Our magical thinking spells defence disaster

Unrealistic ideas and self-deception endanger security, anger allies and cost Ukrainian lives

Russia’s war in Ukraine has laid bare three decades of delusions. We ignored the threat from Russia and hollowed out our armed forces. We fought and lost two wars of choice, in Iraq and Afghanistan. We covered up our weaknesses with spin, stunts, slogans (“Global Britain”) and legerdemain. Now reality is biting. We face in effect a war of necessity: a direct military challenge from Russia to the European security order. But our enfeebled military cannot meet its obligations to defend us and our allies.

As Table Media, a German specialist news outlet, has revealed, Nato is so worried about Britain’s military overstretch that it has asked Germany to keep the rotating leadership of the alliance’s new spearhead force, the Very High Readiness Joint Task Force (VJTF), for a further year.

We must provide a 5,000-strong force, ready within two to five days. Crucially, these soldiers may not be committed to any other task. Britain habitually double-counts its military obligations, so that the same troops fulfil multiple, clashing duties. But Nato sees through this. It is shaming that our allies would prefer even the notoriously underpowered Germans to our own armed forces for this vital role.

The Ministry of Defence insists that Britain is ready to fulfil its commitment, though Nato has not denied making the request to Berlin. But all over our military machine, rivets are popping, while “the magical thinking is getting worse”, as Francis Tusa, a defence analyst, tells me.

This is most visible in the help we are pledging to Ukraine. The 14 Challenger tanks we are sending there are between a third and a half of our usable fleet. Most of the nominally 200-strong force of these giant killing machines are rusting in warehouses. We promised 30 AS-90 self-propelled artillery guns. Now it turns out we can send only eight, with another 16 at “various states of readiness” elsewhere. That will doubtless be of great comfort to the Ukrainians, who need them all right now.

Overstretch last year forced us to bring home half of our 2,000-strong tripwire force in Estonia. The troops still deployed there lack ammunition: our puny “war stocks” of shells are kept in Britain. Our training programme is in shreds.

Ben Wallace, the defence secretary, laments that the Americans no longer regard us as a first-tier fighting force. But this frantic lobbying for bigger budgets from him and his squabbling brass-hats misses the point. The really striking fact here is that while our army cannot (by Wallace’s admission) deploy a single combat-capable division, Poland can provide four. It is smaller and poorer than Britain but it focuses its efforts and spends its money more wisely. The same could be said of countries such as Australia. Its air force, though much smaller, is probably more combat-capable than the RAF.

As Edward Stringer, a former director of Strategic Command, argues, our approach has been like trying to create a medium-sized rhododendron by pruning a large one. You end up with a lot of roots and too little foliage. Instead, we need a rethink on the lines of those that followed the disastrous Crimean and Boer wars. It should centre on our biggest duty, the defence of Europe in Nato, rather than faraway missions where we will always be too small or too weak to make a difference.

In the short term, we must deal with munitions supplies with the vigour shown by Lord Beaverbrook, the newspaper tycoon whose no-holds-barred approach to aircraft production saved us in 1940. Russia’s invasion is now backed by a war economy. We are still wedded to the leisurely habits of peacetime.
Time is not on our side. Our allies are increasingly impatient with the mismatch between our grand words and skimpy capabilities. Moreover, while we dither and fantasise, Ukraine bleeds and shatters. Worse lies ahead as Russia continues its war of attrition. By the time western allies finally provide warplanes, for example, Ukraine will be gravely short of pilots to fly them.

Yet we should beware of magical thinking. A defeated Russia will be volatile and vengeful. And it may yet cudgel Ukraine into submission, gaining territorial and other trophies. Whatever the war’s outcome, Europe will be a dangerous place. And we are dangerously ill-defended.

What a complete pile of poo(rly researched and argued nonsense).

While I would not argue with the need to increase log stocks and enablers, the justifications and arguments in the piece represent shoddy logic.

Lets start with the assertion that NATO is so worried by the state of the UK that they have asked Germany to extend its lead of the VJTF - which it only assumed on 1st Jan this year. This assertion appears to be based solely on a German media article - there's no other source for it. Also the classic NATO has not denied / when did you stop beating your wife? line. How strange that they'd do that at the start of the rotation. That'll also be the German army that is smaller than the British Army as well, I assume? Strangely, that does not get a mention.

Francis Tusa is hardly a source of unvarnished truth either. I'm fairly sure that the 30 AS90 were always couched in terms of arriving depending on readiness.

Then we get the line "Ben Wallace laments that the Americans no longer regard us as a first-tier fighting force". I'm fairly sure SoS has never said any such thing. That is deliberate manipulation of a news report to portray something completely different.

Then we get the "Poles have four times the number of combat capable divisions than we do", dressed up as some form of better use of resources. Might that not be down to the Poles being a traditional land power, positioned right next to the threat, rather than some magical defence efficiency? They don't have a particularly large naval requirement either - a crucial difference.

It's only when you dig into Mr Lucas' background that the truth emerges. He's a european specialist and former LibDem candidate - could these two facts possibly have any bearing on his preference for concentrating on NATO?

This is all part of a concerted lobbying attempt by certain parties to recreate BAOR - or more precisely defer / cancel the planned restructure of the Army as part of the IR refresh.

At no point do any of them explain why the UK (or the US for that matter) should front up large land formations of troops in Eastern Europe, when European nations much closer to the threat - particularly Germany - appear unwilling to do so. It's not as if Ivan is showing particular competence in his ground operations is it? that's against an opposition with a fraction of the counter-air and air-to-ground capabilities that NATO would deploy in the first 5 minutes of any Russian push westwards.

There's a very real danger of learning precisely the wrong lessons from this conflict - and Lucas and his ilk are just the people to teach them....