A fairly opiniated piece.........
" It’s time for realism about our armed forces Manpower is falling and weaponry shrinking; meanwhile the Ukraine invasion exposes as fantasy an ‘Indo-Pacific tilt’
Britain’s armed forces are crippled by deficiencies and shrinkages. Yet an elder statesman to whom I lamented this responded that if he was still in government, he would balk at producing a Visa card. The Treasury last month agreed an increase in defence spending from £46 billion towards a forecast £50 billion: “The Russians are proving incapable of defeating the Ukrainians. Do you expect us to believe they will take on Nato?” His scepticism is widely shared. Britain’s public finances are sorely strained. There are no votes in defence. Our most recent attempts to leverage military power abroad, in Iraq and Afghanistan, have been humiliating failures.
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One of the two divisions Britain pledges to Nato is supposed to be combat-ready, but nobody believes this to be so. Most new defence money is going to support maritime capability, Johnson’s vision of “global Britain”. Yet the Ukraine invasion almost immediately exposed as unrealistic the “
Indo-Pacific tilt”, proclaimed by the government in 2021’s Integrated Review. Whatever the outcome of the war, it seems essential for us to contribute to permanent Nato tripwire forces in Poland and the Baltic states, to deter further Russian aggression.
Like it or not, Europe is our continent. Yet all European army formations, to be capable of taking the field, rely on the support of American artillery and missile systems. In the event of war the RAF is tasked to provide a “day one” interdiction capability over the battlefield, but nobody believes it could do so.
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there's a lot moreAlmost no orders have yet been placed for munitions to rebuild our shrunken war reserve stocks, since the cupboard was stripped — rightly — to help arm the Ukrainians. Thales, hampered by a continent-wide shortage of fuses and guidance systems, struggles to manufacture seven missiles a day, maybe 15 minutes’ consumption on a “hot” battlefield. The Ukraine experience emphasises the importance of big munitions stockpiles.
All these shortcomings reflect decades of neglect, together with some shockingly bad procurement decisions, often politically driven. The current chief of defence staff, Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, was appointed by Boris Johnson because he won favour as an optimist, a “booster”, with a similar mindset to that of the then prime minister.