Is it right for universities...

[Great Plum]

Humble apologies

[UserRequestedRemoval]

Would it be acceptable for universities to invest in companies that utilise third world labour?

[Hendrik]

Good question. Sure you can guess my views on that too.

Think someone missed the point here (re the Army, Navy, Air Force). By investing in arms, my university is not backing our troops. The defence companies don't just make the kit needed for our boys, the vast majority goes overseas. Most of that majority goes to various dictators and other assorted nasties that most of you wouldn't give a pointed stick to, let alone chemical weapons.
(Who armed Saddam? WE did!)
As an aside, much of the weapons we use aren't even made by british contractors anyway.

The most warped thing of all is that we are twinned with a palestinian university which is frequently bombed by the Israelis who use weapons financed by our university. Surely that's wrong whichever way up you look at it.

[loringa]

(Who armed Saddam? WE did!)

Actually not - the vast majority of Iraqi military equipment came from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc with a bit from China. Apart from a few helicopters (Gazelle and Sea King) I don't think I saw a single piece of British or US built Iraqi military equipment following both the Gulf War and, more recently, the invasion of Iraq (Op TELIC / IRAQI FREEDOM). There is no doubt that Saddam received financial and political support from the West, particularly after his unprovoked invasion of Iran, but that was from Governments and not the arms industry per se.

[UserRequestedRemoval]

I thought the big fear before desert storm was how the Challenger II (British) would stand up to the T72 (Soviet) and was the M1A1 Abrahms (USA) really as good as they claimed it was. As loringa says, most of the Iraqi military inventory was soviet or chinese. The result of the tank tests was that that the M1A1 was very good, the Changer II was a lot better than people thought it would be and the T72 was a great target.

The greatest shame of it all was that world politicians screwed up again and our armed forces had to go in and clean up the mess again. Then our politicians srewed up again ans made out troops go in again without a true military objective, rather a political one.

[loringa]

During the Gulf War (Op DESERT STORM) the British Army was equipped with Challenger 1 MBTs rather than Challenger 2s which didn't come into service until 1998. The Challenger 1s performed satisfactorily in the Gulf war but, as I understand it, the Challenger 2 is vastly superior in all respects and compares very favourably with the Abrams A1M1 which (I think) is the current US MBT. All the Challenger 1s have now been gifted to the Royal Jordanian Army. I'm not a tank spotter - honest! I was just on course with a number of cavalry types whilst the rest of the Army were marching into Iraq.

[UserRequestedRemoval]

The Americans were making a lot of noise about how bad our MBT was. It was good to shut them up. Being from an Airbourne family we don't get to have a lot to do with tanks.