Innsworth, England. 8
December. Two events took place here in
Britain last week that place the future of the British armed forces in the
gravest doubt. First, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Right Reverend Justin
Welby, made a speech in the House of Lords in which he made a thinly-veiled
attempt to take more money out of an already horribly over-strained defence budget
to ‘reinvest’ in the bottomless never-never pit of ‘soft power’. Second, the
Chancellor of the Exchequer made his Autumn Statement and made it clear that if
Britain’s ‘books’ are to be balanced more swingeing cuts will be needed after
the May 2015 elections. A report by the
Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) suggested that the Chancellor would
need to find an additional £54.1bn of cuts. According to IPPR with health, schools and the
international aid budget ‘ring-fenced’ for narrow political reasons the defence
budget would take by far the biggest hit; a further £9.3bn worth of cuts, well
over twice that faced by any other department.
This would reduce the defence budget from some £34bn today to
£25bn. So, what would happen and who
would lose if the British armed forces suffered such additional swingeing cuts?
NATO
would be profoundly weakened and any pretence the British had to be leading
NATO Europe by example would be trashed. My purpose in
Innsworth is to address the Headquarters of the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps, a
major NATO headquarters and a vestige of the once mighty British Army of the
Rhine - I am just finishing off a book on NATO so I am full of it – and NATO’s
history. In September, at the NATO Wales
Summit not far from here, Prime Minister David Cameron proudly announced that the money had been found to enable HMS Prince of Wales, the second of
Britain’s new massive aircraft carriers to join the fleet. Britain, he said, would be one of the few
Allied powers to honour its commitment to spend 2% GDP on defence. Both ‘commitments’ are now again in doubt. Even maintaining the defence budget at 2%GDP
will prove hard because with an economy growing at 3% per annum such a target would require
significant new money. And, as Professor
Malcolm Chalmers points out on current spending the British defence budget will
fall to 1.88% next year and 1.52% the year after.
The
Special Relationship with the Americans would be dead. Assurances were given privately to the US at
the time of 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) that once that
round of cuts was completed the defence budget would be stabilised. Further promises were given that thereafter
the British defence budget would grow at 1% per annum in real terms to 2020. The state of the current British military is
of profound concern to the Americans.
Any further cuts would effectively end the close strategic military co-operation
that has been a vital cornerstone of European and world security since
Churchill and Roosevelt crafted the Atlantic Charter on the USS Augusta in
1941.
Britain’s
influence would be critically diminished.
Britain’s armed forces are integral to Britain’s strategic brand. In his speech to the House of Lords
Archbishop Welby called on the Government to include the funding of soft power
in SDSR 2015. Sadly, His Grace is not
alone in pushing such nonsense; there is a group of people close to the top of
government who agree with him and who are using austerity as a cover to reduce
Britain’s armed forces to little more than yet another European peacekeeping
militia. Incredibly, Archbishop Welby
suggests that soft power is the foundation of all power. He is clearly no strategist for it is the
other way round, as I prove conclusively in my latest book Little Britain: Twenty-First Century Strategy for a Middling European
Power. Yes, a state in a
hyper-competitive world must invest in all forms of power –diplomatic, aid and
development and military - if it is to exert the influence and effect
commensurate with its political and economic weight (not population size). However, the bedrock of said influence is
credible and relevant hard military power and that costs.
British
soldiers would die needlessly. Somewhere, sometime an under-equipped,
over-tasked British solder would die in a foreign field that would forever be
testament to political incompetence. Far from the world becoming a more peaceful
place all the evidence is that big, hard power is back. Friction abounds the world over, strategic
ambiguous warfare is being used in Europe, a super-insurgency is underway in
the Middle East and hard geopolitics is reflected by the rapid growth of
illiberal power and their armed forces.
If such a world is to be stabilised and aggression deterred, and if
needs be countered, then it needs the Western democracies to stand together and
stand tall as credible military powers.
Today, European defence is a sham. Any further cuts to the British armed forces
would not only destroy their ability to act, it would wipe out the last vestige
of Britain’s independent strategic brand and remove Britain as a pillar of
Western defence once and for all.
Perhaps that is the aim?
A third event took
place last week. President Putin gave
his State of Russia address in which he said, “We will continue to develop our
general purpose forces: aviation, the navy and the land forces….the funds we
are allocating for rearming the Army and the Navy…are unprecedented. They total
23 trillion roubles [more than $700 billion]”.
In the same debate at which Archbishop Welby spoke Baroness Williams supported
His Grace by warning against being ‘beastly’ to the Russians. When I looked
last it was not Britain that had invaded Ukraine and who is intimidating NATO
and EU allies, most notably our friends in the Baltic States. As such Williams’s statement was a close to an endorsement of appeasement any British politician has uttered since the 1930s.
Be it unbalanced defence
cuts driven through simply to meet an arbitrary deficit target or Archbishop Welby’s
meaningless ‘soft power’ grab both reveal the essential strategic illiteracy of Britain’s
ruling clique. Indeed, all the
indications are that Britain will need more not less forces and the effective destruction
(for that is what such cuts would mean) of one of the finest fighting forces would
simply make the world more not less dangerous.
Sometimes I wonder if
the greatest threat to Britain is not economic crises or even the rise of
global armed illiberalism, but the fantasy politicians who occupy the increasingly
fantasy world that is the fantasy Palace of Westminster.
Cut Britain’s armed
forces anymore and it will be the hardest and most dangerous cut of all.
Julian Lindley-French
