"The government must and will ensure that our Armed
Forces are always properly equipped and resourced."
August 2017 letter of Sir Michael Fallon, UK Secretary of
State for Defence, to Mrs Sue Smith, expressing regret for the July 2005 death
of her son Private Philip Hewett in Iraq.
Alphen,
Netherlands. 18 August. This morning the
British news contained a story that reminds me of the importance of
responsible, independent analysis in a democracy. The job of the analyst is to analyse. In my
case I do this as a well-informed citizen in an effort to make political elites,
and the bureaucracies that serve them better at what they are supposed to do in
my name. Call that hubris if you will, but I see it as my duty. Unlike some I
am not trying to destroy elites, or make them fail, and I fully recognise how difficult
the task of government is in this fractured age.
The letter Sir Michael wrote to Mrs Smith is
one for which I applaud him, even though it comes only after a Supreme Court
decision, the Human Rights Act, and the Sir John Chilcot report into Britain’s
role in the Iraq War. The letter rightfully states: "The government
entirely accepts the findings of Sir John Chilcot in the Iraq Inquiry in
relation to Snatch Land Rover….I would like to express directly to you my
deepest sympathies and apologise for the delay, resulting in decisions taken at
the time in bringing into service alternative protected vehicles which could
have saved lives." At the time of
Private Hewett’s July 2005 death the soldiers called the Snatch Land Rover ‘mobile
coffins’, so vulnerable were they to roadside bombs.
However,
another statement in that letter suggests the Government have
really not learned the lessons which are the implicit purpose of the letter. It goes
onto state, "The government must and will
ensure that our Armed Forces are always properly equipped and resourced."
So, why is London failing its own test?
Why is London still fixated with the appearance of defence at the expense
of its substance? The reality is that in spite of the mantra that
Britain is one of few NATO members that meet the 2% GDP defence investment
pledge, a dangerous gap is opening up between
Britain’s stated defence-strategic ambitions and its military-strategy reality.
Take the
new heavy aircraft carrier HMS Queen
Elizabeth which entered Her Majesty’s Naval Base Portsmouth for the first
time this week, amidst much public fanfare.
Regular readers of this blog and my books will know I am a firm fan of
the two new British carriers. Properly equipped they will not only afford
Britain national strategic assets, exert influence ‘weight’ far beyond their 70,000
tons, they will also enable London to provide coalition maritime-amphibious command
hubs for NATO, European, and the wider Allied military groupings which will be
the military-strategic method for much of first half of the twenty-first century.
And yet
London is screwing up the strategic opportunity the carriers represent because
as ever appearance comes before substance. Yes, HMS
Queen Elizabeth provided an excellent photo op for Prime Minister May this
week. And yes, my analysis suggests that
if the British properly funded their stated ambitions Britain’s armed forces
would, again, be amongst the world’s best – which is precisely where they
should be. And yet, London is stalling on the investment of offensive and
defensive systems the ships need to do the jobs they are designed to do. Worse, a mixture of inadequate spending and
poor spending is forcing the Service Chiefs to make hard decisions that are rendering Britain’s armed forces as unbalanced as at any time possibly in a
couple of centuries. And yet the defence pretence continues, a recipe
for military disaster in this most unforgiving of ages.
Britain’s armed forces are fast becoming a Potemkin Village Force
(PVF), which looks good, but peer behind the façade and one finds an
overstretched little bit of everything, but not much of anything force. London invests in bits of a powerful force,
whilst at the same time cutting the defence budget needed to invest in the
other bits vital to ensure its proper functioning, even in the possible high-intensity conflict
Prime Minister May warned about this week. The problem with such a political
strategy is that whilst it might fool ‘Joe Public’ for a time, and thus serve
some short-term political utility, it does not fool Britain’s allies, and
certainly does not fool Britain’s adversaries.
Sir Michael
Fallon is one of Britain’s better defence secretaries and has fought hard to
protect Britain’s armed forces from the obsession of HM Treasury with sound
money at the expense of sound defence. If Sir Michael really means what he writes,
and that he is committed to ensuring Britain’s armed forces are properly
equipped and resourced, then this moment is the crunch time! The next few years could mark
the last time Britain has to prepare its military for a dangerous future that London itself acknowledges, and which given Britain’s relative power in the world, it will be
unable to avoid. The operations Britain’s
armed forces are likely be called upon to conduct are growing daily bigger,
more intense, and more dangerous.
What to
do? First, properly fund the commitments made in the 2010 and 2015 Strategic Defence
and Security Reviews (SDSR), and end the current game of political charades
with Britain’s defence. Second, use SDSR 2020 to re-establish a link between reality,
strategy and British defence policy. Third, stop funding counter-terrorism and
the nuclear deterrent at the expense of Britain’s conventional force.
At the end of the day the consequences of defence pretence and aspiring
to play a strategic military leadership role with a military of insufficient
capability or capacity are profound. Somewhere,
sometime, some poor British sailor, soldier and/or airman/woman will be sent
into action inadequately equipped and poorly protected. They will be
effectively asked to fill a gap, at an elevated risk to their own lives, between
the empty utterances of politicians and the deadly reality they face on the ground.
My
recent hard-hitting blogs Lizzie Goes
Forth… and …as Britain’s Military
Sinks, took a lot of criticism from some high bureaucrats, and not a few
senior military officers. The hard truth for London is that my concerns about
Britain’s unbalanced defence policy are correct, and those responsible know
that to be the case. The reason I am an analyst, why I do what I do, and why I will not be
co-opted to support nonsense, is because of my citizen’s support for the men
and women who defend me. And, if politicians,
senior bureaucrats or career-sensitive senior military officers find that politically
inconvenient – tough!
London, stop
turning Britain’s armed forces into a kind of strategic Snatch Land
Rover!
Julian
Lindley-French
