Defence: a necessary debate

By Richard North - January 11, 2023

Looking inside the British Army, I wrote recently, one might get the impression that it is about as capable of fighting a war as the NHS is of treating the sick.

For once, it seems my cynicism is shared and if there was going to be anyone with media access who was going to call time on the military, it was going to be Max Hasting.

Writing in The Times, he has an article headed, “It’s time for realism about our armed forces”, with a sub-heading, “Manpower is falling and weaponry shrinking; meanwhile the Ukraine invasion exposes as fantasy an ‘Indo-Pacific tilt’”.

What grabbed my eye was the first sentence which really sums up the predicament of the military, where he writes: “Britain’s armed forces are crippled by deficiencies and shrinkages”.

Hastings then goes on to cite an anonymous “elder statesman” to whom he lamented this view, which evoked a response that, “if he was still in government, he would balk at producing a Visa card”.

In a messy interlude, he plays with several ideas, one being that, since the Russians are proving incapable of defeating the Ukrainians they are unlikely to take on Nato. The second is that public finances are sorely strained and there are no votes in defence.

Then he reminds us that our most recent attempts to leverage military power abroad, in Iraq and Afghanistan, “have been humiliating failures”, implying that direct intervention by UK armed forces is unlikely to be effective.

Next we get an assertion that Russia’s neighbours are vulnerable to direct aggression whereas our island is not. But we provide the courageous Ukrainians with as much help as do the Americans, proportionate to our much smaller wealth and population. Thus, he asks rhetorically, “Are we not spending enough on guns?”

This is not the way I would introduce a piece on the adequacy of our armed forces, but we have to take what we can get, and hope that it sparks a wider debate. Evidently, though, Hastings believes we do not spend enough.

Few analysts doubt that we inhabit a world more dangerous than at any time since the end of the Cold War, he writes. The western-dominated status quo does not suit China, Russia and for that matter Iran.

And while he concedes that some people assert that Russia’s blundering assault on Ukraine has shown it to be a paper tiger, or rather bear, no nuclear-armed state can be thus characterised. He argues, as do I, that failure and frustration makes Putin’s nation more dangerous, not less.

We are also reminded of October’s Baltic gas pipeline explosions. Things have gone very quiet on that, so as Hastings puts it, “their authorship remains uncertain”. But the events did demonstrate the undersea devastation the Russians have capability to achieve against western communication and energy links.

And yet, all the western European democracies have showcased their irresponsibility by taking for granted the support that President Biden has provided to Ukraine – $50 billion and counting. It is entirely fair to say that, without American arms shipments, president Zelensky’s nation would be toast.

Thus, Hastings asserts, one of the best reasons for strengthening our own defences is not merely to deter enemies, but also to convince friends we are serious people, and give a lead to Europe’s faltering Nato nations.

There is a real danger, he says – especially under a possible Republican president after the 2024 election – that Americans will tire of bearing an imperial share of the burden of defending us all. Unsaid is the implication that western European democracies, including the UK, need to step up to the plate.

Then Hastings asks why Britain’s armed forces are in such a parlous state, only two years after the government gave them a one-off £24 billion uplift, on top of the defence budget, to make good the worst failings and help fund replacements for the ageing Trident nuclear missile submarines.

He notes the Army’s manpower cuts, most recently from 82,000 to 73,000, which were supposed to be compensated by 30,000 reservists. Yet recruitment of the latter is dire. Reserves’ morale and credibility is low, not least because much of their equipment has been sent to Ukraine.

Unless a British government makes service seem more attractive and valued, he says, the army’s combat units will remain “hollowed out”, to use a favoured phrase of the generals. One of the two divisions Britain pledges to Nato is supposed to be combat-ready, but nobody believes this to be so.

But now we come to what may be Hasting’s real thesis. “Most new defence money is going to support maritime capability, Johnson’s vision of ‘global Britain’”, he complains.

Yet, he argues, the Ukraine invasion almost immediately exposed as unrealistic the “Indo-Pacific tilt”, proclaimed by the government in 2021’s Integrated Review.

Whatever the outcome of the [Ukrainian] war, he argues, it seems essential for us to contribute to permanent Nato tripwire forces in Poland and the Baltic states, to deter further Russian aggression.

Like it or not, he proclaims, Europe is our continent. Yet all European army formations, to be capable of taking the field, rely on the support of American artillery and missile systems. In the event of war the RAF is tasked to provide a “day one” interdiction capability over the battlefield, but nobody believes it could do so.

He complains that all procurement suffers from the political imperative to buy British, despite the poor delivery records of the UK major players, and also complains that almost no orders have yet been placed for munitions to rebuild our shrunken war reserve stocks, since the cupboard was stripped – rightly – to help arm the Ukrainians.

The French-owned Thales, he says, is hampered by a continent-wide shortage of fuses and guidance systems and struggles to manufacture seven anti-tank missiles a day, maybe 15 minutes’ consumption on a “hot” battlefield. The Ukraine experience, he says, emphasises the importance of big munitions stockpiles.

In Hastings’s book, all these shortcomings reflect decades of neglect, together with some shockingly bad procurement decisions, often politically driven. He also has a “thing” about the current CDS, Tony Radakin – a man appointed by Johnson because he won favour as an optimist, a “booster”, with a similar mindset to that of the then prime minister.

This is the man, incidentally, who argued two years ago that climate change was creating the “new security risks”, with the emphasis on the Chinese threat to shipping lanes.

Hastings takes Radakin to task for a “notably complacent speech” to the Royal United Services Institute last month, when he said: “I remain optimistic and confident about our security… Our operational advantage comes not from the mass but through disproportionate effect… Britain is an expeditionary rather than a continental power”.

The admiral enthused about “the post-Brexit opportunity and ambition”, and declared his conviction that Russia is well down the path to defeat in Ukraine. He said nothing about the issues Hastings has raised. He appears to believe an aircraft-carrier-led “Indo-Pacific tilt” is still credible.

Hasting’s problem is that those responsible for our armed forces are not facing the realities imposed by contemporary defence requirements, and argues that they need to adopt policies that preserve our descendants from the peril of becoming doomed, in so doing, “exploiting the scantiest commodity in modern government: honesty”.

That’s all we get for the moment, but it’s a start. We do need that debate about the shape our military forces should take, and realistic assessments of what they should cost us – and how we get value for money. This may not be quite so pressing as the debate over the future of the NHS, or our energy policy, but it is one we must have.

I wonder though whether we, as a nation, are even capable of having it.