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The Defence Debate to Come - Commentary no. 374

Whoever wins the General Election, one thing is for certain. We have to have a serious defence review. It’s inevitable and it’s overdue. Defence has become a seriously expensive business. But this doesn’t mean to say that it’s something we can’t afford. The ability to defend ourselves has to be the prime responsibility of Government. But people may ask are we really likely to be attacked? You can never tell. After the experience of the First World War, who would have thought that anybody would have wanted to fight another war like it? But yet, in 1940, 70 years ago, we came nearer to being successfully invaded than at any time since the Norman Conquest, when they succeeded in doing so.

Furthermore, we should remember that sending a message that we only put the Defence of the Realm low in our list of priorities, is to invite trouble. Why did Argentina invade the Falklands in 1982? Because we had, misguidedly, cut down on our naval presence in the South Atlantic. We need our navy. Everybody can agree to that, but we also need the RAF. What we don’t need is to amalgamate the 3 services into one single defence capability. The Navy do ships. And the RAF does flying.

The real question centres on what resources we need for fighting wars overseas. What this boils down to is the question of how much we are willing to invest in projecting our power abroad. This is fundamentally a political question.

The argument has been made, in joining America in toppling Saddam Hussein, that we were in the business of defending the shopper in Oxford Street. The chaps we sent to fight in Iraq were doing the same job as the Spitfire pilots flying from Biggin Hill in 1940. The same goes for Afghanistan. The Battle of Britain cost the lives of some 450 young pilots. The casualties we have suffered in Afghanistan are already well over 200. At this rate they seem likely to exceed the Battle of Britain tally, before we are through. This is not to argue that the lives being sacrificed in Afghanistan are lives wasted. Our soldiers have been laying down their lives in a noble cause. No. The point is whether we, as a country, should be in the business of putting boots on the ground to fight overseas wars.

It is interesting to note that the present conflict in Afghanistan has been changing. This latest offensive is aimed at improving the lives of the locals. We have made a considerable play of how the Afghanistan Army is in the front line with us. We are trying to sell ourselves as the best bet for peace, for the locals. Furthermore, we are emphasising our role as the source of professional training. This is actually the business we should be in.

We have expertise in our armed forces which is precisely what we should be offering our friends and allies. We shouldn’t be in the business of fighting their wars for them. The fact is we can’t afford that. Historically, we’ve always tried to avoid doing this. We haven’t got the manpower of continental countries with their tradition of having conscript armies.

What we should be doing is taking a leaf out of the German example, following the First World War. The Versailles Treaty only permitted Germany to have a 100 000 strong army after that conflict. It was run by a certain General Von Seekt. He was a genius. He built that 100 000 strong army so that it became such a professionally trained army that it could be expanded into an army of millions. Well, we don’t want to have an army of millions again. But the principle can be applied to a peace time force so that it has the potential for every man in it to be an instructor. Such a force would be capable of training the army of a friendly overseas power whom we wanted to help. We can’t afford to help such countries to fight their wars for them. But what we ought to be able to do is to go in and train them to fight their own conflicts.

Hand in hand with forging this type of armed force, our politicians need to understand that this is the resource they can use. It means going back from the Tony Blair policy of actual direct intervention. There is, of course, one exception that needs to be made to this policy for our new Model Army, that is a Falklands type intervention. In fact, of course, it’s not an intervention. It is truly the defence of what is genuinely British Soil. There isn’t much of the world that is still painted red. But what there is has to be our liability to defend. That liability probably defined the limit of the size of our army. It needs to be big enough and strong enough to handle that liability. This means that our politicians need to ensure that we don’t offer the guarantee to defend them when we haven’t the resources to meet the cost of carrying out the guarantee. We must not do another Poland. We offered them our guarantee. And we let them down. Yet they took a leading part in defending us in the skies over Britain in 1940. But we failed to go to their aid when they were attacked. We must never do that again. In the future we must always be ready to defend that which we guarantee. That means that the Defence Review coming up must provide the resources to defend these islands, to defend our overseas territories and to provide the training resource for our friends and allies. What the services say they require in order to carry these three obligations out is what they should have.

Tony Rudd

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