The Horsell's Mouth Politics, pedantry and personal interests

The British Grand Fleet, 1916 by Fritz Wagner

I would imagine that things are pretty grim in the MoD this week. Not only has this country suffered further losses in Afghanistan but we learned yesterday that the RAF appears to assert little discipline over some of its staff and today that the fault for the fact that a Nimrod surveilliance plane blew up in mid-flight lay squarely at the door of defence officials.

“A systematic breach of the military covenant” was how Charles Haddon-Cave described the circumstances surrounding the Nimrod tragedy three years ago. But his words could have applied to any number of personnel losses since we entered Afghanistan and Iraq with no strategy except to follow the Americans. Our biggest mistake, obviously, was to assume that they had any more clue than we did.

One looks at the lack of footwear, appropriate body armour, military vehicles and even radios (in Kosovo)  that we supply to infantry. Then cast our eye over the fact that the Nimrod MR2 in question was nearly 40 years old. Very, very few civilian aircraft exist in service at that age – why should it be okay for soldiers to travel in ageing and poorly-maintained aircraft any more than civilians?

Our fleet, which even 25 years ago was sufficient to retake the Falklands, is diminishing with each spending review and looks set to be reduced further due to the recessive legacy of this government. Our air defence is manned by shaky, ageing aircraft from the Cold War era and cuts are being made to the Eurofighter aquisition programme. At the moment, we are committed to 16 planes to defend Britain. That’s one plane to defend every four million citizens.

Given all this, I’m not sure where we can still find the money for Trident II. We already have nuclear weapons – although there is a very good case for scaling back the number that we maintain. The future defence of the realm will not be against other nation states with designated armies – it will be the terrifying fight to stop radical terror groups with all sorts of agendas penetrating our homeland security and threatening us with chemcial, biological and nuclear weapons.

Therefore it makes sense to view our Armed Forces as something else. They simply don’t need to fight off an invading army any more. Instead the Armed Forces should be a source of education, inspiration and pride for young men and women alike from communities where other options are limited – it should be an enabling organisation to turn wayward 16 and 17-year olds into rounded and mature 25 year-olds with eight or nine-year service commissions.

It should be a peacekeeping force to help other parts of the world that cannot help themselves. For this, it needs to be versatile, mobile, organised and well-equipped. But it shouldn’t need to be over-administered, excessively large or armed with the latest nuclear weapons. Nor should peacekeeping stretch to regime change – ever again.

Moreoever, we need fewer gunnery officers and more intelligence officers. Resources need to flow from urban warfare into electronic warfare, intelligence gathering and to ensuring that terrorist cells do not have the chance to threaten our security. All the infantry in the world will be no good to us if their barracks become targets for terrorist attack.

At the moment, Labour is hanging on to a mess. They don’t want to properly reform the purpose of our Armed Forces and admit that we have to give up our pretensions of world power. The Armed Forces themselves are reluctant to admit that they are no longer the commanding presence they once were. But we have an army of just 95,000, only two capital ships (with a handful of Harriers now reaching 30 years old) and small number of airworthy RAF fighters that would be totally inadequate to defend this country against another world power.

We need to let go our ideas of military might, take brave decisions about what we need to defend ourselves rather than what we want. It would wonderful to have a Grand Fleet once again and to be able to send up 1,000 bombers each night to menace our enemies. But even if we could afford this splendour, our modern-day enemies would be nowhere to be seen.