A Smaller Military for a Safer Britain
The Defence of the Realm
“Spend the Six” - that’s what HBD martyr Andrew Sabisky tells us in a film for the BBC. Liz Truss had settled on the more modest goal of spending 3% of GDP on defence before being removed from office. But the direction of travel is clear: Britain will drastically increase its spending on defence in response to the increased threat it perceives from Russia and China.
The Boring Right has been seduced by this prospect. Images of a naval flotilla sailing through the Channel or Grenadiers in bearskins marching down the Mall are enough to set the pulses racing on this side of Twitter. Britain needs to resist “declinism” and restore our military to its pomp after the Second World War. Exactly how the military will be used to further Britain’s own strategic, commercial and territorial interests is left as an exercise to the reader. Liberal interventionists argue the military’s purpose is to ensure Afghan girls go to school. Cold warriors want to use it to risk nuclear war with Russia. And the comedians amongst the Twiter right want us to go to war with, *giggles*, France.
Our current strategy of maintaining a large expeditionary force as an appendage to the American Empire is not working. No one can point to a benefit Britain received or a detriment it avoided by taking part in the US led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Are the Falklands, Northern Ireland or Gibraltar recognised by more members of the “international community” than before? In fact, the EU and the USA take no position on the sovereignty of the Falklands, nor does America recognise Gibraltar’s status as a British territory, despite using it as a military base. France rebuked America for its war in Iraq and still retains eleven internationally recognised exclaves in South America, the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, the Pacific, the East Indies and Canada.
Our defence policy is better explained by political economy. Giving Ukraine billions of pounds in military aid, boycotting Russian energy and sanctioning Russian businessmen does not improve the security or prosperity of the UK, but it does allow MPs to feel really important. Boris Johnson enjoys huge popularity in Ukraine and managed several visits to Zelensky where they were filmed walking around Kiev. He will go down in the history books as a prominent foreign supporter of Ukraine, and has set up his later rehabilitation for corporate speaking gigs and the North London dinner party circuit. However, it is unlikely we will see any reciprocation from Ukraine in our own territorial disputes. A video of Zelensky comparing Putin to General Galtieri or Gerry Adams is the least we could request in return for the support we’ve given Ukraine.
MPs cannot be trusted with a military as large as currently exists. The Parliamentarians most influential in foreign policy are also the most interventionist. Johnny Mercer, the former Minister for Veteran Affairs, favoured imposing a no-fly zone over
the Ukraine, as did the Chair of the Defence Select Committee Tobias Ellwood. The then Chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee Tom Tugendhat called for all Russian assets to be seized and all Russian citizens to be expelled. When Labour were in power the anti-imperialist left were sidelined, and now they are closer to power again they’ve adopted more conventional foreign policy positions than under Jeremy Corbyn. Generals love going to war because it increases their importance, allows them to test military theories and provides an opportunity for their men to gain combat experience.
There will eventually be a new foreign catastrophe and demands for British soldiers to defend our values or the rights of another people. This is how the first and second world wars were pitched to the country. Both resulted in the death of a generation, national bankruptcy and territorial losses. Later interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone and the Balkans were justified on humanitarian grounds, but also on the basis that they helped us build “influence” on the global stage. Curiously, “influence” is something which is only ever accumulated, but never expended to achieve concessions from other countries.
Our foreign policy needs a reset. We should dramatically reduce military spending for both strategic and economic reasons. We have one of the few militaries in the world which is prepared to be deployed to any environment (tundra, desert, mountains, et cetera). We have hundreds of tanks and pieces of artillery so that we are prepared to fight a conventional European land war, as our former Chief of the Combined Staff argued was necessary once more. Our Navy is the largest in Europe and is more than twice the size of the German and Italian Navies. Our Air Force is more modest but is still the second largest in Europe. Our military budget is the fourth largest in the world and the largest in Europe. Higher wages in developed countries do inflate the size of our budget, but wages only make up approximately 10% of spending on our Armed Forces1. And as a percentage of GDP we are the joint third largest spenders in NATO - ranking us among small countries with large neighbours like Greece, Lithuania and Estonia, and the United States. The oft repeated idea that the Armed Forces have been “cut to the bone” is a myth.
And many of our national security interests are not pursued through military force at all. Immigration and energy policy are just as, if not more, important. France has suffered more from Islamist terrorism than any European country because of the size of its Muslim population2. Germany has shown far more belligerence to Islamic countries, the traditional explanation for Islamic terrorism, but has had fewer terror attacks because of its comparatively small Muslim population, and their Turkish and Balkan rather than Arabic, African or South Asian origins. Eastern Europe has avoided this security threat almost entirely because of the absence of any substantial Muslim population (outside of the Balkans). We have already allowed a large Muslim population to settle in Britain and consequently have been victims of numerous Islamic terrorist attacks. But we should restrict any further immigration of Muslims and repatriate Muslim foreign nationals to mitigate the risk of further attacks.
Energy independence is also necessary for national security. Britain and France withdrew from Suez after an operational success because Arab countries led an oil embargo, which the United States threatened to join. Britain is still an energy importer, reliant on French nuclear power, Norwegian gas and Arabian oil. Building nuclear power plants would reduce our reliance on imported fossil fuels for electricity generation. Exploring shale gas fields and remaining North Sea deposits would allow us to source more of our own energy. And reforming our planning system could allow more oil refineries to be built. Energy independence would enable Britain to act unilaterally, which is necessary when our interest don’t align with those of energy producers or the United States.
The military should be scaled back and refocused on defending our territorial waters, British Overseas Territories and Northern Ireland. This may sound like regression but we can retain significant capabilities from our position as a former superpower. We got the bomb before non-proliferation treaties, and can run Trident at a fraction of the overall cost of the military budget3. We have a seat on the UNSC because of our victorious position in the second world war (possibly the only benefit we drew from participation). And we have a “champions league” or “world beating” foreign intelligence service, which can be repurposed to achieve our own security objectives, not those of other countries.
To defend BOTs we need to retain some expeditionary capabilities, equivalent to the task force which was sent to the Falklands in 1982. And we need to retain a large enough Air Force, Army and Navy to maintain our bases in BOTs and our system for defending the British mainland. But the number of full-time personnel, and crucially the amount of money spent on equipment and vehicles, could be drastically reduced by closing our overseas bases in Germany, Kenya, Qatar and Nepal and reviewing our bases in Singapore and Brunei.
The other vital territory the Armed Forces should be able to defend is Northern Ireland. This is mostly achieved through intelligence gathering on republican and loyalist terrorist groups. But retaining peacekeeping and special forces capabilities is also necessary. A conventional military armed with heavy weaponry, air power and artillery is completely ineffective given the enemy uses the civilian population as human shields.
We should maintain NATO membership while failing to meet the two percent of GDP spending target. A Spanish attack on Gibraltar or a Greek or Turkish attack on Akrotiri and Dhekelia would invoke NATO Article 5 even if Turkey and Greece are also members. This does carry the risk of being called to defend Lathustonia, but after Russia’s misadventure in Ukraine and the unlikelihood of Georgia joining NATO, our most likely Article 5 risk is a Turkish attack on Greece proper, which would be easily repelled by the NATO coalition.
Some will malign this plan as “hobbitry” and argue Britain should embrace “Anglofuturism” and become a Great Power once more. This is not a serious proposal unless there is a rapid reversal of the last one hundred years of global demographic change and technological diffusion, and China undergoes another century of humiliation. Those who want a country with less than one percent of the world’s population to act aggressively on the world stage are not “progressive”, they are delusional. Only one such country gets to do that. The best strategy for Britain is isolation and self-defence.
The military should also be a tool for nation building. The number of reserve personnel should be increased so that a high proportion of young, white British men will have common bonds and experiences from serving in the Armed Forces. The military effectiveness of part-time Tommys is not relevant. We are a large island on the edge of a peaceful continent. We do not need to be a Spartan society like Finland or Israel. This would also be value for money - for every active member we retire, we can recruit ten reserve personnel for the same wages. And given we would not be training them on expensive weapon systems or sending them on long deployments non-wage costs4 would be lower.
Even if we allocate just 1% of our GDP to our Armed Forces, only France, Germany and Russia would outspend us in Europe. And we would be safer, richer and stronger than we are now. Military adventures would be debated in strategic terms. Fewer men would return in caskets to satisfy the mawkish shrieking of cabinet ministers. And resources could be refocused on solving our real national security threats by increasing energy production or reducing immigration. We only need ignore less happier lands, and exploit our geographic inheritance, this fortress built by nature for herself.
Assuming the mean salary of British personnel is £40,000 (a generous estimate) then spending on wages is roughly £6,000,000,000 which is 10% of our £60,000,000,000 Defence Budget
The French census does not collect information on religion or ethnicity but survey data consistently shows it has the largest self identified Muslim population (in absolute terms) and the Afro-Arabian population, who are majority Muslim by origin, are more than 10% of the population according to a range of estimates
Trident costs about 5% of the total defence budget https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trident_(UK_nuclear_programme)#Cost
As above non-wage costs are 90% of military spending