Originally Posted by
airborne_artist
How many times have we actually needed to use the following:
RAF's UK air defence assets
Army's main battle tanks - GWs 1 and 2, I know, but were they really needed/useful?
RN's SSBN - never, thank God
However, we have them all to hand to deter those who might deterring.
There are issues with
deterrence and that is that it must be credible. Arguably it was credibile during the cold war if the threat from the USSR had itself been credible. As Navaleye said, deterrence is an insurance policy. However like insurance policies, you hope that you never need it and see money spent in the past as money wasted. When you do call on your policy you often find it is not quite what you thought it was.
Deterrence is a bluff. You cannot fight a sustained war with deterrence forces. Once deterrence has failed, or you embark on a war of choice, you need a specific capability and lots of it. We have been as war now since 1991 but not revised our insurance policy.
Do we maintain our insurance policy with aircraft carriers, aircraft and tanks
and provide the resources to fight a war
or go for the short-term option and go for deterrence lite (3 SSBN) and just resource the war?