Defending Scotland.

[taskforce88]

Relocating the trident warhead and missile storage bunkers at RNAD Coulport would be a bigger and almost impossible task compared to moving the Faslane naval base.

It always amazes me when defence experts go on and on about Faslane but always seem to know next to nothing about Coulport.

There is almost zero talk - zero serious talk - about moving any of moving the infrastructure from the Clyde bases. I'll let you know when I am told

I have a publication from the War Studies Dept at Glasgow uni on thoughts for a Scottish Defence Force. What is published would not be affordable and we would rely on the RAF to provide fast jets for intercepts and RN for credible patrols of the Scottish EEZ. Most Scots in the UK armed forces would remain in the UKAF and the new SDF would have some trouble recruiting enough regular and reserve forces. A SDF SF unit would take quite some time to build up.

I will look out the publication and post some points if anyone has specific questions on specific areas of Scottish Defence.

The talk here on the Clyde is not worrying.

 

[StobieWan]

Yeah - Coulport was at the time the second largest engineering project in the UK *after the Channel Tunnel* - relocating the subs would be relatively trivial - finding a deep water channel with little traffic would be tricky but putting the work into relocating the special munitions jetty plus the stuff that's much more firmly nailed down would be interesting.

Doesn't seem to be an issue right now, the already perilously balanced post-independence budget that the SNP put forward last time around was only 5bn inside thanks to oil - since then crude prices have slid off a cliff.