Last year, I orchestrated a war game – a simulation of a national crisis – alongside former cabinet members for Sky News and Tortoise Media. Some of my colleagues were anxious. “Wouldn’t exposing Britain’s weaknesses help enemies like Russia?” I asked myself. Presenter Deborah Haynes came up with the tape as a result: “Russia knows our weaknesses, but you?”
After the resulting drama, titled of War gamethey were serious matters. The Starmer government had recently announced it wanted a “whole of society response” to the threats facing the UK. The government was making big claims about the UK as a defense leader for its allies in the US and Europe. Starmer assured President Trump that the UK was moving towards 5 per cent of GDP on defence, made bold claims about wanting to lead a “coalition of the willing” of peacekeepers in Ukraine and commissioned an independent study into the future of defence, the Strategic Defense Review (SDR).
However, the resignation of defense secretary John Healey on Thursday (June 11), closely followed by armed forces minister Al Carns and two parliamentary aides, shows the government is failing to meet the most basic defense requirements.
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, brilliantly specified that, under Article 5, “an attack against one member was considered an attack against all”. But article three stated, just as clearly, that each member state had responsibility for its own protection. This was important because the Western powers wanted to be able to control the escalation. Article three meant that a minor conflict could be localized. Article 4 provided scope for “consultation” with other members, partly as a final warning to an aggressor. Article five meant that the entire alliance could be mobilized to fight. The United Kingdom and France, in addition, possessed their own sovereign and independent arsenals of nuclear weapons 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 glance, the UK looks stronger than in the past. Eastern European nations voluntarily joined NATO because of the aggressive nature of their Russian neighbor and their desire to never again live under the repressive occupation of communism. This gives the alliance, and therefore the United Kingdom, an increase in land and air power in continental Europe. The United Kingdom is relieved of the burden of having to restore the ground troops and air group it had in West Germany. Its role now, according to NATO, is to possess sufficient ground forces to reinforce Eastern Europe with a mobile body. The UK must have the ability to field a large force and close any gap, from northern Norway to the Turkish border. It implies an entity with a lot of firepower, great maneuverability, 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 ground forces to manage “out of area” operations overseas. The UK’s national interests do not rest in Europe alone. It has an obligation to its crown territories in the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans. It has Commonwealth allies. It has regional partners that offer mutual support, such as Japan and the Republic of Korea. The UK “leaned” into the Indo-Pacific this decade to embrace technological cooperation and made big bets on emerging technology powers, to the advantage of both sides. Britain is the fourth largest producer of technology and innovation in the world – ahead of Germany, France and the rest of Europe. It remains, contrary to popular belief, one of the richest countries in the world and has a seat on the UN Security Council as a permanent member. Great Britain has never been a purely European state. It has always been a global power.
Therefore, the UK’s worldwide defense base has been, first and foremost, naval, and it has excelled in air and electromagnetic power. This is the priority for the UK today. There are two main UK defense goals: to deter in the North Atlantic and Arctic theaters and to be able to win, or support, “out-of-area” missions.
The resignations of ministers indicate that insufficient funds were being allocated for these essential requirements. The resignation letters also suggest something is systematically wrong in the government. There is a clear need to ensure the prosperity of the United Kingdom. For political reasons, Starmer and his chancellor decided to focus on public sector pay, health and a massive increase in welfare spending. The growth did not materialize as they hoped. Borrowing has reached such levels that we are heading for a fiscal disaster. Therefore, the Treasury’s solution is not to give defense what it needs to fix its slack forces, but to apply enough to see it through to the end of this parliament.
The constant refrain of GDP percentages serves this purpose. It’s a fiction, though—perhaps a worthy one for our wargame. A look at the entire armed forces shows what a miserable state they are all in. I visit units of all three services regularly and the message is consistent: we don’t have the ships, weapons, ammunition, support facilities or the number of personnel we need. The word I hear most often in mess halls is “broken.” The word I hear most often in the Ministry of Defense is “paralysis”. A member of the House of Lords told me that the defense has become “sclerotic”. Part of the frustration of ministers is that, as one said, “you can pull a lever and nothing happens”. The civil service seems incapable of going beyond a self-serving “process” and does not reward delivery. It’s a giant HR department, more concerned with how well one treats colleagues than dealing with hostile states and providing skills.
This does not mean that there are no outstanding individuals in the Ministry; there are, and some are really dedicated. But the system has wrong priorities and there are many wastes in bureaucratic procedures. A former defense official shared with me that he actually found two people “surrendering”, but 35 people in the chain behind them, giving their sign and approval. When I laughed ironically, he told me: “Last week, one of the two who gave birth went on maternity leave, so the inefficiency has doubled.”
The authors of the SDR saw that the UK needed to build its defense capabilities around a different architecture, particularly a digitized one. Critics claim this was unrealistic and costless, but they may be missing the point. A single electronic environment, in which units “plug and play”, would mean a more efficient use of various weapons and services based on precise surveillance, data processing and distribution of effects. There are significant opportunities in co-production, the development of dual-use technology and the embrace of the private sector in the spirit of a military-industrial-financial alliance – rather than the old system where MoD generates lists of “requirements” which are unrealistic and often deeply flawed. Bureaucracy fears loss of control and loss of staff, as so many would move to the private sector.
Bringing government spending under control is urgent and essential. The current spending program and its projection are simply unsustainable. Many suspect that there are ulterior motives at work as the government seeks to buy support with generous materials. This policy will not work. Indeed, it will harm the nation for years to come. The ideological refusal to consider 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 defence. It should create a sovereign wealth fund, engage its powerful financial sector, generate wealth with its allies, and bring its Indo-Pacific and global partners closer together, especially in advanced technologies (such as the AUKUS program) and commercial e-highways with developing countries. At home, it should deploy more automation in manufacturing, which would be a more realistic infrastructure program than the transportation of recently invented white elephants.
The UK cannot continue with small boutique armed forces given the deteriorating global environment. It will need to be able to regenerate forces and that means a manufacturing base, steel and shipbuilding. It means making full use of the “white heat of modernity” as Macmillan once called it – that is, an inclusive digital economy, with tech jobs forming a reserved national cadre of professions, as the Ukrainians have done. Our force design – the armed units we create – must be placed within a real operational design – the systems of how they are used to fight – to meet the threats of today and, as best we can ascertain, tomorrow. Our systems, in the past, have been based on firepower, propulsion, crew needs, navigation, surveillance and rapid mobility. Many of the best developments were led by civilians working with the military. This seems to be a good starting point.
The ministerial resignations have finally and dramatically exposed the state of UK defence. Exposed is the operative word. Our nation is putting itself at unnecessary risk and we are condemning young men and women to die needlessly when we are called upon to deal with a crisis. The ministers who resigned agreed that the provision of an inadequate force was morally unacceptable. It is also politically unstable. No amount of spin can now hide the depth of inadequacy in our defence.
(Further reading: Why John Healey had to resign)
