uninterrupted, the chaps from Hereford and Poole would have thought all their Christmasses had come at once.  The Arg plant would have been a sitting target, Milan anyone?  Of coure they also have let Arg beaver away and done a Pebble Island when they finished.

1. Depends on how much Marston Mat or its equivalent the Argentinians had.
2. Depends on whether they could find hard flat ground that can support ten to twenty times the ground pressure a man exerts when he walks..
3. Depends on whether they had good combat engineers.

1. I do not know.about (1.) at the time.
2. The British found such ground and built such runways-the Argentines can do the same. There have to be men on the ground to stop them.
3. The Argentineans have OUTSTANDING combat engineers.
  

I'd also agree that if Arg had left their poorly equipped, badly trained conscripts over the winter with inadeqaute facilities then they'd have probably tried surrendering to the sheep well before UK troops arrived.  Of course come the end of winter Arg might have tried reinforcing/replacing with better quality.

1. Everyone adapts.  The Argentineans start with tents and end with heated huts and flown in winter gear. This is an army that HAD  winter gear and prepares for conditions along the Andes. i dare say you think these folks were like the boobs that marched on Moscow? Arrogant may be an Argentine failing, but the Peronists like the Spanish Caudillo Franco, at least tried to take care of the troops when they knew the problems. The junta were not totally CRAZY.

3. Curious about this one myself. The Argentineans actually had some very good professional army formations-mostly motorized and trained on the German model. I don't think they had the right kind of Marine or light infantry (parachute infantry?) troops that this kind of operation demanded. Conscript light infantry was what they had, it was what they sent. They also sent way to many infantry for the logistics burden demanded originally. 11,000+ men was about TWICE what they could realistically support with an air bridge.  

As long as the rules of engagement had been appropriate and no neutral ships attacked then UK's rights of self defence under the UN charter were the trump card.  They could probably have got away with the odd attack on Arg mainland military facilities as long as they didn't overdo it or boast about it, a bit of plausible deniability would have worked wonders, blame the Arg homegrown leftists.

1. All it takes is one NEUTRAL freighter or the involvement of hostile action against a mainland American nation state on its territory, and the game is over.  Britain has NO RIGHT to interfere with American trade among our neutral nation states,  period. That principle i

You know, Yimmy, AR was not entirely out of options.,  Chilean card, eh?  How would you like to have a dozen 7/7 type events go off?  How hard would it have been for Argie secret service to run some guns, money, plastique to the IRA and show how they could do you in the eye?  Be glad it was as limited as it was. 

Hell, be glad Carter wasn't in office!  After Iran you think he wouldn't have screwed you if his 'conscience' or whatever told him to?  You should have a big statue of Reagan somewhere and sacrifice sheep to it dancing naked painted in blue woad.

As to the dentistry vs consanguinity stereotype question:  either way it's rather mean, is the point.  And dehumanizing.  And not the point.  Oh they're only niggers wogs kikes fags micks dagoes evangelicals gipsies papists cousin-shaggers and far away, who cares what happens to them?  You have a disturbing tendency to write off YOUR OWN PEOPLE when they're not your set or of no use to you or a little different from you.  And since I read you as at most a lower-middle-class product of the English class and educational system, you should know jolly well that next time to Whitehall or Downing Street maybe "it's only Yimmy."  Or Yimmy's family and all his neighbors and everybody he knew growing up.  My lifeboat only has room for blue- or green-eyed survivors, you brown-eyes go tell it to the next boat or to Davy Jones.

All or none, lad.  I would not have cheered if 9/11 happened in Harlem or Appalachia or Kansas, or England or France or maybe even Germany.  Blessedly neither Appalachia nor Kansas (nor all of Harlem) seemed to enjoy it happening in NY and DC and PA.  One minute FI are sacred English terrain, the next their inhabitants are worthless.  No conflict there?

Thanks for the laugh, I appreciate it.  It is always nice to relax for a few moments, turn the computer on, browse some facebook and read the rantings of internet forums.  I'm not quite sure if your argumentative and talk sh!t for sh!ts and giggles, like me, or if you actually believe yourself though.  If you presume to know me and my education through gibberings on the internet though, well, that says enough in itself.

Good stuff though, comparing some colonials who don't pay British taxes to any British person of different ethnicity as though they are in the same boat.

Ah, so you are the Count of Monte Cristo in disguise and only talk like a chav.  Noted.  But I did understand that an Englishman can place another Englishman's birthplace to within ten miles by his accent.  Hey, Tracy Ullman thinks she's got our number.

As for the comparison:  why are they not in the same boat?  If they are not your equals, why don't you make them pay taxes?  Or run them off and put proper Brits there?  Or abandon the islands altogether?  Puerto Rico isn't a state and doesn't pay Federal taxes, but that doesn't make them less important to the US.  Didn't you learn anything from the American Revolution?

More fun and games!  Good stuff with the chav remark, especially given I doubt you have talked to one, while you certainly haven't talked to me!  You must have quite an ear!

And I never said they weren't "my equals" - I said, I think they are likely inbred, and possibly hinted between the lines that they may well be heathens.  They don't pay towards my British armed forces wages, so I fail to see why the first option looked to should be sacrificing 600 british lives for 3000 of them, when other options existed.  Remember, the topic of this conversation is that of a war - and in my eyes a war which could easily have been avoided.  You may want to consider that I am also fairly right wing and pro-military, and the Falkalnds was a British victory - if I thought it was political serenity I would champion it such.

90 days?  Yet more bluster and fiction.  I wouldn't have thought of putting standard boot ashore before September.   The Arg conscripts were basically hopeless, mostly because they were appallingly badly led at all levels.  Leadership beats machismo hands down any time.  The risk was that Arg moved good troops back.  As for airfields, even if some caapable of taking fast jets and were built, and Arg had the capability to deploy fast jet expeditionary air units, with all that that implies (that's why folks like carriers, duh) Pebble Island showed exactly what could happen. 

Good to see the stick grasping at wrong end continues.  CDS experince in 1944 almost certainly wasn't air attack, there was very little and it did little damage.  What he would have seen was the concentration of men and materiel around the beachead, and being a smart guy realised how vulnerable it was and the loss there could have been.  UK doctrine in 1982(and perhaps still) required a 'satisfactory air situation'.  Basically this means the enemy will have some successes and you'll take losses but a combination of active and passive defensive measures will minimise these, one of these measures is dispersal. 

And total ignorance about the modern need for dispersal and movement inland as well as how FOULED UP Ovelord, then was.   

Turning to Okinawa and still good to see the stick grasping at wrong end, blind Freddy realises that Okinaw was the first choice when all the factors were considered.  Duh again.  The point is that if the attack had failed then the US would have tried again, but there were other islands in the chain, not as good but better than nothing, and they could have retried Okinawa.  Of course once the Soviet Far East theatre had destroyed the Japanese on the E Asian mainland there were heaps more options.  But its no surprise that the US wasn't too keen on the idea of sitting around waiting for that.  It's also possible that they didn't think the Sovs were capable of doing it as fast as they did.  The reality is if the bomb wasn't the Sovs would have invaded Japan months before the US was able, they had the easy route, down the Kuriles.  Makes one wonder why the US didn't use this option, perhaps they didn't like the northern weather, which takes us back to FI in reverse.

Ah, the non-existent logic continues.  If the US had the resources to invade Japan then it certainly had them to have a second bite at Okinawa, of course time may well have been a constraint and by that time Okinawa not needed because the Chinese/Korean coast was available.  The one thing the US didn't lack was manpower, unlike evey other conbattant of note (less India - the issue there was officers).  I seem to remember a lecture from a Harvard (IIRC) history prof pointing out that the US could have manned and sustained the better part of 250 divisions but chose to limit themselves to around 100.  Not forgetting that the war in Europe was over by several weeks when Okinawa fell.

1. The burning up of three Marine Divisions wrecked the Corps for a year. The Tenth Army was all the ground forces we had for Okinawa. ALL. There wasn't anything else for a second try, at least not for a full year. 

2. When you don't know what you are talking about I suggest you don't comment. We were breaking up units to support the European War in  December 1944 because we were short of tankers and infantrymen..

Somehow I don't think 10,000 conscripts with shovels were going to build the 'South Atlantic Wall', and there clearly wasn't a Rommel to inspire them into action.  As for airfields, get used the the idea, they are very vulnerable, during construction, when built and the aircraft using them.  IIRC UK SF did try a couple of Stingers.  The reality is that Arg basing any of their few Entendards on FI would have been a gift to UK, and the Skyhawks merely present a set of duty targets on the ground, etc.  However, I don't actually think Arg would have been able to fwd base them so its academic.

1. I don't expect a South Atlantic wall. What I expect is a compacted turf  airstrip about 1000 meters in length and 30 meters wide that can support a 40 tonne 4 engine turboprop.  
2. The stabilizing of the bog and the pouring of concrete isa what would take the bulk of the time.  The Falklands isn't exactly overflowing with limestone. Still, if there is any kind of rock at all....
3. What gift? Put fighters and recon birds into an island and unless you are the USN you won't be able to operate carriers near it.  This isn't the Nimitz leading the charge with her air-group, its a few  Invincibles with Harriers. The range and endurance advantages LOCALLY would be with the Argentineans. They proved that they were excellent flyers. Given the endurance advantage GCI and amn all weather airstrip they would make mincemeat out of the FAA in the Falklands setup.. 

A reasonable military assessment would have said, wait until southern spring and reduce the risk of the venture on a heap of counts, accept there could be some other increased risk (most notably that Arg would deploy good troops) but not enough to counter balance.  However, the option didn't arise due to CNS jumping the gun (so to speak).

He jumped the gun because he was told to get cracking before the Argentineans sorted their oroblems out and forted yup to receive the British as described above. He was RIGHT. A thoroughly professional scramble to keep the Argentineans from sorting themselves out was exact;ly the correct response once the Thatcher government chose to fight. What were you going to do?  Wait for the junta to send the right officers to the Falklands to get  those  infantry conscripts to figure out HOW to do their jobs the right way?