On Sat, 21 Apr 2012 20:35:09 +0100, Tim Streater
wrote:

In article ,
"ARWadsworth" wrote:

Tim Streater wrote:

Nope, it,s a fact. That was Raygun and Maggie, don,t forget.

No. They would have left us in the ****. Raygun liked mad military
dictatorships in South America.

And TBH the decision to retake the Falklands was probably not
Thatchers.

So whose was it then?

The Army. OK, so she made the decision to retake, but they had the final say
IYKWIM.

Well only in the sense that they had to agree whether it was feasible or
not.

Hastings & Jenkins (the Battle for the Falklands, 1983) suggest that
the decision-making process might have been more muddled and that
unauthorised decisions made by the navy might have paved the way for
later actions.

The Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary made the decision to send
nuclear-powered submarines on March 29th. The First Sea Lord and Chief
of the Navy Staff, Admiral Sir Henry Leach started assembling a task
force from the 31st and in the early hours of Friday, April 2nd, as
the Argentine fleet was moving into position off East Falkland, he
issued the directive that the task force was to be made ready and
sailed.

As Hastings and Jenkins say: "It is perhaps no more than a
constitutional curiosity that at this stage such an expedition had
been approved by neither the British cabinet nor the British
Parliament."

Nick