Michael Dean :: Blog :: Brown and 'there are enough helicopters'

I heard Gordon Brown during PMQs going on about there being enough helicopters for the troops in Afghanistan.

Mr Brown said

it was "absolutely clear" the heavy loss of life in recent weeks was not due to a lack of helicopters.

How can this be 'absolutely clear' ?? It isn't possible to know. They didn't have helicopters available so we don't know.

But one could imagine that helicopters with thermal imaging could have detected the enemy troops before our soldiers got caught in an ambush.

One could image that gunfire from a helicopter could have kept the enemies heads down or even killed the enemy combatants without hand to hand fighting being involved.

Readers of this blog will know that I have campaigned against the use of snatch landrovers when the enemies main weapons are bombs. I have to question how many times a helicopter would have been used instead of a road journey if helicopters had been available!

In PMQs Brown was mixing current tense and future tense, such as

'yes we have enough helicopters for our troops, new ones are being delivered after modifications are made'

In the way I use the English language this means 'no we don't have enough but we have ordered some and they will be available in the future'.