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January 10, 2025 - 7:00am
The recruitment crisis in the Armed Forces has reached new heights (or rather depths). For whatever our previous difficulties in recruiting adequate numbers of soldiers, sailors, and airmen, Britain has to date at least been able to find someone to be in overall charge of things.
No longer, apparently. General Sir Gwyn Jenkins, a former Royal Marine and the leading candidate, faces questions over his knowledge of alleged summary executions by special forces troops in Afghanistan. Meanwhile Admiral Sir Ben Key, the other most obvious candidate, isn’t planning to apply: he’s said he “can’t fix the Navy” given resource constraints and is apparently going to resign next year. The Government is therefore casting about for old hands.
We may thus soon be graced with the absurd sight of General Sir Nick Carter — Britain’s very own Comical Ali, bigging up the heroic Afghan resistance to the Taliban even as it failed to materialise — being called back to service, like Cincinnatus from his plough. More serious than vacuous PR blunders, Carter is also heavily implicated in much of the gross mismanagement of the military in recent decades.
General Sir Patrick Sanders, a former head of the Army, seems a more sensible choice, if only because he’s been very frank about the extremely challenging circumstances facing it. But while such honesty is an essential first step towards finding a solution (and more than some of his peers can manage), it is not enough.
British commanders operate within two hard constraints. The first is that grand strategy (or if that flatters the politicians too much, grand ambitions) is set by the elected government. The second is that so too are the resources assigned to the military to meet those various ambitions.
The core problem is that, as in so many other areas in modern Britain, there is a wide and growing gulf between what the politicians expect the military to be able to do and the means they provide to do it. Decades of steep cuts since the end of the Cold War have not been accompanied by any clear-eyed re-assessment of what role we want the Armed Forces to play.
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SubscribeThe Treasury managerialism view is if it can be imported, then so be it. They are managerialists with models and the tangibles of what they manage and model are irrelevant. The tangible things just happen to be the essentials needed to sustain an industrial society of 70 million people. Steel. Cars. Chemicals. Food. Energy. People. No preference for the development of the nation and citizens it supposedly serves, no strategy to ensure essential capabilities are developed and preserved.
Ukraine has shown the Treasury they can take this approach with defence too. It has been very easy to send a large cheque to Ukraine every month and have someone else worry about the details. And the politicians have noticed too: Ukraine has been able to fight a war heavily endorsed and sponsored by UK leaders but without any blowback at all. The NATO strategic objective of containing Russia met simply by a keyboard and a budget allocation. £20bn more no longer needs to be spent every year to pay for defence we might not need, we can buy defence from someone else when we need it!
It is in this shortsighted context that the gnomes in the Treasury have run the armed forces for decades. Just another financial burden to be managed, minimised wherever possible, without any sense of the long-term ramifications of dead-eyed managerialism. The nation is just an irksome detail in the (blind) eyes of the Treasury managerialists.
I can’t really disagree with any of that, Nell. It seems to be much the same throughout government. It doesn’t surprise me that the Labour Government neglects our defence in order to spend on the NHS, train drivers or minimum wages. What really depresses me is the the Conservatives did too.
All of their statements about more money for defence were just and only that. They never actually did any of it. Not meaningfully.
Ultimately this is probably down to voters’ priorities. We seem to value our butter over our guns. Comfort over safety.
Writing cheques to pay others to fight wars against our strategic enemies is hardly new. It is how Britain did things for a couple of centuries.
It is certainly better to fund Ukraine to eradicate the male population of Russia than have to fight them ourselves.
Of course, we did that with an economy strong enough to pay, and with a navy that could defend our shores and our international trade.
We are blessed with abundant coal, oil and gas and are protected from invasion by the seas. And yet we can’t stop illegal immigration or keep the lights on.
The emasculation of the armed forces in the UK mirrors the emasculation of the British population. Harmful far left woke policies have led to an anaemic military which if challenged would be unable to defend Las Malvinas from the Argentinians. For the monolingual that is the Falklands, many lives were shed in it’s defence and soon it will disappear back to Argentina. Meanwhile in the UK the country is being run by a party that does not believe in sexual difference, the continuance of the British as a people nor the rights of indigenous Britons over that of any Tong, Sadiq or Hari who happens upon one of its beaches in a boat. It is a tragedy, the end of Empire, more so when it’s leaders and it’s military are aware of the imminence of the UK’s destruction.
Just a bit hyperbolic, whilst containing some “home truths”. In reality, the UK is far from “destruction” and there resides a core population who’re finally beginning to stir having seen what happens when they elect “more of the same” whilst the US has signalled the way in which the worm can turn.
Don’t ever give up on us Brits. We’ve been through worse; the core population showed its mettle with the Brexit vote, even if our governments (apart from the last six months of 2019) have failed us.
And the previous 14 years of Tory Right wing rule was not a bigger tragedy?
I note your racial hustle angle. Spent much of my time in the RN in latter years working with shipmates from many different backgrounds all Brits and loyal. You need to get out more.
We all know that both the armed forces and MoD are far too top-heavy (way too many chiefs) and the defence procurement is scandalously inefficient.
As with any unreformed bureaucracy, throwing more money at it is not the real answer.
This is what the absence of actual wars to fight does – organisations become overweight and get distracted by apparently more interesting activities. When the rewards are for making good PR rather than fighting, you’re going to breed PR people and not soldiers.
Good article: thanks! The title of the piece says “leaderless”, but if we look at the Royal Navy, five years ago they had 34 admirals (including vice- and rear-) to supervise 64 ships, but today they have 41 admirals supervising 62 ships. With the MoD employing more than 60,000 civilians, when there are only 180,000 service personnel, defence is nearing that Sir Humphrey situation of the hospital without patients.
The first thing to sort out is the defence of these islands from foreign attack. It strikes me that the worst possible thing you could do is have your entire energy supply dependent on windmill fields in the North Sea and the channel which could be destroyed in an afternoon by enemy drones. Defending a few oil rigs, coal mines and fracking sites would be a damn sight easier.
If the choice is between Army and Navy there is only one option. Keeping these islands (and our allies) safe can’t be done without the Senior Service. If the United Kingdom can’t control the North Atlantic in a war it is done for. Funding Ukraine is portrayed as somehow unbecoming of a first rank military nation. It is the best military budget we could spend – British advisors getting a good hard look at our enemies’ capabilities. If the author thinks Russia is a peer nation he is delusional. They can’t even beat a tiny, economically deprived Ukraine. What would happen if they tried to march into Poland? Or Germany? Or France? (to be fair the last one would be easy enough).
Trump was never sceptical about NATO. He just wanted the countries that weren’t paying their dues (we were only one of 2 or 3 that were) to cough up for the defence of their own continent. There wasn’t this european bedwetting in Asia. Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines heard Trump and upped their military/naval budgets which is now standing them in better order to face China (the only potential peer military on earth). The military might of the West which includes Aus, Japan, Turkey, UK, France, Taiwan, Israel all behind the American juggernaut is unstoppable in a conventional war of defence; in attack nothing is going to be better.
If we were rational we would invest the money in reforming and expanding our police forces whilst radically changing their culture. Not much point in having the ability to project power east of Suez when the machete rules on the streets of our cities.
The Tories made lots of promises on Defence spending, especially in lead up to the GE, but nothing on how they were going to pay for it. And then a further black hole in the nation’s finances uncovered. One can critique the approach of Reeves in her first 6mths but let’s not kid ourselves her inheritance was anything but a pile of the proverbial.
Now as ex-RN I know I have an inbuilt bias to the Service but £3b a year on maintaining Trident? And potentially Billions more on a replacement for a deterrent we know we can’t use without US approval. Yes perhaps nice to have a fixed seat on UN Security Council but part of the reason UN less and less influence is perhaps bigger players now are not e.g India. I’m not for unilateral nuclear disarmament though and want to keep some capability, but I’ve always had doubts about the veracity of the arguments for Trident.
Slight aside but recommend reading Anna Jacobsen’s best seller in 2024 ‘A Nuclear War’. A little overplayed but certainly thought provoking.
Of course I also have a bias that the Top Brass often been pretty useless and more about fighting for their specific Service than really helping develop a coherent overall strategy. Politicians have to make the key decisions but they have to rely on the advice and options put to them.