Kumnaa - My Cunning Plan! (Part 2)

Day 561, 10:00 • Published in United Kingdom United Kingdom • by Kumnaa

I know this is supposed to be the Military and Foreign Affairs manifesto but there has been some confusion about the new layout of ministries I have proposed so I will quickly link this diagram I have drawn to try and clarify it - Layout - hopefully now you will see what I mean by umbrella ministries.

Now on to the military. The military in its current form is poorly equipped. Every time the paras are sent a large portion of gold has to be donated to the MoD to buy weapons, mostly from foreign markets. My proposed restructuring involves converting the Royal Navy into, not only a lesser version of the Paras, but as a means of producing large quantities of British made weapons. I plan on splitting the Royal Navy into three groups and at any one time, two of these groups will be working in government owned weapons companies building stock and supplies while the other one third will be ready and available much like the paras are. Every week/2 weeks/month (the finer points haven't been decided yet) these three groups will be rotated ensuring each member of the Royal Navy has a chance to move abroad and fight. Squiddy has approached me with a proposal himself and a couple of other have been working on and we will be talking over the next few weeks to hopefully refine it into something we are all happy with. The Royal Navy would be paid less than market wages as they'll be getting free weapons but still the cost of this could potentially mount up very rapidly so a meeting will take place between the CP/VP, MoDaFA and MoF to finalise costs and feasibility after the election.

Next, foreign affairs. This is an interesting one. We've just watched Atlantis collapse around us, we've argued with our old friends the Swedes and Romanians, we've befriended their enemy Germany, everything is very much up in the air now. While it is nice to be free of the influence of any alliance it doesn't give us much security. With this in mind I have been speaking with PEACE for the last few weeks, gauging what kind of response we would get from a formal request to join. The response was very positive so I will be asking the public to decide if we want to join. I will quickly outline some of the benefits:

* immediate security
* we will be allowed to keep our MPP with Germany and actively help them
* the possibility of a training war with France will become a very real one
* no risk of immediate collapse as there might be with a new alliance

While joining peace gives us immediate security I would still like to develop close friendships with all our neighbouring countries to prevent any situation similar to the Germany/Sweden conflict that ultimately led to the downfall of Atlantis.

The greatest single expenses, out of war time, for the UK are Defence (with a c!) Systems and Hospitals. I propose to not buy any more defence systems for the foreseeable future. We are pretty well defended and the money would be much better spent with on an MPP for a year (with Indonesia for example). I would like the UK to have a few more Q5 hospitals, we are constantly involved in wars (training or otherwise) at the moment and only two regions can really take full advantage of this.

One of the main problems I encountered as Para CO / uMoD this term was the ability to communicate the current state of play to the UK. To remedy this I propose to have a sticky in the General Forums of the UK forums that the Military can use to tell the UK where to be fighting and any MoD articles will simply link to this to get general population used to reading it. It can contain a list of battles that are active and indicate which one the UK should be fighting in. Of course this sticky can also be used by domestic bodies if there are any important messages they also need to be sending out.

Both my manifesto articles pretty much sum up my ideas for the UK so I think I'll leave it at that.

Finally I'd like to wish Jerry good luck and remind everybody to vote on policies not party.

Kumnaa