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'Positive Policy' - Defence: Part 1 of 4
Posted by Matthew Taylor (@MTPT)
Friday, 5th March 2010
Now British troops have withdrawn from Iraq, and we are reinforcing Afghanistan, with territorial dispute over the Falkland Islands again in the news, and with crucial elements of the UK's military forces coming to the end of their lifespan, this is a good a time to talk about defence policy.
Let us be clear: we cannot conduct debates about defence policy in way we all too often approach health or education. Where new schools and hospitals can be delivered in a matter of months or a few years, it takes years to build up military forces, and decades to introduce new weapon systems.
Simply pledging to spend money, without a clear strategic vision for how it will be spent, is not policy. Defence spending has risen, in real terms, by over 10% since Labour came to power, but it is far from clear that this increase has been accompanied by a real increase in the capability of our armed forces.
In the same period, we have seen how poorly equipped our armed forces have been to fight the conflict to which we have sent them. The Army had plenty of tanks and unarmoured landrovers, but little in between, and limited supplies of body armour. The RAF was prepared to accept the much-delayed Eurofighter Typhoon, but had only small numbers of heavy lift helicopters, and was reliant on an ageing fleet of aerial reconnaissance aircraft. The shape of our armed forces today reflects 1980s assumptions about the conflicts we would fight. They have been almost universally incorrect.
To make defence policy requires consideration of the foreign policy objectives which we pursue today, tomorrow, and for several decades to come. We must consider not only current commitments, and those which we might want to make, but also the unknowns: those events we cannot properly predict, but must nonetheless prepare for. It also requires that we take account of the experience of the last century, and learn the lessons. This will necessarily lead to dramatic changes in our thinking about defence.
The single most important change will be an acknowledgement that we are at not “at peace”, nor have we been at any time since the second world war. As the asymmetric conflicts of the past two decades demonstrate, the concept of states observing peace and declaring war is little more than a 19th century formality, if not an outright fiction. The choices we make for weapons systems must reflect this reality.
Consider this: since 1945, there has been only one year in which no British soldier died in the line of duty. In the same period, only two ships worldwide have been sunk by attack submarines. It was not until 1982 that a nuclear submarine did so. No RAF jet fighter has ever recorded an air-to-air kill.
Others in this series of policy blogs are going to consider what should foreign policy objectives the UK should pursue. I want to propose three strategies for defense planning and procurement, which reflect these realities. Some may be controversial, but I believe each should be adopted by the UK.
