In an open letter posted in The Sun newspaper on Wednesday, a group of Britain’s 14 former military chiefs warned Scotland against a yes vote, saying the secession would be “critical for all our security.”
“The division of the UK may or may not be politically or economically sensible, but in military terms we are clear: it will weaken us all,” the letter said.
“As former chiefs of the Royal Navy, British army and Royal Air Force, we know it is fiction to talk about regional armed forces,” the seven former Chiefs of Defense Staff, three ex- First Sea Lords, three former Army chiefs and the former head of the Royal Air Force wrote.
The chiefs stressed that armed forces of Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom “train as one, fight as one and are under one command.”
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“We are not, and have never been, structured for division,” they said in the letter.
Today’s open letter came hot on the heels of a major tumult caused by General Lord Richard Dannatt, the former head of the British armed forces, who in an interview with The Telegraph newspaper last week invoked the deaths of service personnel in conflicts around the world as a reason to vote against separation in the upcoming independence referendum.
A group of 18 former British armed forces vets on Monday signed a joint letter strongly criticizing this stunt, saying they were outraged by “Dannatt implying that our fallen comrades died in support of a no vote.”
The long-standing issue of the Scottish independence is to be settled on the referendum scheduled for September 18. If the majority of people vote for independence, Scotland may secede from the United Kingdom on March 24, 2016.
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