Technical Support

It's not much of a story. Even the General himself had, to say the very least, trouble controlling the Far Right or that way inclined elements in the French Armed Forces and Intelligence Services.

Those elements had an admiration for the Latin American juntas in the Seventies and Eighties, and a suspicion of England going all the way back to the days of Saint Joan of Arc via the identification of this Island as the source of the Revolutionary ideas circulated within and through the Lodges. A technical support team of that mind went rogue while servicing Exocets in Argentina in 1982? So what?

France gave us invaluable intelligence assistance, allowed our task force to test and practice our Exocets in manoeuvres against French counterparts, and gave us the use of the base at Dakar. Meanwhile, Portugal, England's oldest ally, gave us the use of the Azores, and Norway, then as now our closest military ally in the world, intercepted and passed on Soviet surveillance of the South Atlantic.

The United Kingdom cannot be defended without the ability to cut off the North Atlantic if necessary. There is no deep water harbour either at Saint Helena or at Ascension Island. Therefore, the Falkland Islands are essential to the defence of the United Kingdom. Somewhere like Brazil or Chile, each with a British-supplied Navy dependent on us for spare parts and, once again, for technical support, can like that or lump it, but cannot change it.