Current operations in Afghanistan and Iraq have been described as the most intensive since the Korean War, yet our armed forces are, in manpower terms, the smallest they have been since the 1930s. Indeed, the armed forces budget as a proportion of GDP is also the lowest it has been for decades. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, successive governments have been looking for ways to cash in on the 'Peace Dividend' by cutting the supply support and infrastructure for the steadily reducing core establishment of the armed forces. A major loser in this drive for economy has been RAF logistic support.rnThe RAF policy for stock holdings in the 1990s was based on a sophisticated combination of, amongst other criteria, collated past consumption data, mean time between unit failure, re-order period, reserves and, where appropriate, mean time between unit replacement. A liaison was maintained between the RAF engineers who collated the technical data and the supply managers who calculated the consumption data using a global supply management computer, known as ATLAS.
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