Restrepo

"First friend I lost was Restrepo..."

Restrepo, nominated for 2011's Academy Award for Best Documentary, is currently film of the week on iTunes and can be rented for 99p. Made by Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger (who turned the story into his book, War), it grew out of frontline reports for Vanity Fair in January and October of 2008.

Testing Tanks

Does exactly what it says on the tin (except they're not tanks).

"Without firing a shot..."

This footage underscores pretty well just how foolish John Reid was when he described the prospect of Britain's deployment in Helmand. That we could come out of that place without a battle is not just unlikely, believing such an obvious fairy tale demonstrates a wilful ignorance. Not believing it, but asserting it anyway, demonstrates a much more serious problem.

The footage comes from At War, an upcoming documentary about the war in Afghanistan. Proper coverage of the fight for Afghanistan's future is slowly trickling out now, but it is long overdue.

Drudge Report decides to break OPSEC

In case you've missed it, the Drudge Report is boasting about its scoop on Prince Harry's tour in Afghanistan and the rest of the media have now broken their silence and are reporting the story. The Drudge Report's headline ends with "3 MONTH TOUR", and of course, such is the self-fulfilling nature of this headline, it will now only be a three month tour. It is more than likely that Prince Harry will soon have to leave Helmand, where he has been operating as a JTAC since December 14, as the man known as 'the bullet magnet' is forced to fulfil that nickname. Jon Snow thinks this is marvellous and tries to draw a link between this and the recent loss of trust in the media, asking "whether viewers, readers and listeners will ever want to trust media bosses again."

However, this isn't a matter of faked footage or contrived competitions; this is a British Army officer who, through no fault of his own is of particular interest to our enemies and whose life - and the lives of those around him - is now placed at greater risk because of one desperate blogger. A great many people knew he was there; it takes a very special kind of egomania to release that information for one's own benefit.

Update: Channel 4 News' desperate hunt for a negative spin to put on Cornet Wales's deployment knows no end; now they think British Muslims might be offended by Harry's description of his mission there as "killing the bad guys." For British Muslims, as fellow members of the Ummah, must surely feel some affinity for the mass-murdering, medievalist and misogynist fanatics that make up the Taliban's ranks?

The Channel 4 News website reads like the ramblings of a series of competing personalities manifested in a muddled stream of consciousness; it describes its competing - but equally odious - opinions as "voices" and one of these voices is not so sure that Harry's words don't apply to all "Muslim fighters". Quite who Channel 4 News means by "Muslim fighters" is another, more pertinent, question that they fail to address.

Gordon Brown: A silence for the underappreciated, the underfunded and the unarmoured...

Of all Gordon Brown's attempts to change his public image (if not his policies), none have angered me more than this. That Brown - in another vain attempt to paint himself as the statesman he'll never be - has the nerve to pose as the champion of the fighting man is beyond contempt.

Lest we forget the squeeze that this man put on our armed forces while he headed up the Treasury, there are some choice examples to remind us: first and foremost, Government underspending has directly resulted in the loss of British soldiers' lives, from missing body-armour, from fratricide caused by a lack of combat ID equipment, from the lack of casevac and from faulty aircraft amongst other causes.

Training, and the equipment vital to carry it out properly, has also been at a premium since 2001, inadequate funding leading to the cancellation of major exercises as far back as the run-up to the Iraq war, and worsening as the intensity of current operations increased. And this money isn't just held back at source, it's also clawed back later, sometimes with disastrous results: much of the £1 billion worth of funding the Treasury promised for the invasion of Iraq was demanded back just a year later, resulting in the sale of WMIKs at below cost in order to refund the Treasury's money, WMIKs that would later be in short supply in Helmand.

And, considering his praise for the new national war memorial in Staffordshire, it is perhaps strange that only in 2001 was he charging £200,000 VAT bills to the builders of the Memorial Gates monument to Commonwealth servicemen.

These few examples represent only a small sample of the disrespect that this Government in general, and Gordon Brown in particular, have shown our brave men and women in uniform over a decade in power. It's just a little bit too late for all his fine words about the courage and heroism of men he's spent so long shafting.