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A Falklands War commander has dismissed Argentina’s latest talk of taking the islands as empty bluster, arguing that any attempt to seize them would run into British air power long before it became a landing.

Major General Julian Thompson (legend), who led 3 Commando Brigade in the 1982 campaign and is now 91, told The Sun that Buenos Aires was “just bullshitting as usual.” 

His assessment was blunt. 

Argentina, he said, would not be able to take the Falklands because “the Air Force will hammer them.” 

The Typhoons already stationed in the South Atlantic, he added, would “take care of them.”

They've got history of gobbing off to try and appease their people when their country is in a shit state. 

And they're at it again. 

The garrison is small by the standards of a major war, but it is nothing like the thin presence Britain had in 1982. 

Four RAF Typhoon fighters are permanently based at Mount Pleasant. They sit alongside an infantry company, a Royal Navy patrol ship and Sky Sabre air-defence batteries. 

The wider British footprint on the islands is around a thousand military personnel when pilots, engineers and headquarters staff are counted.

The remarks come after Argentine President Javier Milei again pressed Argentina’s claim to the islands it calls the Malvinas, and after Donald Trump suggested the United States might not automatically side with Britain if the dispute turned violent. 

Trump linked that hesitation to what he sees as insufficient European backing for his campaign against Iran. 

Thompson’s reply was as political as it was military. He said he hoped Trump would not be “stupid enough to take Argentina’s side,” because Russia and China “would love that.”

There is a distinction worth keeping in view. 

Milei has talked about sovereignty, oil and sanctions more than about an imminent amphibious assault. British officials and some military sources still describe the Argentine armed forces as limited in training, experience and the ability to project force across several hundred miles of South Atlantic. 

Argentina is, however, rebuilding parts of its air force, including second-hand F-16s, which is why the debate keeps returning to whether four Typhoons and a modest garrison are enough if rhetoric hardens into a test of the runway at Mount Pleasant.

Thompson’s point is the one that has shaped British thinking since the war: if the islands are to be held, they have to be held in the air first. 

In 1982 Britain had to sail a task force halfway around the world because there was almost nothing on the ground. That is no longer the opening condition. 

Whether Britain could still assemble a large naval reinforcement if the first line failed is a separate, and more uncomfortable, question. 

The Corps legend's warning was aimed at the first line. If Argentina came, he said, it would be hammered — and the hammer would be the RAF.