Last year, I orchestrated a wargame – a simulation of a national crisis – alongside former cabinet members for Sky News and Tortoise Media. Some of my colleagues were anxious. “Won’t exposing Britain’s weaknesses help enemies like Russia?” I was asked. Presenter Deborah Haynes came up with the strapline as a result: “Russia knows our weaknesses, but do you?”
Behind the resulting drama, titled The Wargame, were serious issues. The Starmer government had recently announced it wanted a “whole of society response” to the threats the UK faced. The government was making big statements about the UK as a defence leader to its allies in the US and Europe. Starmer assured President Trump that the UK was heading to 5 per cent of GDP on defence, made bold claims about wanting to lead a “coalition of the willing” of peace enforcers in Ukraine and commissioned an independent study for the future of defence, the Strategic Defence Review (SDR).
However, the resignation of defence secretary John Healey on Thursday (11 June), closely followed by armed forces minister Al Carns and two parliamentary aides, indicates that the government is not meeting the most fundamental requirements for defence.
During the Cold War, a more solid arrangement existed in Nato. The charter of the alliance, which was, and remains, purely regional and defensive in nature, specified famously that, under article five, “an attack on one member was considered an attack on all.” But article three stated, just as clearly, that each member state had responsibility for its own defence. This was important because the Western powers wanted to be able to control escalation. Article three meant a small conflict could be localised. Article four gave room for “consultation” with other members, partly as a last warning to an aggressor. Article five meant the whole alliance could be mobilised to fight. The UK and France, in addition, possessed their own sovereign and independent nuclear weapons arsenals to deter any threat of nuclear attack.
Cold War 2.0, which began in the 2010s, is not of the same character as the first Cold War. At first sight, the UK seems stronger than in the past. Eastern European nations voluntarily joined Nato because of the aggressive nature of their Russian neighbour and their desire never again to live under the repressive occupation of communism. This gives the alliance, and therefore the UK, an augmentation of land and air power on the continent of Europe. The UK has been relieved of the burden of having to re-establish the land corps and air group it used to have in West Germany. Its role now, according to Nato, is to possess sufficient land forces to reinforce Eastern Europe with a mobile corps. The UK must have the ability to lift a large force and plug any gap, from northern Norway to the border of Türkiye. It implies an entity with plenty of firepower, great manoeuvrability, and a large enough body of troops that it can take losses and remain combat effective, a euphemism that means it can continue to fight and sustain itself for months, perhaps years.
The advantage of having this reinforcement role was that the UK could detach and reattach land forces to manage overseas “out of area” operations. The UK’s national interests do not lie solely in Europe. It has an obligation to its crown territories in the Atlantic, Indian Ocean, and Pacific. It has Commonwealth allies. It has regional partners which provide mutual support, such as Japan and the Republic of Korea. The UK “tilted” to the Indo-Pacific in this decade to embrace technological cooperation and made big bets on the emergent tech powers, to the advantage of both sides. Britain is the fourth largest technology and innovation producer in the world – ahead of Germany, France and the rest of Europe. It remains, contrary to popular belief, one of the richest countries of the world and has a place in the UN Security Council as a permanent member. The UK has never been a purely European state. It has always been a global power.
The worldwide basis of the UK’s defence has therefore been, first and foremost, maritime, and it has excelled with air and electromagnetic power. This is the priority for the UK today. There are two primary purposes of UK defence: to deter in the North Atlantic and Arctic theatre and to be able to win, or support, in “out of area” missions.
The resignations of ministers indicate that insufficient funding was being allocated to these core requirements. The resignation letters also hint at something systemically wrong in government. There is an obvious need to ensure UK prosperity. For political reasons, Starmer and his Chancellor decided to focus on public sector pay, health and a massive surge in welfare spending. Growth did not materialise as they hoped. Borrowing has reached such vast levels that we are heading towards a fiscal disaster. The Treasury’s solution is therefore not to give defence what it needs to fix its hollowed forces, but to apply just enough to get to the end of this parliament.
The constant refrain of percentages of GDP serves this purpose. It’s a fiction though – perhaps one worthy of our wargame. A glance across the armed forces shows what a parlous state they are all in. I visit units of all three services regularly and the message is consistent: we don’t have the ships, the guns, the munitions, the enabling facilities or the numbers of personnel we need. The word I hear most often in the mess halls is “broken”. The word I hear most often in the Ministry of Defence is “paralysis”. One member of the House of Lords told me defence has become “sclerotic”. Part of the ministers’ frustration is that, as one put it, “you can pull a lever and nothing happens”. The civil service seems incapable of moving beyond a self-serving “process” and does not reward delivery. It is one gigantic human resources department, more concerned with how nicely one treats one’s colleagues than confronting hostile states and delivering capability.
That is not to say there aren’t outstanding individuals in the Ministry; there are, and some are truly dedicated. But the system has the wrong priorities and there is too much waste in bureaucratic procedures. One former defence official related to me that he had found two people actually “delivering”, but 35 people in the chain behind them, giving their sign off and approval. When, with irony, I laughed, he said: “Last week, one of the two doing delivery went on maternity leave, so the inefficiency has doubled.”
The authors of the SDR saw that the UK needed to build its defence capability around a different architecture, particularly a digitised one. Critics claim that this was unrealistic and uncosted, but they may have missed the point. A single electronic environment, into which units “plug and play”, would mean a more efficient use of the various arms and services based on precise surveillance, data processing and delivery of effects. There is considerable opportunity in co-production, dual use technology development and embracing the private sector in a spirit of military-industry-financial fusion – rather than the old system where the MoD generates lists of “requirements” which are unrealistic and often deeply flawed. The bureaucracy fears a loss of control and loss of staff, since so much would shift to the private sector.
Bringing government spending under control is urgent and essential. The current programme of expenditure and its projection are simply unsustainable. Many suspect there are base motives at work as the government looks to buy support with generous handouts. This policy will not work. Indeed, it will damage the nation for years to come. The ideological refusal to contemplate further development of the UK’s own energy reserves is widely condemned, and, in the midst of a global energy crisis, rightly so. The UK needs to develop a long-term approach to paying for its services and its defence. It should establish a sovereign wealth fund, engage its powerful financial sector, generate wealth with its allies and bring in more closely its Indo-Pacific and global partners, especially in advanced technologies (such as the AUKUS programme) and commercial electronic superhighways with developing nations. At home, it has to establish more automation in manufacturing, which would be a more realistic infrastructure programme than the transportation white elephants concocted recently.
The UK cannot persist with small boutique armed forces given the deteriorating global environment. It is going to have to be able to regenerate forces and that means a manufacturing, steelmaking, and shipbuilding base. It means the full exploitation of the “white heat of modernity” as Macmillan once called it – that is, a comprehensive digital economy, with tech jobs forming a national reserved occupations cadre, as the Ukrainians have done. Our force design – the armed units we create – must be placed within a realistic operational design – the systems of how they are employed to fight – to meet the threats of today and, as best we can ascertain, of tomorrow. Our systems have, in the past, been based on firepower, propulsion, crew needs, navigation, surveillance, and rapid mobility. Many of the finest developments were led by civilians working with the military. That seems to be a good starting point.
Ministerial resignations have, finally and dramatically, exposed the state of the UK’s defences. Exposed is the operative word. Our nation is placing itself at unnecessary risk and we are condemning young men and women to die unnecessarily when we are next called to deal with a crisis. The ministers who resigned agreed that providing an inadequate force was morally unacceptable. It is also politically unsustainable. No amount of spin can now conceal the depth of inadequacy in our defences.
[Further reading: Why John Healey had to resign]
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