Commentary: UK won’t be putting military boots on foreign soil in a big way again

 
Orderly pullout: the move paves the way for the withdrawal of most troops
2 April 2013

Just before Easter, the Treasury sneaked out the announcement that spending across all government departments is to be cut by 10 per cent in the comprehensive spending review to the year 2015/16.

I suppose this was the usual Whitehall rule of thumb that the day before the Easter break was a good time to announce bad news. For defence and the armed forces it is all particularly bad because it is likely to mean their combat strength and capability — what they can really do in the field — will have been cut by half in the five years the coalition has been in power.

Of course, some departments such as Health and Overseas Aid, are ring-fenced. We have also been told that the defence equipment budget — the money for the big kit like nuclear submarines, ballistic missiles, aircraft carriers — is not to be cut.

Nobody from politics or the media commentariat has asked why this should be so. A cut of 10  per cent in the budgets for personnel and operations at defence will mean very soon we won’t have enough trained men and women to man the planes, aircraft carriers fighters and frigates now on order.

The Government seems to be suffering from post-Afghanistan syndrome — even before the forces are home from that country. With the withdrawal of UK and other international forces from Afghanistan next year, we close the book on the era of long-term military interventions of the past 12  years.

In future we may mount the odd boutique raid or mission, such as that in Libya or helping the French in Mali, but UK plc is not up for putting its military boots on foreign soil in a big way again. So the Army is likely to be cut further to 70,000 or below, though the RAF and Navy will suffer less as they already look below critical strength.

The costs of military personnel are soaring in all major western countries. The budget for health insurance alone for the US armed services is already more than the budget for the entire US foreign service of overseas embassies and diplomats.

The Government believes we can make up the shortfall by recruiting more reserves, up to 30,000 of them. And of course we can always expand the ranks when the economy picks up. This is nonsense. There just aren’t enough men and women of sufficient quality for the reserve for employers to spare. With half of all candidates for the services now being turned away as educationally or physically unfit, it is going to be hard to expand the forces again.

The new US defence secretary Chuck Hagel has already warned that the American armed forces and the whole defence apparatus face huge cuts, and has called for a radical rethink of US defence strategy.

We need to do the same in Britain. We need substantial work on where and when public security forces across the board, not only the military, are needed — especially for civil contingency. Something far more substantial is required than the flimsy National Security Strategy produced by this Government in 2010.

In the week before Easter as we got the hint of new cuts, we heard of North Korea’s threat of nuclear war, the possible crash of Cyprus’s banks, a massive cyber attack on the internet, the cold reducing the UK to two days reserve of gas. Join the dots — all of the above, and more, pose actual threats to national and international security and stability.

We need a grown-up strategy and adequate numbers of trained personnel to stand a chance of handling the new, and only too real, security agenda.

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