In light of recent comments by politicians and senior generals about the need to get Britain ready for a future conflict with Russia – which have included suggestions that we would need conscription to build the “citizen army” needed – a few items from Sunday’s newspapers demand attention.
As allied ships continues operations off the Yemeni coast, the Sunday Telegraph reported that “Royal Navy destroyers have been fitted with treadmills where land attack cruise missiles should be”, because “the Navy did not procure the weapons due to a lack of funds”.
This means that HMS Diamond, the only British warship in what is sometimes (generously) dubbed the Anglo-American taskforce, cannot attack Houthi targets in Yemen, and is confined to anti-drone operations.
On the unhappy subject of His Majesty’s fleet, the Mail on Sunday had a big story on how HMS Queen Elizabeth, one of our £3.5bn aircraft carriers, has had to drop out of a scheduled NATO exercise at the last moment due to an engineering fault. “Britain has been left red-faced”, was the paper’s bald but not-unfair conclusion.
Things look little better on land, with the Sunday Telegraph picking up figures from the Ministry of Defence about the scale of the Army’s recruitment crisis; it reports that “for every eight troops who leave the Armed Forces only five join”.
We owe this revelation to the Defence Select Committee, which yesterday published its latest report on the readiness of the Armed Forces. This extract from the summary paints a bleak picture:
“The UK Armed Forces have deployed above their capacity in response to the worsening security situation, but all have capability shortfalls and stockpile shortages, and are losing personnel faster than they can recruit them. They are also consistently overstretched, and this has negatively impacted retention as well as delaying the development of warfighting readiness. Either the Ministry of Defence must be fully funded to engage in operations whilst also developing warfighting readiness; or the Government must reduce the operational burden on the Armed Forces.”
The basic problem with defence is not complicated. Since the end of the Cold War, every European country has gradually pared military spending to the bone.
Whilst the United Kingdom has not done this to the extent that most of our continental neighbours have (although George Osborne was accused of “creative accounting” in meeting our NATO commitments) this advantage is offset by the fact that successive governments have been unwilling to make hard choices about our role in the world that reflect our reduced spending.
Thus we must be one of the few countries to float more than one aircraft carrier, despite the Royal Navy not having sufficient ships to put to sea a full carrier group. Thus a continued emphasis on global reach (a fuelling station in Singapore, freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea) despite the growing talk of preparing for a land war with Russia, despite that requiring a very different sort of military.
Such disconnections abound. The size of the fleet is restricted both by the insistence on building top-of-the-line (which is to say, par-with-the-Americans) ships, and the insistence on building all our ships in the United Kingdom, which is very expensive.
This can be justified in terms of keeping essential industries in this country – but how does that sit alongside closing all our blast furnaces, making Britain the only one of the world’s twenty largest economies unable to manufacture virgin steel? (Or indeed, with an energy policy which has left the UK with the highest energy costs in Europe.)
It can, and often is, also justified in terms of employment; the aircraft carriers were touted by Gordon Brown as an example of why voters in the west of Scotland should stay in the Union, as is the submarine base at Faslane.
Yet this logic applies beyond combat vessels, and leads to things such as the 2019 decision to scrap an international tender for fleet support ships. Building such things in Britain may well create or protect jobs, but only at the expense of vastly increasing the cost of supplying the Royal Navy.
But then, perhaps that merely saves our blushes? After all, recent reports suggest that HMS Albion and HMS Bulwark, our entire stock of so-called landing platform dock (LPD) ships, might be mothballed to free up sailors for other ships in light of the Navy’s own recruitment crisis.
This is all the more remarkable since such vessels, which “can accommodate up to 405 troops” and “thirty-one large trucks and thirty-six smaller vehicles and main battle tanks”, are presumably well-suited to “a more agile, integrated, lethal and expeditionary” vision for the military, which was the plan set out by Ben Wallace back in 2021.
Beyond the Navy, the track record of the Ministry of Defence’s close collaboration with the defence sector is also uninspiring. Consider the £5.5bn programme to develop the Ajax infantry fighting vehicle, which so far has distinguished itself by deafening its own crew.
To return to recruitment, we have an historic advantage in that citizens of Commonwealth countries can and do serve with distinction in the Armed Forces. One might have thought the Government would lean into this, to try and offset the difficulty finding recruits at home.
Yet whereas the French offer veterans of the Foreign Legion instant citizenship if they’re injured in the line of duty (the wonderfully-named Français par le sang versé, or ‘French by spilled blood’), here the Home Office rinses ex-servicemen with visa charges and all but wilfully obstructs their efforts to build a life in the country they fought for.
So far, the debate in the media on this subject has focused on the headline question of whether we need to spend more on defence. That is a good and, in light of the dire talk from politicians and generals, urgent question.
But it ducks some much harder questions. Forget conscription for now: are politicians prepared to make strategic decisions to bolster our national warfighting capacity where it cuts across other parts of their agenda? Before asking young people to sign up and fight, will they ask their own voters to put up with new power stations, new pylons, even new fracking wells? What can you ask a patriot, and what can you not?
Then there’s the question of how we spend the money. Is it really realistic to think that we will get defence spending back to the point where we can float a front-rank blue-water navy and have an army fit and ready to be deployed to a high-intensity conventional war in eastern Europe? If not, which do you prioritise?
And given the reality of our budgetary position, to what extent is it responsible to continue with our current insistence on procuring equipment from domestic suppliers, when this is very expensive and, too often, ends up being extremely bad value for money?
British politicians like to talk a big game about global affairs. But since the end of the Cold War, this has increasingly meant writing cheques which only the United States could possibly cash. If they want any chance of the United Kingdom being willing or able to join a hypothetical World War III, they need to drop the boosterish fantasies and prepare for a lot of very, very hard work.
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