Defence: the least of our problems

By Richard North - October 25, 2024

I get the feeling it’s about time I wrote some more on Ukraine, although looking at the Donbass and Kursk “directions” – as the Russians prefer to call theatres of operation – it is perhaps premature to write a full piece.

To a very great extent, it’s more of the same since my last evaluation. The Russians are making steady, incremental gains although, if anything, the pace of their Donbass offensive is picking up. Several key towns are on the brink of capture, even if there is nothing yet decisive in terms of a breakthrough.

Meanwhile, the situation in Kursk is looking tenuous for the Ukrainians and much of the commentary I’m reading suggests that it’s only a matter of time before the Russians have pushed them back to their border – and perhaps beyond, possibly with the assistance of North Korean troops, who are said to be in the general area.

As to Donbass, at the current rate of progress, it can only be a matter of before the Russians have attained their current objective of conquering the whole of the region, which begs the question as to whether they stop there or go on to take Ukraine’s second city, Kharkiv and the adjoining oblast, or even go further to take all the land to the east of the Dnieper.

There is very little doubt, though, that the uncertainty about Putin’s intentions is driving the steady drumbeat of talk – but very little action – about the defence of the west and the need to prepare for war.

And indeed there is much talk and, at the highest level in the UK now, he have a formal admission by defence secretary John Healey of something we knew already – that British armed forces are not ready to fight a war.

Taking a typical Labour line, he blames the last (Tory) government for leaving the military “hollowed out” and “underfunded”, to such an extent that he claims that it would not be able to deter the enemy if war broke out today.

He thus says, “The UK, in keeping with many other nations, has essentially become very skilled and ready to conduct military operations” but, he adds: “What we’ve not been ready to do is to fight”, concluding that, “Unless we are ready to fight, we are not in shape to deter”.

In Healey’s view, deterrence “is at the heart of the Nato thinking”. Rather than “just be capable of defending our Nato nations”, he thinks it is more important to be “effective in the deterrence we provide against any future aggression”.

If that “aggression” is coming from Moscow, though, with the possibility of an invasion of Nato territory – the most vulnerable of which is the Baltic states – that it is hard to see how any British government – Labour or Tory – could afford the enormous price tag entailed in furnishing a credible deterrent.

According to The Times, the MoD needs billions of pounds in extra funding just to avoid “eye-wateringly painful” cuts in existing programmes.

Military chiefs are not confident that they will even get that, fearing that Labour will fail to set out a pathway to increasing defence spending to 2.5 percent in next week’s budget. Their concern is that the government might just announce a short term “bailout” which will fund recent pay increases for troops but go no further.

The Times has it that one former senior member of the Conservative government said Healey was “Labour first, defence second” and was unlikely to get into a fight with the Treasury over money in the same way his predecessors had.

Such is the level of scepticism that an unnamed “senior foreign diplomat” is dismissive about ideas that the UK should take the lead on crises abroad. He makes the obvious but unflattering point that that “language without resources is just empty words”.

However, it is by no means settled wisdom that Putin has any immediate ambitions beyond Ukraine, and it is quite typical of the military and their allies to talk up threats to increase the flow of funds. Yet the military has a very poor record of predicting future wars and an even poorer record of preparing for them – notwithstanding the shortage of funds.

There is even a possibility – however remote that might seem at the moment – that we are poised on the brink of peace in the Ukraine. Putin has been reported as welcoming Trump’s pledge to end the war in Ukraine if he returns to the White House in January.

Trump, it transpires, has “recently” spoken of “his aspiration to do everything he could to end the conflict in Ukraine”, according to Putin, who says: “It seems to me that he said this sincerely”, adding: “And we, of course, welcome statements of this kind, whoever they come from”.

If the Russians are, as it seems, close to a breakthrough in Ukraine, and can beat the autumn mud, in time to complete their immediate conquests, than a peace initiative from Trump could play into their hands. US pressure on Ukraine, from a newly-installed Trump administration, could force the pace.

Zelensky (or his successor, should he be deposed) might be prevailed upon to accept a “stand-still” settlement where Russia gets to keep the territories it currently occupies, in return for a ceasefire and a commitment to peace talks. A war-weary Ukraine, with nothing to gain from continued conflict, might not be difficult to persuade.

Cessation of hostilities in the region would undoubtedly defuse some of the war rhetoric and put some of our more bellicose generals back in their boxes. That would include CGS Gen. Roland Walker, who is trying to convince anyone who will listen that the UK needs to be ready to fight a major war in three years.

The state, he says, must double its ability to kill the enemy by 2027 and triple it by the end of the decade. He is that detached from the real world that he believes civilians can be called to rally to the flag, to fight another pointless war under the command of leaders of questionable competence, despite the government determination to destroy the very concept of a sovereign state that is worth defending.

Even if things do quieten down in Ukraine though, there is still the ongoing instability in the Middle East, given an extra dimension after the recent terrorist attack in Ankara, and the Turkish retaliation by way of airstrikes on Kurdish targets in Syria.

However, there is little likelihood that there will be a call for British military intervention in the region, on any scale, and such demands that are made could probably be handled with the depleted resources already available.

That leaves the possibility of a Pacific adventure, in support of the US, in the event that Chinese aggression turns “hot” and there is open conflict – which might be centred around an invasion of Taiwan. Again, it is likely that British participation would be limited, not least because we have very little to offer which would be of use to the Americans.

Short of contagion which spreads the conflict into other theatres, the immediate future would have the UK as spectators rather than players in a number of regional conflicts, with no obvious need to strengthen our military capabilities, or the capacity to do so.

That notwithstanding, given our poor track record of predicting the nature (and locations) of future wars, it could be that the military “community”, made of serving officers, politicians and pundits – including the think-tanks such as RUSI and Chatham House – are looking in entirely the wrong direction.

Any future conflict might not be so much as closer to home as at home, here in the UK, with the military being called upon to assist the civil authority in keeping the lid on a low-grade civil war, edging into an armed insurgency.

With the country degenerating into lawlessness, the Army was recently placed on standby to assist police forces in the event of a mass walk-out of armed response officers, should the jury have returned a guilty verdict on Martyn Blake. We were that close to having armed troops on the streets on London, once again.

As numbers of third-world immigrants increase, we can expect a continued upsurge in violence, and even amongst “settled” communities, we see them importing disputes from their home countries to the streets of Britain.

It is only a matter of time before one or other of these escalates beyond the capability of the civilian police to handle it, and the Army has to be called in to restore order.

And then there is always the possibility of an active pushback by the white, indigenous population, which finally loses patience with the lack of action on mass immigration – where nationalists adopt tactics not dissimilar to those used in Northern Ireland, possibly with the assistance of the Irish south of the border, who have similar issues with their own government.

That may be the future for the British military. At the height of the “Troubles”, 20,000 British troops were deployed in Northern Ireland. To keep that many on active service would probably absorb the entire resource of today’s depleted Army, and the very much larger area that is Great Britain could absorb many thousands more.

Training and equipment would, of course, have to be geared to this type of conflict – a long way from the grandiose plans of Gen. Walker, but no less expensive. And, with that, it may turn out that Russia is the least of our problems.