Memo to Britain and Spain- Grow up

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

Maybe a bugger to recapture intact. The place is tiny. You could flatten it with artillery in hours

It's a 400 metre high outcrop of shale, riddled with deep tunnels. What kind of artillery is going to flatten that?

[molly bloom]

It's a 400 metre high outcrop of shale, riddled with deep tunnels. What kind of artillery is going to flatten that?

The operation was a success but the patient died. In order to save Gibraltar for Spain it was necessary to turn it into a smoking crater.

Y VIVA ESPANA !

Actually it's one of the WWII scenarios in 'Hitler Triumphant: Alternate Decisions of World War II' and there's another one in Kenneth Macksey's 'The Hitler Options' where Franco gains Gibraltar but loses the Canary Islands...

[Hauldren Collider]

It's a 400 metre high outcrop of shale, riddled with deep tunnels. What kind of artillery is going to flatten that?

The town isn't in deep tunnels, nor the naval base or the airport. If there are defenders on the hill you could besiege them rather easily.

[Hauldren Collider]

BTW - When AH says the major western naval powers won't trust Spain to look after it, he obviously means the US want us to control it rather than Spain. We do what we're told (mostly) and let you use our facilities a lot more readily than other NATO members.
.

Fair point.

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

The town isn't in deep tunnels, nor the naval base or the airport. If there are defenders on the hill you could besiege them rather easily.

Then, seeing as there's natural springs providing water and huge storage space for food (which is used), you then just spend the next few years getting sniped at from elevated positions until the ammo runs out.

There are sound reasons why Britain hung onto it for centuries.

[regexcellent]

Have you ever seen Gibraltar? There's a practical reason why it was never retaken by Spain- it's as good an example of a natural fortress as you'll see. Even to a modern army, it would be an almighty bugger to recapture.

Yes, there's a big rock in the middle, but the actually demarcation line with Spain is flat as a pool table.

And the superiority of numbers would be insurmountable for the British.

None of this matters because Spain's not going to go to war with Britain over a tiny spit of land.

[onodera]

Mine the sea, destroy the airstrip, let the defenders starve to death. Simples.

[regexcellent]

BTW - When AH says the major western naval powers won't trust Spain to look after it, he obviously means the US want us to control it rather than Spain. We do what we're told (mostly) and let you use our facilities a lot more readily than other NATO members.
.

We park our ships in Rota way more than we do in Gibraltar.

[Hauldren Collider]

Gibraltar has a nuke sub base though.

[Alexander's Horse]

If Britain gave Gibraltar back to Spain who the freakin' H would take Gibraltar from them?

The real reason the British won't give Gibraltar back is that there are a bunch of Brits living there and the British don't want to entrust them to the care of the Spanish because they still think of the Spanish the way Basil Fawlty thought of Manuel.

It probably wouldn't matter that much but the Westerm alliance is still Anglo-centric with Spain on some sort of outer ring. This is one of the things the Snowdon revelations is painfully showing to "allies".

The inner ring is still the old UKASA alliance of WWII, US, UK, Canada, Australia, the latter two junior partners with New Zealand trying to get back in. Spaniards would be well out/ even the French and Germans are finding they still aren't trusted. Otoh why would you trust them? They all have form for being untrustworthy or unreliable.

The United States now controls the sea lanes. Britain holds Gibraltar as a contribution to that.

[Hauldren Collider]

Spain was run by an erratic fascist for most of the 20th century and then did a total 180 to leftist constitutional monarchy, plus its military is pathetic. France jumps in and out of NATO depending on how butthurt they are that they aren't top dog anymore even though they haven't been since Waterloo. They sell their weapons systems to anyone who will pay, regardless of their relationship to NATO. Germany is nominally pacifist and we still have large bases there. So of course they aren't as big a deal to us as Britain.

That said, a lot of the anger lately is over the fact that we have been spying on our allies. France reacted to this with basically a shrug, to their credit. Merkel got pissy because apparently she didn't get the memo that everyone spies on everyone and it's not that big a deal.

[regexcellent]

He could have been listening...on my cell phone conversations!!!

Yeah lady you're one of the few people where that's actually okay.

[Hauldren Collider]

If you're a world leader and you don't assume your phone is tapped by somebody, you're an idiot.

[Dauphin]

You two should enter the diplomatic core.

[molly bloom]

You two should enter the diplomatic core.

Is that hard ?