Penny-pinching, cowardice and the ruin of our armed forces
PATRICK BENHAM-CROSSWELL
AT SOME time in their careers most prime ministers say or are told that the defence of the Realm is the first duty of government. Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak and Starmer have all parroted the phrase. The putative next prime minister, Burnham, has not (yet) uttered this phrase, although he has (sort of) undertaken to fund the Defence Investment Plan (DIP), somehow without cutting welfare. Of course, had his nine predecessors actually put money where their soundbites were, defence would not be in the mess that it is.
But no, they were happy to strut the world stage as a Security Council member and as a leader with a nuclear button and the world’s finest (read feared) armed forces. Major certainly had them, although it was he who started the peace dividend. Blair’s disastrous wars destroyed the Army, and Brown’s self-image as an Iron Chancellor reduced spending. Cameron moved the nuclear deterrent into the defence budget, effectively a 20 per cent cut. Johnson’s Strategic Defence and Security Review effectively abolished (expensive) armour but was ‘refreshed’ (read ‘rewritten’) following the invasion of Ukraine. While the Ministry of Defence scribbled, Johnson gave them all our artillery and most of our war reserves. Truss and Sunak continued the motion.
Starmer’s Strategic Defence Review (SDR) had a stab at rebuilding some military capability but didn’t consider costs. The recent DIP amounts to a black hole in a pretty cover and is some £15billion to £20billion short of what the Ministry of Defence thought it needed. (It’s quite possibly more than that; the Centre for a Better Britain reckons the costs of rearming are closer to £70billion.)
Today’s reality is that the Royal Navy can just about field two missile submarines to fulfil the constantly-at-sea nuclear deterrent that has underpinned our defence since 1968. None of its attack submarines works; it has two of six destroyers at sea and four of supposedly 13 frigates available. The Army’s Ajax vehicle is a liability and its new Challenger 3 has serious problems. Its new Boxer personnel carrier is OK, but it’s only lightly armed. The RAF’s F-35Bs still have reliability issues and can’t fire the excellent Meteor missile. The RAF has just decided to throw £8billion at its next shiny new jet (the Global Combat Air Programme) rather than upgrade the Typhoons and their Meteor missiles.
At a cost of £60billion or so a year the Realm is not defended and has not been for some years, despite it being the alleged first priority of every prime minister.
How is this possible?
Because all bar one of them sought popularity rather than earning respect. The exception was John Major, who was never going to be popular for ousting Thatcher during a war. He earned respect, though, by maintaining a balanced budget. Blair stuck to it for a couple of years and then the pandering to every progressive interest and the expansion of the state began, accelerated by quantitative easing (the temporary measure to stave off the global financial crisis) and covid. The national public-sector net debt has soared from 36 per cent of GDP in 1997 to 109 per cent today.
There is no money because of the feckless spending of socialism, embraced by the Tories in their move to the Blairite centre. (Note to Tories: read Hayek – you can’t be a little bit socialist.) Like failing Roman emperors, successive governments have spent on the bread and circuses of the welfare and the NHS rather than structural reform, upgraded infrastructure and defence. Now, according to Nato and some others, we can expect the Russians to be at our gates inside five years. That timeline makes the SDR and DIP both obsolete. If the intelligence community are not crying wolf (and they have a history of that with the mythical bomber and missile gaps of the early Cold War) we need a fast fix for defence now, not the gradual recovery over a decade envisaged by SDR.
It’s worth noting that throughout this military decline not a single senior officer has resigned. Some have exercised their right to visit the prime minister but none has spoken out publicly. General Patrick Saunders, then head of the Army, got close in 2022 when he stated that ‘You can’t cyber your way across a river‘ and warned of a ‘1937 moment’. He was effectively terminated and his successors did nothing. Despairing letters to newspapers from retired senior officers change nothing. They are, in effect, an admission of a lack of backbone while serving.
That lack of backbone is nowhere more apparent than in the abject failure of military commanders to demand, nay insist on, their troops being protected from lawfare by the likes of Phil Shiner and the whole Northern Ireland troubles mafia. It’s notable that John Major (the chap who did the hard yards in bringing an end to the troubles) took responsibility for the death of Warrant Officer James Bradwell, saying ‘He joined the Army, prepared to lose his life defending the British nation. Soldiers do. But he was murdered in cold blood in the United Kingdom. I sent him there, Mr Adams, so save me any crocodile tears. Don’t tell me this has nothing to do with you. I don’t believe you, Mr Adams, I don’t believe you.’
Yet no Admiral, General or Air Marshal has gone to No 10 and demanded that the Prime Minister take responsibility and protect the soldiers they send into harm’s way from nefarious lawyers. The silence of serving senior officers is deafening.
The miasma of hypocrisy, cant and self-interest that infects Westminster and Whitehall corrupts good intentions and, in the case of the senior officers, what once were noble men and women. Moral cowardice is, it seems, infectious. The only people who emerge from this mess with credit are John Healey and Al Carns. The latter’s powerful resignation letter is worth reading in full.
I’ve been writing on defence for TCW since 2014. It has largely been a narrative of failure, particularly when prime ministerial cant and MoD cowardice confront reality. After more than a decade charting the UK’s military (and other) decline, I leave you with a question: is a country that destroys a truthful and objective enterprise such as TCW really worth defending?
Anyway, if we end up at war with Russia in 2030 the only equipment we’ll really need is body bags. I doubt if the MoD will have bought enough.
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(UKR)