Kai looked out at the boys playing, and told me about his childhood during the war. He was, he said, younger than his pupils when he saw someone burned alive in front of him. The man was a rebel, and a few weeks previously, he’d shot another person, an act which Kai witnessed too. Now, the murderer was at the mercy of a mob, seeking revenge.

They shoved a tire around his neck, doused him with gasoline, and set him alight. This was 1997, Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone. Kai and his family had been driven from their home in Kenema, a city in the east of the country, by the rebel advance. They arrived in Freetown among thousands of other refugees. “We were accused of being rebels, spat at, called ‘monkeys’, people said we had tails,” he says. Kai’s older brother didn’t make it – he was captured by the rebels and taken to Liberia.

Kai’s family were educated, but in Freetown there was no work. So Kai and his siblings sold charcoal to support themselves. They sheltered in a hotel commandeered by “Kamajors”, a civil defense militia, who wore voodoo-infused “body-armor”: string vests, hung with woolen charms and trinkets. When there was a general amnesty for weapons in 1999, Kai’s mother persuaded him to take in one of their guns to receive payment. It was a believable story – child soldiers were common. The money kept them going for a while. But “it was very, very hard,” Kai says. Throughout the war, he barely went to school.

***

It’s been 25 years since the end of Sierra Leone’s war. What began as an army uprising against the corrupt administration of the then-President Joseph Momah on 23 March, 1991, swiftly spilled into a bloody regional conflict. In a small country of five million people, more than 50,000 people were killed, and hundreds of thousands more wounded, disabled and displaced. At one point, the army rebels held almost all the country, including parts of Freetown. Speak to anyone in Sierra Leone over the age of 30, and they will have stories of trauma and loss.

It’s too easy to dismiss Sierra Leone’s conflict as a historic tragedy – simply the kind of thing that happens in Africa, as inevitable as the rains. But the British military intervention, which brought the war to an end in an extraordinary fashion in 2001 – through concentrated force, in-depth understanding of regional politics and clear, boundaried objectives – showed how Western powers can use military force humanely and effectively to create change, including in current conflicts, such as Iran.

Yet after a bright period of stabilization and peace, the country seems to be backsliding into the conditions which led to the war in the first place. Indeed, UnHerd can today report that Britain has ended its permanent military presence in Sierra Leone, citing security concerns. And as the Western powers have pulled out of West Africa, other countries – principally China and Russia – have hungrily stepped in to fill the breach. Sierra Leone today provides a front-row seat to the new Great Game, as Western and non-Western powers scramble to control their “spheres of influence” through diplomatic, military and economic might.

***

Even by the standards of Africa’s civil conflicts, Sierra Leone’s war was breathtaking in its brutality. It began when a breakaway commander in the Sierra Leone army, Foday Sankoh, led an incursion from neighboring Liberia. His nominal goal was to overthrow Momoh’s government. But sponsored by Charles Taylor, the dictator of Liberia, who wanted a piece of Sierra Leone’s diamond industry, Sankoh’s Revolutionary United Front (RUF) ran riot. Allied with elements of the Sierra Leone Army — a faction which came to be called the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) — the rebels terrorized ordinary Sierra Leoneans. In response, many formed militias, the Kamajors, to fight back. They were a rag-tag bunch: alongside their faith in voodoo-infused protection from bullets, they also believed that a mirror could deflect an RPG.

The rebels lacked a central command structure, and individual commanders effectively acted as private warlords, rampaging across the country, looting, raping and kidnapping children to fight for them. Among the various factions were foreign mercenaries from Britain and South Africa, the Kamajors and the West Side Boys, a gang of drugged-up thugs. Adding to the chaos were the Sierra Leone Army’s “sobels” — soldiers by day, rebels by night. Child soldiers were used by all sides — but were a signature of the RUF, as were mass mutilations. Fighters would cut off people’s arms to spread terror among the population, especially after the 1996 election returned a democratically-elected President. (“Vote for the government, lose your hand.”)

By late 1999, it looked like Sankoh and the rebels were poised to seize full control of the country. The previous decade had seen coups, counter-coups and democratic elections; there had been half-hearted attempts at peace deals and disarmament. Though the government was nominally run by Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, a former UN development worker who had been elected by a landslide in 1996, the power lay with Sankoh. He paid lip-service to the 1997 Lome Peace Agreement, which was supposed to defuse the fighting, but refused to disarm the RUF and had himself installed as Minister for Mines. The UN peacekeeping forces were underpowered and ineffective; the rebels were becoming increasingly assertive, attacking positions on the way to the airport and threatening Freetown.

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At this point, the Foreign Office ordered a Non-Combatant Evacuation (NEO) — Operation Palliser — of British citizens, headed by the then-Brigadier, David Richards, who had already visited the country on several occasions. With a small team of British officers, paratroopers and special forces soldiers, he set about taking the fight to the RUF. This went explicitly against orders from London, who wanted Richards to remain solely focused on the evacuation mission. He ignored them, rallying beleaguered UN troops and forging an “unholy alliance” between the Sierra Leone Army (SLA), the Kamajors and warlord Johnny Paul Koroma’s West Side Boys — all of whom had been at each other’s throats in previous months. Using British troops as a spearhead, they pushed back against the RUF with maximum force. They were aided in this blitzkrieg campaign by Neall Ellis, an eccentric South African mercenary who piloted a Russian-made Hind Mi-24 attack helicopter.

Within weeks, the RUF were on the back foot, and driven to the negotiating table. Whitehall — despite sneers about Richards’ buccaneering tactics, earning him the nickname “Richards of Africa” — was forced to concede that Operation Palliser had been a success. The lightning campaign was the making of Richards’s career; afterwards, he went on to command NATO forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and served as Chief of Defense Staff. By the end of 2000, Sankoh was in prison awaiting trial, and the democratically-elected government could begin to rebuild. Thirteen of the ringleaders of the conflict were put on trial in the high court in Freetown. Sankoh died before he could begin his sentence, but Charles Taylor, the Liberian dictator, was sentenced to 50 years for war crimes and crimes against humanity. He is currently serving his term at HMP Frankland in County Durham.

Yet Richards says now that he wasn’t concerned about the storm the Sierra Leone intervention caused back home. “I never expected to be a Field Marshal or anything like that. I had a rather romantic idea of what the military could do — that the Armed Forces could make people’s lives better, rather than the conventional view of armies as brutal killing machines. This was the last British-only foreign intervention. We had sufficient military muscle to do it then. I’m not sure we could do it now.”

***

Unlike the sprawling, messy interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan – and now in Iran – Richards’s campaign was short, sharp and goal-limited. There were no lofty aspirations about “regime change” or “sowing the seeds of democracy”; instead, the campaign was about supporting Kabbah’s military until they could stand on their own against the RUF, and then lending a hand as Kabbah sought to shore up his country again. To this end, for ten years afterwards, the British ran a training center for future officers in Freetown and provided foreign aid to support the government. “We helped get it back on its feet,” says Richards. “Most coups and dictatorships in Africa are born of the armed forces, so we were very keen in Sierra Leone that we had a democratically-elected president, with an accountable armed forces.”

After that first decade, British support began to dwindle. Since 2019, the UK’s Official Development Assistance (ODA) has been cut from 0.7% to 0.5% of Gross National Income; and, as of this year, it will hit its lowest since 2008 — down to 0.3%. This drop in foreign aid has blindsided countries like Sierra Leone. In the country, things seem more precarious; politics appears to be polarizing along the lines of old tribal animosities. So far, presidential elections have peacefully rotated every five years between the two main parties, the SLPP and the APC, and no president has tried to push their two-term limit. But the current President Julius Maada Bio is seen in some quarters as autocratic and nepotistic — and some Sierra Leoneans I spoke to felt it was only a matter of time before the peaceful transition of power broke down. In addition, many of the factors that led to the war — illiteracy, uneven development, drugs and corruption — are still present; by themselves, each is a manageable issue. But taken together, their effect is corrosive, especially given the context of Sierra Leone’s endemic poverty. The minimum monthly wage is 1,200 Leones (less than £40), and outside of Freetown, mains electricity and running water are scarce. People make do with solar power units, but they also look across to the nearby Ivory Coast, which has almost comprehensive mains electricity coverage, and wonder what is going wrong.

One compelling answer to that question is corruption. It operates at all levels — I was frisked for money several times by policemen at the ubiquitous roadblocks — but, more damagingly, it pervades the apparatus of the state. Only 6% of businesses which can pay tax do so, and the main industries — mining, ports and defense — are run by the President’s inner circle. “My time to eat,” runs a local saying. This lack of altruism leads to widespread culture of short-termism: few ordinary Sierra Leoneans have many savings, and the economy still operates on a wartime GDP. After all, why bother to save, to build businesses, to invest, if an iffy contract or an insufficiently-stuffed brown envelope could undermine all your efforts?

Drugs are a caustic problem, too. “Kush” — a synthetic, psychoactive drug which sends the user into a brief, catatonic high — is endemic. Addicts are easily identified, stumbling in a zombie-like daze through the streets; in 2024, the President declared its abuse a national health emergency. It mostly leads to petty crime as addicts steal to afford a hit — but its long-term use is lethal. Last year, a corpse lay outside on the smart streets of the embassy quarter for days, as the unlucky soul had no one to bury them.

West Africa, and Sierra Leone in particular, also appears to be becoming a hub for global cocaine trafficking — and, most concerningly, the Sierra Leonean government seems to be involved. Jos Leijdekkers, a Dutch cocaine kingpin, sentenced to 25 years in absentia in the Netherlands, appears to be operating with impunity in Freetown, enjoying Sierra Leone’s lack of an extradition treaty with the Netherlands. He is even rumoured to be married to the President’s step-daughter and the father of her child.

Still, Sierra Leone is far from a failed state: some of the robust civil society so carefully built after the war remains. No-one, aside from the police and the armed forces, carries guns. And despite the occasional flutterings of unrest — there was a squib of a coup in November 2023, in which 17 soldiers died — the upper echelons of the armed forces are seen as competent and loyal. “Coup-proof”, in the words of one insider. (Though whether they would stand up to a determined incursion from neighboring Liberia or Guinea, a distant but plausible scenario, is another matter.) In addition, Freetown has a small but feisty independent media. And Sierra Leonean social media — while occasionally unhelpfully hysterical — is rambunctious and critical: a vital outlet via which to safely complain against the government and the state of the country.

***

Traveling through Sierra Leone 25 years after its war, you can’t help but call to mind other, more recent conflicts, such as Afghanistan and Iran. So what went right in the 2000 Sierra Leone intervention — and what is going wrong with more recent Western interventions?

For a start, militarily, there was sufficient use of concentrated force to deal a “shock and awe” blow to the RUF, vaporizing desire to fight. In one memorable episode, the RUF were goaded into attacking a small, isolated force of British soldiers near the airport. This was, in fact, a ruse and they were met with overwhelming firepower, killing dozens of rebels. “Clout, don’t dribble” was the maxim which lay behind any engagement with the RUF.

Richards also worked with a small, agile command structure, with responsibility for everyday tactical decisions delegated to trusted commanders. And he could also operate autonomously — free from both oversight and backseat battle-fielding from London, but also without having to manage other allies in the field. Lastly, he and his team understood the country. Their multiple previous visits meant that they knew its top people, knew where power lay and could navigate its complex tribal structures adroitly.

All of these factors were absent or lacking when it came to Iraq and Afghanistan — and it seems Trump is in danger of making the same mistakes with Iran too. From the first in Iran, there has been a lack of clear, obtainable objective — is it regime change? Neutralizing Iran’s nuclear capability? Reopening the Straits of Hormuz? It’s been all of these and more throughout the months-long conflict. Another key difference was that Sierra Leone was already at war: Britain could back one side against the other. In Iran, America initially appeared to be attempting to topple a regime, and keep a lid on any resulting instability indefinitely: “Pandora’s Box” doesn’t begin to do it justice.

And while the initial US strikes accorded with the idea of maximum, overwhelming force, they failed to deal with a knockout blow. The escalating nature of the fighting — and the way that Iran is able to wreak havoc through asymmetric drone strikes and small boat attacks — wasn’t factored in beforehand. Nor was the unpredictable way it might draw in regional allies. As Richards puts it, “I think it will be looked on as an example of how not to run operations, because of the chaos it’s caused to the global economy. And if it causes a recession, I don’t think Trump will ever be forgiven.”

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And once the Iran intervention is over, what then? Again, Sierra Leone’s recovery, though imperfect, is instructive. After a promising start, which brought much-needed prosperity and stability, Britain and other Western countries took their eye off the region. In Britain’s case, this absentmindedness is especially unforgivable. The UK’s ties to Sierra Leone run deep — the state was established in 1787 by abolitionists as a refuge for escaped slaves, and it was a British colony and protectorate until independence in 1961. It sits in a key position geographically, with the largest natural harbor on the west coast of Africa. Yet even before the recent military withdrawal, Whitehall appeared to have no grand strategy for the country — or the region more broadly. There is not only, therefore, a lingering moral obligation to Sierra Leone, but also, most pressingly, an opportunity. English is widely spoken and Britain, unlike the region’s other former colonial masters, is largely looked on fondly. I remember whizzing on the back of a motorbike over stone bridges deep in the northern bush, while my guide proudly pointed out that they were built during the period of the British Protectorate, and still standing many decades on.

Into the breach, Sierra Leone has welcomed other partners. The Lebanese community, traditionally involved in the country’s mineral industry, provides 30% of the country’s GDP. China is heavily involved in mining as well. In fact, the Chinese have rebuilt the old British railway to neighboring Liberia, which last ran a passenger service in 1975; its massive, 90-carriage long trains now ferry gold, bauxite and coltan. Turkey is a key player as well. Its Karpowership, a floating power station anchored in Freetown harbor, provides 80% of the city’s electricity. Disputes over unpaid debts have frequently led to blackouts: powerboat diplomacy in action. Lastly, Russia is heavily invested in Sierra Leone’s shipping industry. Its boats provide a “shadow fleet” of Sierra Leonean-flagged vessels, running oil and avoiding international sanctions. Quite whether this is an explicit arrangement with the Sierra Leonean government is unclear; nonetheless, to date around 85 tankers registered to Sierra Leone have been sanctioned by the US, UK and EU for connections to Russian oil trade.

The danger here is twofold. First, that Sierra Leone might slip back toward the corruption, inequality and disillusionment which were among the factors that led to its 11-year war. Such a result would be a disaster for the ordinary people of Sierra Leone, and would have profound consequences for Western security. As it stands, Sierra Leone has been relatively untouched by the Islamic terrorism which has ravaged nearby Mali and the Sahel; a breakdown in law and order would create fertile conditions for terror. Any conflict would also create a massive refugee crisis which, as recent years has taught us, will inevitably end up on European doorsteps.

But even if that doesn’t come to pass, Sierra Leone deserves better than to become a vassal state, carved up between China, Russia. Or to become a safe haven for international organized crime. On my travels through the country, I found a deep optimism, a desire to reckon with its past and hope that, through education and a robust civil society, life might be different.

And by reaching out into the world again in this way, Britain may begin to strengthen its position – at home, and abroad. It’s perhaps naive to think it can recapture the swashbuckling success of the 2001 intervention. But to pull back entirely, and pull up the drawbridges, is also a mistake.

Until relatively recently, British defense secretaries were much envied by their European counterparts — because they were allowed to conserve as much real combat strength as possible by cutting everything else to conserve money for training and realistic exercises, as well as the continuous maintenance it requires. Typical in that regard was Healey’s namesake Denis, a fiery socialist and decorated beachmaster at Anzio, who served as Labour’s defense secretary from 1964-70. No relation to his 21st-century successor, this elder Healey worked closely with his cabinet colleagues to cut costs on buying warships, aircraft, bases and the like, to focus instead on what really matters: training, munitions and maintenance.

That may seem like mere common sense. But since the post-Cold War drawdown that was underway by 1991, almost every European defense ministry has wasted increasing proportions of their diminishing defense spending to keep increasingly empty bases open — often just to preserve civilian janitors and ground-keepers in a job, and retired NCOs in their attached housing. Also bloated are the officer corps of most European forces, increasingly disproportionate to their shrinking personnel totals. The Spanish army is perhaps the leading champion here. Despite shrinking from 280,000 men in 1990 to just 75,000 today, it has preserved every formation command, and every regional headquarters and geographic command, including one for the Canary Islands, headed by a three-star army general and flanked by navy and air force counterparts.

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Altogether, these commands absorb a remarkable percentage of the total armed force personnel: all just to keep up appearances, and jobs for generals and admirals. Nor is the Spanish army unique in this self-sabotage; Madrid’s wasted defense spending, which may even reflect the policy preferences of its pacifist government, is merely an exaggerated version of knowingly wasteful policies across Europe. By a remarkable coincidence, for instance, every branch of the Italian armed forces — as well as the civilian police, the customs police, and the carabinieri military police present in every town — buy almost all of their pistols, rifles and machine guns from privately owned Beretta. The French are arguably even worse offenders: all their combat aircraft are slated to come from the privately-owned Dassault Aviation, and for all the lobbying of British firms they are not allowed to become monopolies.

The root cause of John Healey’s complaint is that to preserve those envied British defense practices, to retain a disciplined focus in using taxpayers’ money to buy actually usable combat capabilities, there are minimum funding levels which must be respected. All concerned know perfectly well that spending on “combat readiness” is like buying cut flowers: which must be bought anew each day, at the expense of furniture that can last for decades or even centuries. In other words, doing defense for real is, much more than anything else a government does, like running a restaurant open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. This is true even when compared with health care, in which the vast majority of patients do not require round-the-clock intensive care.

The real thing, the upkeep of true combat capabilities, has also required other forms of institutional discipline: including avoiding service in UN peacekeeping forces which never in fact carry out their mission to protect civilians if they have to use their weapons. The longest-lived such specimen, UNIFIL in Lebanon, has failed to execute its mission — of keeping Hezbollah from Israel’s border — even for a single day. Yet that has not prevented the participation of numerous Nato officers in over the years, including Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Karremans, the commander of the Dutch battalion meant to protect thousands of Bosnian Muslims gathered in the UN-declared “safe zone” of Srebrenica in July 1995.

We know how that turned out. Yet despite Karremans failing to follow orders and defend the enclave, ultimately allowing Serb fighters to kill some 8,000 men and boys, he was still promoted to full colonel upon returning to the Netherlands. Nato armies continue to retain a great many generals whose only “field” experience was in UNIFIL, to which the British Army formerly sent a single officer, and who was very soon withdrawn (it currently contributes exactly two personnel to the mission).

What have the British people ever obtained from their expensive “cut flowers” armed forces — that cost twice as much to operate as their European counterparts? Well, when asked to fight, they fight. A very recent example was the bombing of Houthi anti-ship missile and drone-storage sites in Southern Yemen by RAF Eurofighters. They flew out of Akrotiri, Britain’s sovereign base in Cyprus, despite being over 1,500 miles from Yemen in the Eastern Mediterranean.

When I asked the chief of another European air force — one that also flies Eurofighters — if his pilots could fly the same mission, he said “no” without a moment’s hesitation. To strike targets at those distances, he explained, you would need an aircraft with a sleep cot and a toilet; a cramped fighter cockpit is apparently not enough. And, in any case, you also need air-sea rescue continuously available along the way. Without it, he said, any flying mishap becomes a death sentence. That is also true of the RAF, of course, but its pilots crave the opportunity to fly real combat missions far too much to indulge their fears.

At the same time, British reluctance to get involved in the Ukraine war has not prevented SAS troopers from helping Zelensky’s government — officially just with training, but in practice with likely more. In sober strategic terms, there is nothing especially important about these examples. But think of the alternative: 3.5 million active Nato personnel, from Canada to Turkey, who eat breakfast, lunch and dinner in uniform every day — almost none of whom is ready to fight in earnest for any reason whatsoever.

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John Healey’s predecessors could count on cabinet support to maintain the British difference, but things are now changing. Not only are many modern cabinet ministers in charge of ever-expanding social and healthcare spending — inevitable with an aging population — they are also increasingly attentive to Britain’s defense industry. The latter generally hates cut-flowers “combat readiness” spending just as much as any pacifist. Why? Because it takes many millions of pounds from their preferred weapon-system “programs”, which are comfortably long in duration, and which can last even longer if they are multinational in nature.

That is the case with the current British-Italian-Japanese jet-fighter project, which will keep many in stable employment — before its inevitable dissolution, when the British will defect to the American jet on offer once their bargaining chip becomes useless. The competing Franco-German fighter project has just died, after Berlin belatedly discovered that Dassault meant to control every part of the project, as befits the French Beretta of combat aviation.

Compared with all this, the first Healey had an easy time of it. The House of Commons was still full of war veterans, many of them working-class talents like himself, who entered the army as privates but soon rose through the ranks. They all knew what combat readiness meant, and were ready to defend it from industry as well as the social-welfare crowd. Evidently, the second Healey chose to resign to issue a wake-up call, because he could not obtain the funding needed to preserve a critical mass of competence in each branch of Britain’s Armed Forces. I well remember the day when my own regiment — the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry in which I learned to shoot, carefully, to make each bullet count — was amalgamated into the Green Jackets to preserve funds for “readiness”. If Healey’s sacrifice of his high ministerial position remains unheeded, unpleasant consequences will ensue sooner or later, as they always do.

On defense, Starmer’s chutzpah has been staggering. He has burnished his image as a determined and principled leader, while doing very little to reverse the perilous decline of the armed forces. Like his Conservative predecessors, he has promised generous military support to Ukraine. He has demanded that Nato gird itself for a possible conflict with Russia, and since the start of the United States’ unpopular war in Iran, he has distanced himself from Britain’s most important ally. All of this might be commendable if it was backed up by action to improve British security and resilience, but it has not been. With the Treasury mismanaging an ailing economy and unwilling to cut costs elsewhere, it is unclear whether Starmer will even manage his target of spending 2.5% of GDP on defense by next year, equivalent to about a quarter of total welfare spending.

The condition of Britain’s armed forces is frankly terrifying. In March, when Cyprus came under attack from Iranian drones, the Royal Navy could summon just one destroyer to defend the island. It took three weeks to get there and immediately had to enter port for repairs. Despite much of the fleet approaching the end of its service, shipbuilding plans will likely be delayed to cut costs. The British Army still relies on tanks from the Nineties and armored vehicles from the Eighties. It is so short of equipment, weapons and munitions that General Richard Barrons, one of the authors of last year’s Strategic Defense Review, has said that it could only hope to “seize a small market town on a good day”. Various crucial capabilities can only be used with American sign-off. And this is before we reckon with the revolution in military technologies that is now underway, demanding much greater use of complex software systems, high-tech equipment and unmanned platforms such as drones.

The size of the defense budget is not, however, the only thing that matters here. In public discussion, a fixation with headline sums has crowded out the question of whether the money is well spent. The often unspoken issue haunting these debates is the Ministry of Defense’s procurement system, which has a less than stellar record of delivering equipment, and shows few signs of adapting to a fast-changing world. In 2023, a parliamentary committee described it as “highly bureaucratic, overly stratified, far too ponderous, with an inconsistent approach to safety, very poor accountability and a culture which appears institutionally averse to individual responsibility”. This system operates within a defense industry that is dominated by a small number of large, often foreign firms, known as “primes”, which win the lion’s share of government contracts, while controlling the supply chains in which smaller companies must serve as sub-contractors.

The results paint their own picture. Most notoriously, the MoD’s £6.3 billion program to develop the Ajax armored vehicle is running 10 years behind schedule, having repeatedly injured its crews during trials. The US-based company responsible for Ajax, General Dynamics, was nonetheless given a £330 million contract in 2016 to deliver a new tactical communications system, and that too has been mired in delays. Another big firm, Babcock, has come under scrutiny for its maintenance of Britain’s nuclear submarines. In one instance, broken bolts inside a reactor were found to have been reassembled with glue. Meanwhile, Britain’s drone capability, likely a central plank of any future force, remains small, beset by technical failures, and dependent on Chinese components. In 2021, the National Audit Office found that the delays forecast on 13 different programs came to a total of 254 months.

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One man who is clear about the scale of this challenge is Rob Harper, founder of Rowden Technologies, a British engineering company that specializes in information systems for the battlefield and other “edge” environments. I spoke to Harper at a nondescript industrial park on the northern edge of Bristol, where Rowden is headquartered. “I believe very strongly that the golden thread in so many challenges we face is that they are cultural,” the 38-year-old tells me. He is friendly but forceful, clad in Caterpillar-style boots with jeans and a fleece jacket. Chief among the cultural problems he has in mind is risk aversion, across both the public and private sectors: “so that’s entrepreneurs, founders, management teams, and it’s the people buying [for the armed forces],” he says. “We have very clear demand signals for the need for change, and we’re looking at an industrial base and a public sector who culturally aren’t necessarily ready for that. That underpins everything.”

Founded in 2017, Rowden works on the new cutting-edge of warfare, where the battlefield is permeated with sensors, autonomous systems and streams of data. Military equipment must run on software which can be updated constantly and linked together with networks relaying information from satellites. Rowden has won contracts from the MoD, and last month received £25 million for the National Wealth Fund to help with its ambitious expansion plans. At first glance, its spacious and immaculate facilities could belong to any tech company, were it not for the odd detail like a military manikin loaded with radio equipment. I am allowed to inspect a small black box sitting half-assembled on a workbench, its insides a maze of circuitry. This is a decoy device, which emits radio frequencies to confuse an enemy about the location of military assets.

Deeper inside the building, I step into a small room known as a semi-anechoic chamber, where pure signals are recorded to train AI systems. It is lined on every side by hundreds of carbon-tipped foam pyramids to soak up background noise. I am told that if you stand alone in here, you can hear your heart beating.

Rowden is seeking to disrupt the top-heavy structure of the defense industry, which Harper argues has produced too much tolerance for failure. In the MoD, the familiarity and procedural comfort of working with the big prime contractors has meant that they continue to win tenders even if their track record is poor. More importantly, an unwillingness to break with this model is preventing Britain from scaling up homegrown companies and developing new technological tools. Harper says he reached his conclusions after seeing the procurement system from a range of perspectives. He joined the military at 16, and served as a radio operator in the Airborne Forces, getting to know the equipment by “jumping out of a plane with it”. He then worked on acquiring communications equipment for the armed forces, before a stint in defense economics where he modeled big military programs. Realizing there were “weaknesses in the industrial base”, he started Rowden to fill the gap.

Harper is careful not to be cavalier in blaming the civil service for those weaknesses. “It’s easy to bash the system,” he says. He points to Rowden’s success in landing substantial government contracts, including work on the army’s Asgard digital-targeting network, to argue that the growing role of tech is already creating opportunities for new companies if they are willing to step up their own investment. Still, he describes the MoD as an “immune system” that instinctively rejects change, is suspicious of ambition and success, and looks down on people who lack the appropriate rank and length of service, not to mention accent and style of dress. He has apparently been asked “who runs the company?”, as though it could not possibly be a non-officer from the West Country such as him.

Elsewhere in the world, military innovation is being driven, in part, by new players tapping into growing defense budgets and a boom in private investment. In the United States, the rebranded Department of War is acquiring more of its high-tech equipment from “neo-primes” — companies which are young but also very large — such as Anduril, Palantir and Space-X, while creating additional room for start-ups in the procurement system. Besides the computing and weaponry, the Pentagon looks to such upstarts for speed and efficiency in delivering contracts. Europe has been nurturing its own crop of defense tech champions, led by Helsing, a software company turned drone-maker.

Britain has scored some successes too. Kraken, founded in 2020 by a speedboat racing engineer, now designs uncrewed vessels which can be deployed at sea for reconnaissance, transport, or kamikaze attack missions. It has already gained a presence in the US and continental Europe thanks to partnerships with major firms there. By and large though, Britain is best-known as a hunting ground for foreign companies to poach AI talent and promising start-ups. Meanwhile, parliament’s defense committee reported that, as of 2021, just 10 of the MoD’s 23 largest defense contractors were domiciled in the UK, and average British ownership across these companies was only 18%.

Harper is not alone in thinking that excessive caution and inertia is leaving the MoD flat-footed. According to one civil servant with experience of defense procurement, who asked to remain anonymous, “timelines are so long that we only seem capable of procuring things we needed 20 years ago”. Noting that “risk appetite is functionally zero”, she pins much of blame, ironically, on rigorous standards around spending taxpayer money, as well as an “obsession with being absolutely scrupulous and fair”. The MoD tries to treat every tender application on its merits. In theory, this should keep the field open to new entrants, but it also means that firms with a record of failure will keep being considered for new contracts. And if they are big firms with multiple revenue streams, they have a good chance of success, since the process takes longer than smaller competitors can afford to wait.

My source emphasizes that “we get amazing value for money” on many contracts. But this is thanks to an “algorithmic” approach which rules out explorative, trial-and-error development of new capabilities. That would require civil service managers to have the discretion to start funding a program without knowing exactly how much it could ultimately cost.

There are some big-ticket capabilities which only the big prime contractors can provide. In February 2024, for instance, the MoD invited bidders for a new medium-lift helicopter contract, but by September of that year there was only one left: Leonardo UK, the British arm of an Italian multinational. Leonardo then lobbied the Government privately and publicly to close the deal, backed-up by the Labour-affiliated Unite Union, warning that 3,000 jobs at its Somerset factory were on the line. A £1 billion contract was agreed this March. Clearly, such companies have enormous bargaining power. As John McDonald, co-founder of new defense tech start-up Blackmoor, puts it to me: “It’s not like you can go out to some promising young company and ask them to build you a helicopter.”

Macdonald, who previously gained an insight into procurement via think-tank work, also acknowledges that primes are not necessarily less innovative than start-ups, and that they are often best placed to integrate smaller companies into a program. But he agrees that primes are also favored because they appear less risky. Rather than go through extensive approval processes to fund less familiar companies, the preferred solution is to  “go to a big prime and ask, just sort this all out, we’ll leave all the subcontracting to you, and we’ll pay you a lot of money to get the whole thing done”. Then, when these mega-contracts start to go wrong, the lack of accountability within the MoD means that no-one has the authority to pull the plug.

The MoD insists that it is trying to help new entrants bid for contracts. Its recent strategy documents include various pledges to work more closely with small and medium enterprises. The people I spoke to, however, say that these efforts have so far been patchy and noncommittal, stringing companies along without any guarantees of substantial work. Politicians bear much of the blame here: the delays to the Defense Investment Plan have left both prime contractors and civil servants uncertain of the funds they have available.

Everyone agrees that the system needs greater accountability, but clearly it needs greater freedom too, in terms of providing attention and resources for ideas with potential, even if not all succeed. A number of people told me that the MoD could harness innovation by simply sharing the problems it wants to solve, along with a budget, and then seeing what proposals it gets. As for the problem with timelines, an AI consultant tells me that rather than having civil servants trawl through the dense and interminable paperwork involved in defense tenders, much of this processing could be done rapidly by new agentic software.

As things stand, ambitious British start-ups have an incentive to relocate overseas, and especially to the United States, where they can find the investment to scale. Skycutter, a very promising drone maker, recently warned that it will take this option due to the sluggish funding in Britain. It seems that, just as there is no-one to take responsibility for axing a disastrous program like Ajax, nor is there anyone to seize new opportunities when they fall into the MoD’s lap. Still more potential is lost by talented individuals avoiding defense altogether. According to Macdonald, “if you’re a repeat founder, or you’ve got engineering expertise, defense is a nightmare. What we’ve seen in the UK is most people with the requisite skill sets will go into AI and robotics, where the market is far greater. The venture money is also greater.” Harper argues that there is risk aversion in the private sector, but for many companies, the risks of Britain’s defense industry are simply irrational compared with the alternatives.

This takes us to the other conundrum in defense, namely sovereignty. How does Britain ensure that its military capabilities and industry are not so dependent on other states as to be unreliable in a crisis? I raised this with a director at the British subsidiary of a major defense contractor, who asked not to be named. He argues that thinking about sovereignty must be based on two factors. The first is resilience, meaning that we recognize the importance of being able to make things in Britain, with supply chains that are reliable and, as far as possible, local. The other factor is commercial exploitability. Obviously, it is far easier to build and maintain capabilities in Britain if they can pay for themselves, and better still if they can generate prosperity. This means that companies must either be dual-use – making goods and services for the civilian economy as well as the military one – or they must have export potential.

On this front, my source says that the MoD has neglected the importance of intellectual property, the knowledge that underpins technology. “If you want a company to grow, you’ve got to have something to exploit,” he says. “When we talk about high-tech, IP is the key thing that you exploit. Don’t just say we’re buying from a UK company. Use the tender to work out where the IP is held, who controls it, and do they have a commercial exploitation plan.”

But the biggest obstacles to sovereignty, he says, come from the political level. While Britain has “strengths that are just about still there in all areas of science and technology and military experience”, it is being held back by “inconsistencies and outright contradictions in the rest of policy supporting industry.” He points out that the countless strategy documents pledging to build up British industry have been undercut by Treasury decisions to raise taxes for employers, increase fuel levies, and commit to renewable energy subsidies that lock-in “the most expensive electricity we’ve ever had”. All of this acts as a massive deterrent to industrial investment.

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Rob Harper agrees that Britain is unlikely to become an industrial power with its current energy policies. But he has a somewhat different view of sovereignty. Unsurprisingly, it involves greater boldness. He thinks Britain should accept that it cannot compete in every field, and play to its strengths instead. “Look at what is being produced by universities, look at areas where we have a really strong legacy, things we will be great at and that will drive export revenues, and focus, blindly focus on those things.” Even if this were just three to five areas of excellence — and even if those areas were quite specialized, such as aerodynamics or systems engineering — Harper believes that allies would opt to rely on Britain for these capabilities, allowing Britain to rely on them for others.

He has a similar outlook when it comes to homegrown companies.“The best thing they can do, which again involves making big decisions, is to choose five companies and say: we want them to win. Then ask, what do we need to stop the founders re-headquartering, or getting bought out by other firms? How do we make them huge?”

Macdonald agrees that Britain should think of sovereignty in terms of interdependence with others, finding points in the supply chain, and levels in the technological stack, where it can become indispensable. Part of this is manufacturing, namely “really, really specialized parts for important military infrastructure like submarines and helicopters”. More generally, it means recognizing Britain’s strengths in technology and design: “leaning into the future of warfare as being dominated by autonomous systems and data, that is absolutely somewhere where we can be a leader. And that’s absolutely something we should be putting money into.”

A strategy based on specialization raises further questions, of course. Which allies does Britain want to be interdependent with? My civil service source says that the MoD already looks for “things we can become so good at that we’re indispensable to the Americans.” But after the shenanigans of the Trump administration in recent months, this no longer seems such a sure bet. As for the gambit of picking five companies and “making them huge”, this seems bound to create another generation of over-powerful prime contractors, such as America’s neo-primes. To some degree, sovereignty and meritocracy are conflicting values, and the MoD will need to find a way of preventing companies it does support from resting on their laurels.

Nonetheless, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that Britain must decide what kind of battle it wants to be able to fight, for unlike great powers such as China and the US, it cannot try to do everything. The hyper-innovative warfare we see in Ukraine, where drones and other unmanned platforms now dominate the battlefield, is not a universal model. Other scenarios will still require aircraft carriers and battleships, artillery, tanks and large armies of soldiers. But Britain’s leaders must accept that, thanks in no small part to their own role over decades in eviscerating the country’s industrial capacity, most of these scenarios are now beyond its means. The Defense Investment Plan, if it does finally arrive this month, will likely show that the Government and MoD are still trying avoid this reality, spreading resources ever-thinner across many domains so that politicians can swagger a little longer on the world stage.

Such was the pre-Suez balance of power that these ideas were seriously entertained: not as idle reveries but as genuine strategic debates, with the outcomes backed up by the hard power of Britain’s military-industrial strength. Nor was this thinking the preserve of public-school soldiers and jingo adventurers; it was common in the Labour movement. Clement Attlee himself remarked that “we ought not to give the Americans the impression that we cannot get on without them”, while Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin called the Middle East a “lifeline” for the Commonwealth.

Today, such confidence has passed into history. The idea of a mighty Albion projecting her influence in the Gulf is laughable — whatever Donald Trump might now demand. Such is the state of our armed forces, indeed, that we are unable even to play the supplicant role afforded to us two decades ago during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Instead, Britain looks on in horror as Trump adds his own forever war to America’s growing list. Meanwhile, our prime minister makes a virtue of necessity. For once, his anti-interventionist position chimes with the public mood, even if it has been forced upon him by the ascendancy of Labour’s soft Left and the impotence of a mostly ship-free Royal Navy.

Common to many national disgraces, these embarrassments become an opportunity for a kind of military palingenesis: a rebirth of national prowess like a phoenix from the ashes. From the humiliations of the last decades, and with Britain confined to a spectator role as the “rules-based order” burns, a new political tendency is gaining popularity in the more intellectual corners of the Labour Party. A substratum of “Anglo-Gaullism” is now concentrated among the Left’s self-proclaimed realists, hawking a message of salvation-through-defense spending, with rearmament presented as a catalyst for national renewal.

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Already last year, the government’s Defense Industrial Strategy promised military spending would become an “engine for growth”, creating a “strong industrial base” and a “defense dividend” for “every nation and region”. Starmerism’s media outriders have demanded a “new political economy of defense” that integrates “Labour’s goals of economic, social and climate justice”. A defense-industrial “securonomics” will, they claim, reindustrialize Britain’s left-behind regions. If Glubb Pasha’s British Monroe Doctrine is no longer available, at least the hardware of defense-industrial capability can be restored, not least as it offers the kind of secure manufacturing work that makes nostalgic Labourites dewy-eyed.

The Iran War has turbocharged this new thinking, which sees war-like preparedness as the panacea for a policy trilemma: the solution to low growth, persistent regional inequality, and our newfound irrelevance on the global stage. Learned essays in the house journal of Labourism have lamented the unsustainability of the welfare bill, while bemoaning a Treasury orthodoxy for which “reindustrialization through defense spending will never meet a value-for-money test”. The argument has found fertile ground among Blue Labour types, with Maurice Glasman declaring upon the invasion of Ukraine that the return of war to Europe’s periphery “has given us the possibility of an industrial strategy”.

As far as it goes, this argument is appealingly simple. As the transatlantic alliance falters, now is the time to reallocate capital away from the benefits bill — and towards gleaming new arms factories, cyber war labs, drone swarms, frigates and the new domain of space. The New Jerusalem, in short, will be built with a bomb factory in every drab provincial town.

But the new military Keynesianism is based on a delusion. It refuses to confront the fact that defense spending is, in strictly economic terms, one of the very worst ways to promote broad industrial rejuvenation. The growth multipliers are weak and the long-term productivity gains are non-existent. Unlike, say, investment in large-scale capital projects, building things, creating new fixed assets in energy, transport or digital infrastructure, there’s little diffusion of defense spending through the wider economy. While the construction of new roads, power stations or tram networks might provide decades of cheaper inputs, rearmament has a severe opportunity cost. An arms factory might create demand for steel and provide jobs for workers in much the same way as a high-speed rail link — but the former produces few positive spillovers, while the latter can regenerate whole regions. Rather than building the lifeblood of work, jobs and economic activity for the next century, in short, this khaki-clad Keynesianism sacrifices domestic prosperity for a real or perceived threat from without, or else because of an illusory attachment to the idea of Britain as a “global player”.

In truth, building and maintaining a world-class military exists downstream of a serious level of industrial capacity that Britain now sorely lacks. In the days of Bevin and Glubb, Britain built over half the world’s exported cars. Today it’s around 4%. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the UK was second only to the US in its steel production. Today, it manufactures less than Iran and Brazil, not enough to satisfy even half our own national demand. For all Labour’s rhetoric about a manufacturing renaissance, we simply don’t have the basic foundations of a durable industrial ecosystem: steel production; petrochemicals; plastics and advanced materials; energy independence and abundance; and a self-reliant productive base that isn’t subject to the whims of international oil shocks or geopolitical wrangling.

Each, in turn, has been allowed to atrophy. Against this backdrop, the notion that Britain can will itself back into great-power status through defense investment alone is incoherent at best and fanciful at worst. You simply can’t build a credible military in an industrial void, and military spending is a terrible option for closing our yawning productivity gaps. If the opposite had been true, the Soviet Union would have been buoyed by the Politburo’s excessive commitment to the Cold War arms race — rather than brought low by system-wide sclerosis.

Bevin’s Britain was able to take a seat at the Potsdam conference as a global military superpower because postwar Britain was a great industrial exporter, not vice versa. Today, by contrast, we are a country disastrously unsuited to a deglobalizing, dog-eat-dog, protectionist age of competitive national production; a poor country by OECD standards, with Eastern European levels of GDP in some regions, but with a rich capital city that distorts our more dismal averages. If resilience is the watchword of our age, it is surely economic, not military, resilience that should take priority. This is a country facing its second major energy shock in less than a decade, and without any significant per-capita growth in the last two.

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Then arises the question of which war we are preparing for: a counter-insurgency; a neo-imperial intervention in the Gulf; a standoff with China in Taiwan; or a continental land war with Russia? Given the parlous state of procurement at the Ministry of Defense, are we to spend billions building yet more faulty hardware? Will we make the common mistake of every general, fighting the last war, building old-fashioned ships that can be destroyed by a naval drone costing a few thousand dollars in an age of asymmetric warfare?

If the principal threat today comes from Putin’s revanchist nationalism, it will be up to the new military Keynesians to explain why Britain must stomach yet more years of belt-tightening to prepare for war with a country that has failed to occupy even the Russian-speaking territories of a poor, dysfunctional, non-Nato country in which many voters habitually plumped for Russophile oligarchs. Having turned its nation into a pariah, and almost suffering a palace coup after attacking perhaps the most propitious place on Earth for a Russian invasion, is the Kremlin really about to attack Nato? That uncertainty is shadowed by the societal challenge here at home. In the dilapidated high streets of Britain’s regions, it is doubtful whether a beleaguered public see our capacity for military deployment, let alone the protection of some far-off military base, as an urgent daily concern.

Rather than busying ourselves with the dead end of Gaullist posturing, in short, perhaps we should start thinking of ourselves as the developing country that, in many ways, we so obviously are. Certainly, financial analysts have already begun tempering their investments in Britain, a country now displaying the dysfunctional features of an “emerging market”. Rather than Anglo-Gaullism, then, surely a far better model is Anglo-Dengism. Echoing the Chinese example, Britain today should look inwards, focus on problems closer to home, build, develop, reform, innovate, and Make Britain Rich Again, before finally concerning ourselves with the global status games beloved of men-of-a-certain-age who played too much Risk as a child.

As the pro-market reformers of the Chinese Communist Party understood, following the privations of three decades of peasant communism, to project yourself abroad, you must “hide your strength, bide your time”. Before sending aircraft carriers to reopen faraway straits or threatening foreign regime, we must first become a country capable of raising real wages and living standards for our own British citizens.

Ernest Bevin once demanded a nuclear bomb “with a bloody Union Jack on top of it!”. The Anglo-Gaullists fancy themselves his heirs. But Bevin — and Glubb before him — knew that power had to be consistently built at home before it could be brandished abroad. Today, we are attempting a reverse Bevin: indulging in a fantasy of power without the necessary foundations, painting the flag onto imaginary weapons we no longer have the means to sustain.

Such is the disconnect between the rhetoric surrounding the British military and its true condition that it is tempting to simply dismiss the strategy documents and high-stakes summits as diplomatic bluster. But the disintegration of global order may well produce scenarios in which politicians and officials, prisoners to their own commitments, are sucked into a shooting war. At that moment, the danger of a tragic and ruinous fiasco will become very real. In his recent book The Rise and Fall of the British Army 1975-2025, retired brigadier Ben Barry warns of this very outcome, albeit in the understated language of the military analyst. Unless “capability weaknesses are rectified”, he writes, “deploying British Army units and formations to fight carries increased risk of avoidable casualties and mission failure”.

British strategy is like a man riding multiple horses whose paths are gradually diverging, and some of which are biting each other. With US commitment to Nato in doubt, Britain finds itself with greater responsibility for countering the Russian threat in Europe. At the same time, to maintain its own American alliance — not least in the interests of moderating Donald Trump’s claims on the Danish territory of Greenland — the Government will feel compelled to serve as a junior partner in some of the US President’s ongoing military adventures, as it already did with the seizure of the oil tanker (the ship had evaded a US blockade of Venezuela). Since 2021, Britain has also pledged to follow the United States in supporting a coalition of Asian and Pacific states ranged against China, while remaining active in the Middle East, where British interests are bound up with issues of terrorism, migration and trade.

Since 2010, when the Coalition government took office against a background of financial crisis and unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the British response to these challenges has been shaped, above all, by spending cuts to the armed forces. Barry writes that by 2012, Britain’s deployable combat power was already down by a third compared to 2009. Aircraft carriers and jets were retired early, experienced officers were made redundant, and personnel were slashed across the navy, airforce and army. In 2014, former US Defense Secretary Robert Gates stated that Britain would soon lack “the ability to be a full partner as they have been in the past”.

Britain has since regained its military ambition, but not the budgets to match. It has signed up to develop nuclear submarines with Australia and the US, and a new fighter jet with Italy and Japan. It has played a prominent role in boosting Nato defenses in Eastern Europe and the Baltics — just short of 1,000 troops remain stationed in Estonia today — while focusing resources on the murky realm of “hybrid” activities such as intelligence, counter-terrorism and cyber warfare. It plans to build a new generation of nuclear warheads as well as an AI-enabled “digital backbone” to coordinate its forces.

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All the while, conventional capabilities have continued to wither. Britain has drastically reduced its numbers of tanks, planes, ships, armored vehicles and airlift helicopters. Its missile defenses are inadequate to defend its own territory from attack. It has abandoned its major landing craft, meaning that an operation like that to retake the Falkland Islands in the Eighties would now be extremely difficult. It has donated a large quantity of weapons and equipment to Ukraine, without replenishing its own stocks. It lacks the engineering, medical and logistical abilities to support its soldiers in the field. Army troop numbers, which stood at 109,000 in 2010, are now down to 72,500, their lowest since the early 1800s.

The mood music accompanying this decline, and still audible in last year’s Strategic Defense Review, is the hope that new forms of fighting with hi-tech systems will allow British forces to do more with less in the way of traditional platforms and manpower. Drones, cyber and precision strikes will cripple the enemy before the soldiers and sailors arrive. This theory is highly suspect in its own right — because we do not yet know what the demands of modern warfare will be outside the specific contexts where it is happening now, because new technologies will be subject to failure and contestation, and because many of the lost capabilities just cannot be performed by newer ones. More to the point, military chiefs and politicians are now contemplating precisely the kind of mission that will require large numbers of soldiers equipped with a wide range of hardware, namely the deployment of a ground force to Ukraine, the largest country in Europe after Russia, where they will risk war with Russia itself. Should this actually come to pass, the army could, in extremis, deploy a division of 25,000-30,000 troops, which would soon seize up for lack of ammunition and other resources, while leaving Britain unable to fight elsewhere. For comparison, Russia currently has around 700,000 troops in Ukraine.

The frailty of British forces is now common knowledge, but plans to strengthen them are far from convincing. Starmer last year promised to raise defense spending from 2.3 to 2.5% of GDP by 2027, while pledging 3% at some point in the 2030s “if economic and fiscal conditions allow”. A further 1.5% will be earmarked for defense industries and protecting critical infrastructure. Even with such vague timelines, it is questionable whether any of Britain’s parties can persuade the electorate to make the sacrifices required to meet these targets. Public finances are already overstretched, the economy is suffering from years of underinvestment, and the bills for pensions, health and welfare continue to grow. The hope is that defense spending will act as an “engine for growth”, by rebuilding the manufacturing industries that disappeared along with the military reductions of recent years. There are signs that this is starting to happen, but greater certainty will be needed to bring companies into the supply chain, and contracts have so far been slow to appear.

Money is one thing, but Britain is also struggling to find people willing and able to serve in uniform. The Army and Navy have missed their recruitment targets every year since 2010. I recently had a sobering conversation with Mark Maguire, an anthropologist at Maynooth University who has been investigating the erosion of the people and cultures that once underpinned Britain’s military. The forces which have transformed British society in recent decades, from deindustrialization and immigration to falling birth rates, are also being felt in traditional recruiting grounds. “If you go to these military towns, there is no evidence of the people that used to populate the British Army,” Maguire said. “They’re just not there anymore.” He told me of army units which are now recruiting over the phone from Commonwealth countries, their traditional streams of working-class men having dried up.

Attitudes have changed too. Maguire describes focus groups with young people where “the negativity towards the armed forces was stunning, frankly”, the military now being associated with “bombing poor counties and murdering kids”. One young man signed up in secret to avoid the stigma. Recruitment is further hampered by high rates of drug use, obesity, general unfitness and physical and mental disability. In 2024, it was revealed that more than a fifth of regular British forces was not “fully deployable” or deployable at all due to health conditions.

Scarcely less troubling is the MoD’s abysmal record on planning and procurement. The current budget shortfall is anything but unusual. Since 2010, when the department revealed it was £36 billion in the red, defense spending has been marked by, in the words of parliament’s Public Accounts Committee, a “consistent pattern of planned overspend”, “serious organizational failings” and “a dangerous culture of optimism”. This has led to important programs being cut while others spiral into expensive failures. The new Ajax range of armored vehicles, for instance, was originally due for 2017, but has repeatedly been delayed due to design flaws causing illness and hearing problems in soldiers. Consequently, the army still lacks a replacement for its Scimitar and Scorpion vehicles, which entered service more than 50 years ago.

Considering the mismatch between Britain’s posture and its military resources, many will naturally conclude that the former should change. Why must Britain do so much? Surely, the bloody disaster of the Iraq war showed us where blind fealty to the United States leads, and under Trump, we are potentially allying ourselves to a rogue state. And why would we put British lives at risk more than 1,000 miles away in Ukraine, when other European states, with the exception of France, feel no need to? Britain is a declining, middle-ranking nation; what business does it have trying to operate in distant corners of the globe, as though it were still a great imperial power?

These questions are always worth asking, insofar as they pressure our leaders to set aside their vainglory and think carefully about which military endeavors are truly vital to Britain’s interests. It may well be, for instance, that the Navy’s Pacific ventures are not sustainable in a world where Britain has to help compensate for less American involvement on the European continent. But Europe’s humiliation at the hands of Trump, who has imposed one-sided tariffs on it and tried to exclude it from negotiations over its own future, has put paid to the notion that military weakness is a symptom of an enlightened society. Hard power is vital for being taken seriously by friends and enemies alike, especially as the global system fragments. Nothing else is as effective in discouraging aggressors or in reassuring allies.

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This logic is especially compelling for Britain, and especially after Brexit. An island nation whose prosperity depends on connections with other parts of the world, Britain has, since the 18th century, pursued a policy of forward defense, recognizing that threats are best met at a distance from its own coastlines, and that its interests must sometimes be protected far from home. Britain needs good relations with other nations, and security cooperation is a very concrete form of assistance to offer. Being a loyal partner to the US can be a thankless and demeaning role, but America remains the world’s greatest military power and one that is crucial for British intelligence, nuclear assets and weapons programs. If we are to stand any chance of influencing Trump, it will be in situations where it can offer material assistance. Starmer has got very little right in his first 18 months as Prime Minister, but he has been wise to insist on not choosing between Europe and America for as long as possible.

Regardless, this is all moot if Britain cannot find the resources to recruit, train and equip its armed forces to adequate levels. And ultimately, those resources are social and cultural as well as material. After decades under the American security umbrella, western European nations like Britain are not only reluctant to make economic sacrifices in order to defend themselves; they have become totally estranged from the reality that societies sometimes have to fight in order to survive. The clearest evidence of this is that the British state makes no real effort to provide young people with a positive vision of the nation as something to which we owe loyalty and a sense of duty. Nor does it give any account of the role of the Armed Forces in protecting our way of life. The numbers of 18-27-year-olds who are proud to be British and who are willing to fight for the country has plummeted over the past 20 years.

But the problem goes deeper. Maguire argues that “every developed economy now has a problem with self-sacrifice”, meaning that they struggle to produce people who are “willing to run towards danger”. Few of us now have jobs which involve any degree of physical risk, and we are more likely to worry about safety than to celebrate physical bravery. We have little acquaintance with violence beyond films and news stories, while the harsh realities of death are carefully quarantined in medical buildings. Much of this is good, but it leaves us unable to fathom what warfare actually entails. Fighting, Maguire points out, is “pretty gruesome work”, a fact that is now routinely repressed even among those responsible for managing it. He calls the UK’s latest, tech-centered Strategic Defense Review “the most bloodless document I’ve ever read”.

In a recent interview, the historian Stephen Kotkin put Europe’s defense dilemma succinctly: “You need to build really large armies, navies and air forces, of killers — of soldiers who can kill, not build homes, or roads, or sing songs… there are many brave people in Europe, but they’re just not interested in war.” The question in coming years will be whether firmer foundations can be established before they are truly tested, or whether the country’s goals will be revised downwards to match its means. The third course, our current one, is that it will stumble into a fight it is not ready for.

In much the same way, it would be unwise in the extreme for a country’s leaders to embroil their people in a distant foreign conflict without a confidence approaching certainty that their military, industrial, economic and political resources are matched to the great challenge ahead. Were one, like one of our ambitious renovators, proceeding from a state of near-dereliction, then the confidence that the necessary reserves are there to be drawn upon would need to be even greater still; the risks of disaster all the starker. For those granted the power of the British state and the trust of its people to make these decisions, as the analyst William D. James observes in his penetrating 2024 book British Grand Strategy in the Age of American Hegemony, these basic calculations come under the intimidating rubric of “grand strategy”.

James’ view is that the essential calculation of grand strategy is “proportionality”. Ultimately, James observes, grand strategy is simply “the sustainable balancing of means and ends, based on a prudent calculation of the state’s interests and the threats to those interests”. Strategy of this kind requires the identification of “interests or objectives that are commensurate with the state’s aggregate power (economic strength, technological prowess, and military capabilities), its geographic location, and the nature of its security environment”.

In contrast, a “disproportionate” grand strategy would be based on imprudent calculations. The result, James warns, would be “overstretch (pursuing overly ambitious goals given available means) or underreach (identifying overly conservative goals given the security environment)”. For Chamberlain not to have rearmed in the late Thirties, given the precarious security environment, would have been irresponsible underreach. Yet for Britain to have sent a military expedition to support plucky Finland against the Soviet Union in 1939, as politicians and military planners convinced themselves was a strategic necessity, would have been catastrophic overreach, given the balance of power that a combined Nazi and Soviet juggernaut could bring to bear.

Today, Britain’s grand strategy, in as far as it exists, is set by the Government’s Strategic Defense Reviews, such as the one the Labour government commissioned last year, due to be released next month. Yet as James notes these works of distilled Whitehall wisdom are often triumphs of the willing spirit over the weak flesh, ending up “thin on the main question: the dialectic between a country’s aims and its ability to meet them”. No man can read the future; even so, the defense reviews of recent years have fared poorly. All too often, planning assumptions are rapidly overtaken by real-world events. In this vein, the 2021 Integrated Review, a triumph of Johnsonian cakeism aiming to enshrine post-Brexit Global Britain into defense policy, vastly understated the approaching risks to Europe’s security. As James notes, “Just three months before Russian armor rolled into Ukraine, Prime Minister Boris Johnson boldly asserted that ‘the old concepts of fighting big tank battles on the European land mass are over.’” Instead, the driving concept of the Integrated Review was Britain’s “Indo-Pacific Tilt”, the goal of which was for Britain to establish “a greater and more persistent presence than any other European country” east of Suez.

While “the Tilt” caused much excitement among defense wonks, no one could say with any certainty what it actually meant or what the purpose was. As the Commons Defense Committee warned in 2023, “the UK’s regional military presence in the Indo-Pacific remains limited and the strategy to which it contributes is unclear”, given that “fundamentally UK Defense is already under-resourced for its role within NATO in the Euro-Atlantic, which is the core current and medium-term security challenge for the UK and Europe”. Without effectively doubling the size of the Royal Navy, the committee warned, and also defining Britain’s actual strategy in the Pacific and how to achieve it, “the UK may need to curb its ambitions in the region”. As one expert witness, the Professor of Strategic Foreign Policy Greg Kennedy, more bracingly phrased it, the Tilt “is a distraction and costly prestige exercise that will have no significant impact, apart from a fleeting appreciation from the USN (US Navy)… The costs of operating beyond the Straits of Hormuz are not profitable in any sense: pounds, politics or prestige.”

Reading Policy Exchange’s initial argument for the Tilt, one is struck by its divergence from the actually-existing world of 2025. Aside from the scheme’s essential paradox — that of preserving Britain’s trade links with the Pacific, in which China is by far our greatest trading partner, through a policy of confronting China — the proposal rests on planning assumptions that must now be re-examined from ground-up. “To fully globalize Britain,” it states, “the Indo-Pacific region… must become a priority in the UK’s overall foreign and security policies.” Yet what is the advantage of fully globalizing Britain in a world of frantic deglobalization, where over-extended supply chains outside national control have become a major source of strategic anxiety?

The Tilt commits Britain to a project of “reinforcing its commitment to a rules-based international order” by confronting global autocracy, yet this order not only does not exist but is anathema to the Trump administration, happily engaged in carving up the world into civilizational spheres alongside likeminded autocrats. The conceit was that committing the armed forces to a project beyond their abilities, to defend a fictional order that the United States wishes to firmly bury, would boost the Special Relationship; and this conceit must surely now be consigned to the dustbin of bad ideas. Not only are the ends beyond the existing means but those ends are illusory. By any definition this is the antithesis of grand strategy.

Yet the same can be said of the Integrated Review’s hurried, post-invasion of Ukraine update, the 2023 “Refresh”, which, while reverting to Europe as Britain’s prime source of strategic anxiety, rests upon two worryingly dubious planning assumptions. The Refresh states with unshakeable certainty that “NATO remains the bedrock of collective security”, and “The United States remains the UK’s most important ally”, two assertions, made just two years ago, that the entire ongoing European defense crisis now treats as false. With no certainty of success, European leaders are currently engaged in persuading America not to walk away from NATO for the five to 10 years it will take Europe to fill its role. Both the Integrated Review and the Refresh revolve around a “NATO first” defense vision, preservation of global free trade, and a “high cooperation and low-tension Arctic”, all of which now put the UK in direct confrontation with the US, not least because the greatest current threat to NATO’s Arctic possessions in Canada and Greenland is American annexation.

More from this author

Rearmament is a noble lie

By Aris Roussinos

Reading the expert testimony around the Refresh, we see the “dean of British strategic studies”, Sir Lawrence Freedman, tell Parliament in 2022 that we need not worry unduly about the Army’s current state of readiness, as “I find it hard to believe that we will be sending a division into battle because Russia is now a diminished power”. Instead, he asserts, “The hardest thing for us to get our heads around is the implications of a Russian loss.” Three years later, it is precisely the opposite fears now driving Whitehall’s mounting sense of strategic panic, with the same voices that condemned any talk of peace negotiations while Ukraine had the upper hand now condemning Russia for not coming eagerly to the table when it is winning.

While Freedman’s repeated analyses of Russia’s inevitable defeat in the intervening years have not weathered well, the aim here is not to mock him for his lack of a crystal ball. Rather, it is to underline the observable fact that Britain now finds itself in a situation where the resources at hand are vastly below its commitments, because those commitments were made through faulty analysis regarding achievable ends, available resources, and probable outcomes. To have presided over two failures of grand strategy in half a decade might be considered unfortunate. To bolt on a third, at this perilous juncture, could prove fatal.

There is an old Irish joke where a driver stops to ask a weathered countryman directions to a nearby town: the response, that “First off, I wouldn’t start from here,” characterises Britain’s current search for a grand strategy. In normal times, as James states, “Decisions over commitments, as well as military capabilities and force posture, are rarely taken at rapid speed”: yet, overshadowed by the Ukraine peace talks to which Britain is not a party, this is precisely what is happening. The last two documents setting out Britain’s grand strategy were made under the planning assumption that what was always probable, a second Trump term and waning commitment to European security, was unthinkable. That failure of imagination is now a strategic threat of the highest order.

Yet the terms of reference of the ongoing strategic defense review, which promises “a root and branch review of British defense” also pledges “a ‘NATO-first’ defense policy”, asserting that “NATO will remain the cornerstone of UK Defense…” Its guiding hand, Lord Robertson, confidently assured the Commons Defense Committee back in 2022 that the Ukraine war had led to a firm American recommitment to Europe and the Atlantic alliance. As ever, the British state’s incapacity to distinguish wishful thinking from reality remains its greatest strategic deficit. Just as the engine of tragedy is an inbuilt and overriding character flaw, Britain’s material shortages of men, munitions and industrial capacity all flow downstream from this willed blind spot.

For Britain to rearm now, given the perilous security environment, is essential. Regarding a land war in Europe, James accurately warns: “Not only does the UK currently lack the necessary depth for such an engagement, but its military-industrial base is ill-equipped to fill any gaps in the short-to-medium term.” Yet the basic work of ensuring economic, industrial and political security and stability necessary for such a deployment — the testing of foundations and fixing of the roof that precedes choosing wallpaper for the nursery — must come first. Despite two great societal and strategic shocks in 2020 and 2022, this work simply was not done, while Britain instead piled greater and greater foreign commitments onto an unstable base, in a frenetic, and still accelerating burst of directionless activity.

We must hope that the forthcoming review displays a ruthlessness Labour have yet to display in other areas. The Indo-Pacific Tilt, we may assume, will be consigned to the graveyard of Johnsonian optimism. As the Defense Secretary, John Healey, has rightly observed, there needs to be “a realism about military commitments into the Indo-Pacific” and a renewed focus on our near abroad. If America, as is its right, does not wish to underpin Europe’s security, then the British goal of supplementing US power at the furthest edge of the Earth can likewise be laid aside.

Since the Suez humiliation, a guiding principle of British strategy has been that “we must never allow ourselves to be put in a position where we have to make a final choice between the United States and Europe”. Yet events now appear to be forcing that choice, with the hurried quest for a role in the Ukraine settlement occluding cool, long-term strategic thinking. Britain is fortunate enough to be a collection of North Atlantic islands, far from Russia, whose home defense ought to be a trivial matter. Instead of distant long-term commitments that cannot currently be met, a genuine root-and-branch rethinking of British defense would radiate outwards, establishing a sense of security within Britain’s borders that few currently feel, before extending outwards to Britain’s Atlantic near abroad, and onwards only as far as material conditions allow. The Spring Statement will bring an increase in defense spending, but nothing that will be transformative. This is, perhaps, the work of decades.

Yet those most insistent of a British role at the forefront of world events are too often eager to overlook the growing insecurity and instability of the home front. As James observes, “The ability to mobilize and allocate resources depends on a stable domestic political environment.” Denmark’s social democratic Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen addressed this problem with rare frankness last week, telling Politico that while Russia remains Europe’s greatest threat, “security is also about what is going on in your local community… Do you feel safe where you live? When you go and take your local train, or when your kids are going home from school, or whatever is going on in your daily life?” Devoid of both domestic stability and expeditionary capacity, perhaps Britain’s current weakness is a hidden opportunity. The risks of underresourced adventurism are greater than the immediate risks of inward-looking withdrawal from world affairs. Until the structure is solid and watertight, the need to make harder and more expansive geostrategic choices can be deferred as a future luxury.

“I had an immediate and acute feeling: what the hell’s the point of having a navy if you’re not going to use it,” Leach remarked in an interview, a decade later.

The First Sea Lord’s prediction was correct — Britain did retake the Falklands. But the admiral did not just fight off the Argentine military. He also bested an opponent closer to home. In 1981, Defense Secretary John Nott had formulated plans for major cuts to the Royal Navy’s surface vessels and air power. In Nott’s view, the Navy should concentrate on anti-submarine duties. After the highly public actions in the South Atlantic — and the consequent boost to Thatcher’s image — Nott’s reductions were scaled back. Nott himself eventually resigned.

The Falklands War was not just fought on land, sea and in the air. It was also a battle in London, over budgets and resources. That is worth bearing in mind now, with the discussion of British involvement in an international peacekeeping force in Ukraine. In reality, the contribution that the British Army of 2025 could make is profoundly limited. The army now has around 75,000 regular troops — i.e. full-time — down from 102,000 in 2010 and 153,000 in 1990. Modern armies can only project a small proportion of their overall headcount into the field, given the logistics needed to sustain troops in theater, training and other responsibilities at home, and the need for operational tours of a manageable length. Today Britain could probably cobble together a brigade-sized force that, with enablers like logisticians, signallers and intelligence, might amount to around 7,000 troops.

Suggested reading

The fantasy of British defence

By Aris Roussinos

At the height of the post-9/11 wars, Britain ran two enduring deployments in parallel, one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, and both around 10,000 strong. Most of those troops came from the army. That was hard enough then, but today sustaining a single brigade beyond one initial six-month deployment would be far more complex. Equally, the equipment a British contingent could take now would be limited. In the late 2000s, as the army’s operations in Afghanistan ramped up, the organization scaled back the programs needed to maintain, upgrade and potentially replace its heavy vehicle fleet: the Challenger 2 tank, the AS-90 self-propelled artillery piece, and the Warrior armored infantry fighting vehicle. Instead, resources went towards a new generation of vehicles designed to resist roadside bombs, the signature weapons of the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns.

Coming up for two decades on, almost the entire working British AS-90 fleet has been given to Ukraine. Most Challenger 2s are tied up in a much-delayed upgrade program, and so are also unavailable, while Warrior is on its last legs. As an interim artillery capability, Britain bought 14 wheeled self-propelled Archer guns from Sweden; perhaps eight of these are deployable.

The likely British formation that could initially go to Ukraine, 7th Light Mechanised Brigade, is equipped with Foxhound and Jackal, Afghanistan vintage vehicles, which have little protection against conventional heavy weapons. “The problem with it though is it doesn’t have any heavy weapons,” Nicholas Drummond, a former British Army officer, says of 7th Brigade. “It doesn’t have sufficient armored protection — armored vehicles — and it doesn’t have any artillery.”

“The British Army is in the worst state it’s been since Dunkirk,” adds Francis Tusa, the editor of the Defense Analysis newsletter. “The only difference was, of course, in 1940 the war production had started two and a half years previously, and they were able to re-equip the army quite rapidly. It’s not the case here.”

The store cupboard, then, is pretty bare. However, the aspect that is often missed in the public debate is the difference in the way a potential operation is perceived internally, within a professional military, compared to externally. This boils down to a question of obligation versus opportunity. From an outsider’s perspective, sending British troops to Ukraine — particularly with very uncertain US support — is a fraught political call. Inside the British Army, however, for the past three decades at least, a chance to deploy into the field has almost always been perceived with great enthusiasm, up to the point where things go badly wrong.

Suggested reading

The end of the transatlantic alliance

By Wolfgang Munchau

The reason for this is that the central business of armies — fighting — does not occur all the time. You can spend a working lifetime in uniform without ever doing it for real. Since the British Army pulled out of Helmand in late 2014 — more than 10 years ago now — it has sent troops to Eastern Europe and deployed special forces, in small numbers, in combat in the Middle East. But the field army has not had a clear role at all. And 10 years is two entire generations of junior soldiers and officers. The “Spicier Subaltern Memes” Instagram account gives an insight into the culture that results. “When you asked the guy who called you a REMF to talk about his last operational tour,” reads one post, as a mechanical mouth spouts gibberish. A REMF is a “rear echelon mother fucker”, the traditional slight troops in combat throw at those in safe rear area jobs.

In this world, the prospect of a real operation becomes an exciting one. A big deployment does not just mean troops on the ground. It would mean resources, equipment, budgets, promotions, perhaps equally a sense of renewed mission. The Russian invasion of Ukraine gave a theoretical post-Afghanistan purpose to the army, but not the resources to really step up to that. Sending peacekeeping troops to Ukraine could open the resource taps, though it seems that the recent announcements from Downing Street do not follow much actual consultation with the army’s own planners. “If you do want 72,000 soldiers to be available at the drop of a hat,” Tusa writes, “the operations budget is probably going to have to treble, if not quadruple.”

The senior army leadership of 2025 are seasoned and experienced individuals. Roly Walker, the current Chief of the General Staff, led a battlegroup in Afghanistan in 2009. But his cohort have spent their entire working lives in a shrinking institution. The prospect of purpose and action is therefore — for entirely understandable reasons — often an enticing one for them too. However, excitement can also become a blinding force.

After interviewing numerous retired senior officers for my book, I came to the conclusion that their job is largely a custodial one. The vast shrinking of the British military that has occurred since the Second World War means that the opportunity to actually command troops in the field at the scale that corresponds to rank is almost gone. In 2023, the British Army had nine lieutenant generals, a rank that historically would command a corps, maybe 30,000 troops. None of them will ever do that in an army that contains in total fewer than 100,000 soldiers.

In this context, the real emotional pull of senior command is different. You are given, for a few years, the helm of an institution to which you have devoted your entire adult life, and which for your whole career has been subject to salami-slicing cuts. As a result, the ultimate priority of those at the top of the army is to keep the army safe. That generally means keeping it safe from the Treasury.

The problem is that a can-do culture that thinks an operation is always better than no operation, and that it’s always best to crack on with the limited resources available, has got the army into serious trouble before. There’s a plausible case that the post-2006 Helmand campaign was fought — at least in part — to save the British infantry from manpower reductions. “It’s use them or lose them,” Richard Dannatt, the then head of the army, reportedly once told British ambassador to Afghanistan in the summer of 2007. Helmand could provide a role for troops freed up by the end of operations in Northern Ireland and the drawdown in Iraq. There was a chance to echo the Falklands dividend that spared the Royal Navy in the Eighties. The irony is that the poor outcome of the Afghanistan operation led to the army losing much of the trust of its political masters, and the infantry were cut anyway.

The early gung-ho Helmand tours — reflected on the emerging platforms of social media, and subsequently officially endorsed by the medal and promotion systems — became highly aspirational for other units to match. But the campaign bogged down and IEDs restricted movement. The rapid march of the Taliban in 2021 eventually showed that the idea that the West had created a local military that could hold terrain was cant. But right up until the end of the British operations, there were individuals keen to deploy. They knew that in an organization in which credibility — both individual and collective — is so important, a Helmand medal would assure them status.

It is not always better to do something than to do nothing.

There is also a potential ratchet here. The more the army is cut, the smaller the realistic contribution it can make is. Yet paradoxically, the smaller the army is, then potentially a big operational deployment becomes even more enticing — the magic ticket to resources and prestige. There will undoubtedly be ambitious officers in army headquarters at Marlborough Lines in Andover imagining how an enduring troop deployment in Ukraine could transform their own careers. But they might do well to also recall the other thing that Henry Leach (at least) claims to have told Margaret Thatcher in 1982. Yes, he said, Britain could retake the Falklands. But there was also a risk that they might lose the entire fleet trying to do so.

How strange, then, that Britain’s Armed Forces are unprepared to defend their country. Over the past month, an increasing number of military insiders have been sounding the alarm, warning that, if we are to survive, we may have no choice but to enlist a “citizen army”. 

The truth, however, is even more concerning. 

As Aris Roussinos reveals in this Special Report, it may be too late to guarantee Britain’s survival. Decades of political indifference and dismal procurement strategies have left our Armed Forces outgunned and obsolescent. And with military insiders increasingly expecting a land conflict with Russia, Britain now faces an uncomfortable question: is the coming war already lost?

Read on to learn about:

• Russia’s ability to expose Britain’s weakness
• The dismal state of Britain’s Armed Forces
• A catalogue of procurement fiascos
• How we were crippled by support for Ukraine
• Can Britain build a new army?
• Why we must pivot towards the air and sea

How close is Britain to all-out war? It would be comforting to assume that all the recent warnings from defence officials are mere hyperbole. But quite the opposite is true: as it stands, there is a very real risk that the British Army will be politically committed to fighting a land war against Russia in eastern Europe within the next five years. Without American support, we are on course to lose.

When the Chief of General Staff, General Sir Patrick Sanders, claimed last week that “we need an army designed to… equip the citizen army that must follow”, the debate it produced centred on whether Britain is now too woke or too ethnically diverse to sustain mass conscription, while also considering whether the Britain of 2024 is even worth fighting for. While these are valid questions, the broader context — the idea of a land war against Russia — was left largely unexamined.

Yet Sanders’s warning was not without precedent. In 2022, he declared that this is “our 1937 moment”, in which the British state had a few short years to mobilise industry and modernise the Army on a war footing, with the aim to avert a war if possible, or at least not lose if one began. But if 2022 was 1937, by Sanders’s reckoning, 2024 is 1939 — and this work has not been done.

Russia will expose Britain’s weakness

In 2022, even as Russian troops found themselves bogged down and on the back foot in Ukraine, Sanders presciently cautioned observers that “historically, Russia often starts wars badly”. Thanks to “its depth and resilience”, however, it “can suffer any number of campaigns, battles and engagements lost, regenerate and still ultimately prevail”. While Russia’s slow progress initially birthed a crowing sense of overconfidence among British commentators and Ukraine’s online cheerleaders, Sanders warned: “Putin’s declared intent recently to restore the lands of ‘historic Russia’ makes any respite temporary and the threat will become even more acute. We don’t yet know how the war in Ukraine will end, but in most scenarios, Russia will be an even greater threat to European security after Ukraine than it was before.”

A year and a half later, Ukraine is firmly on the back foot, and while Russia’s gains on the ground are slow and costly, Putin’s mobilisation of his vastly larger economy and population towards the war effort mean that, over the course of the next few years, Russia’s prospects of victory will become more likely, while Ukraine’s will dwindle. To defeat Russia, in the current reality, means not recapturing lost territory but blunting the Russian advance at such cost to Putin that negotiations to freeze the conflict become a more attractive prospect than total military victory. In pursuit of this goal, Ukraine has been dependent on a constant flow of war materiel from the United States which has now ceased, and on a rapid scaling up of Europe’s military-industrial capacity that has not manifested. Just to stay in the fight, Ukraine will be forced to conscript half a million men from a civilian population increasingly unwilling to fight in a war that has caused the country, according to Sanders, “hundreds of thousands” of casualties.

Indeed, the unspoken assumption in military circles is a scenario in which Ukraine loses the war against Russia, perhaps next year or the year after. And if this happens, Putin will then turn his gaze to eliminating Nato as a threat to Russia by launching a war on the alliance’s eastern frontier. The United States will be too preoccupied with its confrontation with China to take part, and European armies, including Britain, are too under-equipped to win. As Sanders warned two years ago: “Given the commitments of the US in Asia during the Twenties and Thirties, I believe that the burden for conventional deterrence in Europe will fall increasingly to European members of Nato and the JEF [Joint Expeditionary Force].”

Giving evidence last summer to the Commons Defence Select Committee, the RUSI analyst Justin Bronk suggested that Britain’s “window of vulnerability is probably late 2026 to about the end of 2028”. That is, he cautioned, “the maximum window of vulnerability for a Chinese-American clash in the Pacific”, as, due to Pentagon procurement errors, this is the period in which Chinese naval power in the Pacific will overmatch the American forces they are rapidly preparing to confront.

As Bronk has warned elsewhere, “in the event of such a military confrontation with China in the mid-to-late 2020s, Russia will have a strong incentive to take a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to break Nato while the US cannot reinforce Europe effectively. By 2026-2028, Russia’s industry will have been at full-scale military production for years, allowing it to rebuild its increasingly battle-hardened forces.” It is because of this likely scenario that prominent US strategic thinkers such as Elbridge Colby, who would be expected to play a major role in a future Trump administration, have warned that “America must first and foremost ensure that it can defeat China in a conflict, and Washington no longer has a military capable of fighting two concurrent wars”.

With a laser focus on America winning a war against China, Colby makes clear that “European Nato needs leadership” — and Britain should fulfil that role. Bronk implicitly acknowledges this, warning that: “We must plan on the danger that, if the Americans are more than occupied, they will not just be unable to reinforce Europe; they will be pulling things out… in all domains, because the threat is really huge in the Indo-Pacific. I would ask people in the country as well: how secure would you feel against Russia in Europe, given it will continue to mobilise long after Ukraine fighting stops, if the United States is not coming to save us?”

The only answer is: Not very. According to one recent study, based on the volume of artillery fire in the Ukraine war, the British Army would run out of munitions after eight days.

The dismal state of Britain’s Armed Forces

If Russia defeats Ukraine, and then launches an incursion against Nato in Eastern Europe while the US fights the greatest war in its history in the Pacific, then Britain is committed to fighting Russia on land in Europe without significant American help. This is not a scenario for which British defence planning has geared the Army to undertake, and is not a war the Army is currently capable of fighting.

Everyone is aware that the British Army is too small for its stated task. From 109,600 troops in 2000, the Army had shrunk to a mere 80,500 in 2022. As Sanders warned: “If this battle came, we would likely be outnumbered at the point of attack and fighting like hell.” And yet, in the year and a half since, the Army has shrunk to 76,950, and is on course to shrink further to 73,000. Sanders has resigned in protest. To put these numbers in context, Russia has currently deployed 40,000 troops in its current operation to seize the small Ukrainian town of Avdiivka, just one front in a series of Russian offensives taking shape over the coming year. Yet it is perhaps under-appreciated that not only is the Army too small for its purpose, it is vastly under-equipped for the coming task.

The most sobering evidence of Britain’s shoddy preparation for our increasingly dangerous strategic environment can be found in the testimony of Armed Forces chiefs and military experts to the Commons Defence Select Committee. Its 2021 report on the state of Britain’s armoured capability put its conclusions in its title: “Obsolescent and outgunned.”

As it warns: “Were the British Army to have to fight a peer adversary — a euphemism for Russia — in Eastern Europe in the next few years, whilst our soldiers would undoubtedly remain amongst the finest in the world, they would, disgracefully, be forced to go into battle in a combination of obsolescent or even obsolete armoured vehicles, most of them at least 30 years old or more, with poor mechanical reliability, very heavily outgunned by more modern missile and artillery systems and chronically lacking in adequate air defence. They would have only a handful of long-delayed, new generation vehicles, gradually trickling into the inventory, to replace them.” Due to “bureaucratic procrastination, military indecision, financial mismanagement and general ineptitude”, for which the Army’s leadership is, if anything, more responsible than the Government, “we are still some four years away from even being able to field a ‘warfighting division’, which, itself, would now be hopelessly under-equipped and denuded of even a third combat brigade”.

As Brigadier (Retd.) Ben Barry, Senior Fellow for Land Warfare at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, warned the enquiry: “The reduced UK division”, which would be Britain’s initial land contribution to a war against Russia, “has half the anti-armour capability, only 30% of the tanks of a Russian tank division, two-thirds of the armoured infantry fighting vehicles, 20% of the anti-tank guided weapons and 15% of the self-propelled artillery. It would be very difficult for that reduced division to stop a Russian tank division. A Russian tank division would seriously overmatch the reduced Third Division. ‘Overmatched’ is a very polite, clinical way of saying ‘could be defeated’.”

As another expert witness, the defence consultant Nicholas Drummond, observed, Russia outguns the British Army in a number of areas: “The first is artillery. It needs to do a wholesale renewal of its artillery systems.” The second is the British Army’s “ability to fire anti-tank missiles from under armour. It does not have that ability. It urgently needs that. The third missing capability is air defence. We are woefully short, and we would get absolutely spanked if we went to war without investing there.”

A catalogue of procurement fiascos

Since 2021, even those timelines have slipped, and capability has worsened since then. Britain’s armoured fleet consists of Challenger 2 Main Battle Tanks, CVR(T) reconnaissance vehicles, Warrior Infantry Fighting Vehicles and FV432 Armoured Personnel Carriers. By the middle of this decade both the FV432 and CVR(T) will be approaching 70 years in service: indeed, CVR(T) was partly designed to fit between the trees in Malayan rubber plantations. Warrior and Challenger 2 entered service in the Eighties and Nineties and are also reaching the end of their working life. Yet the joint MoD and Army “fiasco” of procuring their replacements has left the Army waiting for new armour that will not enter service until the end of the decade at the earliest.

The long-delayed Ajax Armoured Fighting vehicle, whose vibrations cause the troops inside debilitating injuries, may enter service in 2030: the Army is “cautiously optimistic” on this point. According to Select Committee evidence, the upgraded Challenger 3 is expected to enter service in tiny numbers — 18 — by November 2027, and its full complement of 148 by December 2030. The wheeled Boxer family of armoured vehicles will see 27 enter service in 2027, not reaching its full complement of 623 units until 2032. As the Committee Chair Tobias Ellwood remarked: “The full complement will not come into service here until the 2030s, when we can start doing our all-arms combat. Until then, we have a mix and match of old and obsolete kit, with the stuff that is coming online.”

If Britain goes to war in the mid-2030s, it will do so with a small but modern armoured force. Unfortunately, as we have seen, the war may already be over by then. As Bronk warned the committee, if the MoD was tasked with providing “a backbone of European deterrence against Russia, with credible warfighting capabilities in Europe in the next three to five years”, and resourced to do so, it will still take “five to 10 years to build that force”.

Crippled by support for Ukraine

If Britain goes to war with Russia within the timeframe our military leadership fears, it will do so with the Army we have, or can quickly build in the next few years. And as the RUSI analyst Jack Watling warned in 2020, the Army we have is not equipped for the task: “The UK lacks ground-based air defences and deployable long-range precision fires… Its heavy armour is under-gunned, its protected mobility is worn out, its artillery is outranged, its logistics are under-resourced, its deployment is too slow, and its ammunition stockpiles too small to deliver the effect for which it is designed.”

Due to well-meaning political decisions, which have not been matched by a sense of urgency in rebuilding the Army, the situation has deteriorated further. The donation of 14 Challenger 2 tanks to Ukraine, along with AS90 self-propelled artillery systems, M270 rocket launchers and L118 Light Guns, FV432s and significant quantities of anti-armour munitions and artillery shells “will leave us temporarily weaker as an Army, there is no denying it”, Sanders warned a year ago. “There is no doubt our choice will impact on our ability to mobilise the Army against the acute and enduring threat Russia presents and meet our Nato obligations.”

As Watling cautioned in 2022, “UK anti-tank guided missile (ATGM) stockpiles have now been significantly depleted — having been gifted to Ukraine — leaving British units toothless. With the announcement that the UK’s MLRS are also going to be sent to Ukraine, the punch that was supposed to buy out the UK’s lethality in the close fight is about to be stripped from the order of battle. The already woefully inadequate stockpiles of rockets for these systems are now to be expended.” As one senior defence source told the press: “We’ve given away pretty much everything we can afford to give…” As another warned: “The PM’s wartime approach is currently to cut the Army, hollow it out further by gifting [equipment to Ukraine] and with no plans to replace [the weapons] for five to seven years.”

Britain’s Nato commitment to the ground defence of Eastern Europe is an armoured division by 2025. Unfortunately, this division does not exist. As RUSI observed in 2022, the “current force comprises two armoured regiments of obsolete tanks, while one brigade has been converted to a medium-weight Strike Brigade. This forms the core of the UK’s current land contribution to Nato’s conventional ‘hard power’ in Europe to deter Russia.”

Moreover, as Ellwood notes of those two tank brigades: “We have just one brigade deployed in the Baltic right now and it is going to take days, if not weeks, to bring that up to divisional strength. Bear in mind that if the Russians cross the border into the Baltic, that second brigade is going to be under attack all the way from the UK into the Baltic area. Our lines of communication are certainly going to be hit, and hit very hard.” In fact, it is doubtful that even the single existing brigade is currently fit for its commitment, according to the defence analyst Francis Tusa.

In the air, too, Britain will be heavily outgunned, outranged and outnumbered by its opponent. Because Nato’s SEAD capability — the ability to search and destroy enemy Surface-to-Air Missiles — is dependent on the US, for the first time since midway through the Second World War, Britain cannot expect air superiority and must work on the assumption that any build-up of forces will be both visible and vulnerable far behind the front line. Under-equipped on almost every front, Britain is heading towards military defeat.

Can Britain build a new army?

The question is what to do now. As long as Ukraine stays in the fight, Russia will not be able to expand the war, providing Britain and the rest of Europe with breathing space to rebuild military capacity. But enabling Ukraine to do so requires a vast, Europe-wide effort to produce munitions in the quantity sufficient for full-scale war. And in the two years since the war began, Europe has not achieved production sufficient for Ukraine’s own needs, let alone rebuilding Nato stockpiles. Unless this work is done now, the looming war will be lost almost before it has begun.

Even if this level of production is reached, a question mark hangs over Ukraine’s ability to conscript the manpower necessary to survive the coming war: Europe’s year or two of breathing space will be very costly in human lives for Ukraine, without even guaranteeing the country victory at the end of it. In that short space of time, Britain will need to marshal its existing resources — which means shifting its focus to training Ukrainian troops rather than gifting Ukraine our dwindling stockpiles of equipment — while converting what remains of British industry to a war economy.

Yet a country that cannot produce its own steel, and is dependent on nations that will be either open rivals or detached observers for much of its imports of raw materials, is hardly geared towards a wartime-level of production. In the short term, Britain could engage in a frantic spending spree, buying off-the-shelf armour from European allies, as it should have done years ago. But even here, whether Britain could outcompete equally panicked European allies for limited production is questionable. The recent acquisition of 14 ARCHER artillery systems to replace equipment donated to Ukraine shows that, while far short of the investment needed, a rapid procurement programme could swiftly bring results.

Ultimately, Britain needs to rapidly pool resources and production with European allies, based around a standardised, interchangeable suite of capabilities. Drummond suggests a five-year spending drive to buy Boxer armoured vehicles, anti-tank munitions, drones and long-range artillery, while increasing the Army to a size of 90,000 formed in eight brigades — all at a cost of an extra £10 billion defence spending a year, solely focused on the Army. This is a useful baseline level of thinking, but whether the political will exists is doubtful: the two controversially expensive aircraft carriers came to around £8 billion in total, while the Guardian’s lofty declaration that defence spending “should take a place in the queue” behind council funding and fighting climate change suggests that the British political class has no understanding of what the country is very shortly going to be tasked to do, the amount of effort and pain it will take, and the level of spending it will require.

A pivot towards the air and sea

Any future war would not be easy for Russia: the war in Ukraine has re-emphasised that, in modern warfare, the defending side holds a strong advantage. Britain would not fight alone: it would fight alongside the small but capable Baltic armies, currently building a joint defensive line along the Russian border, the currently more effective French Army, the German Bundeswehr and the rapidly expanding Polish army (whose defence procurement and recruiting effort, at much less cost, should shame Britain), as well as Sweden, Finland and other nations. Britain’s land contribution has been so woefully managed that we should expect to play a supporting role, perhaps under European command.

But perhaps we should rethink the question from first principles: the Army is the weakest link in the Armed Forces, and as it stands threatens to be the weak link in Nato’s ground campaign, which itself means it will be disproportionately targeted by Russian fire. Given how things stand, should Britain be frank with the rest of Nato about the state of our Army, and shift our contribution to our better-resourced Air Force and Navy?

As Watling warned in 2022: “if the UK feels it can no longer resource a war-fighting capability then this must be the starting point from which UK strategy develops, and extensive and difficult conversations with allies must be initiated.” Perhaps the time has come to warn Nato that we’re going to be late handing in our homework.

At some time in the 2030s — all things being well — Britain will possess a functioning Army, but until then it does not. A weak and underpowered British land commitment in Europe threatens to become a drag on Nato’s capacity, a burden rather than a gift. Should a war break out this decade, Britain has three choices: to go to war with the Army we have, and lose; to spend the next few years rapidly building up the Army, at vast cost; or to admit in good time that the Army will not be functional this decade, and shift Britain’s contribution to a European war to the air and sea. These are fundamentally political decisions, each of which will be controversial, and which require a degree of political leadership and popular legitimacy the current government, in its waning days, does not possess.

As the historian Robert Lyman observes: “We have opened ourselves up to a shock of very significant proportions.” This is the insufficiently-understood context in which the current conscription discourse, essentially a debate on how to quickly replace our currently-existing Army, which has been set up for defeat, exists. But unlike 1914 or 1940, there is no strategic hinterland of booming factories and willing volunteers to fall back on. There is no Empire to come to Britain’s aid, Russia’s resources will be pitted against us, and the United States will be hard-pressed with its own war against the world’s greatest industrial power.

As Watling warned two years ago: “The old British tradition of losing the early battles but winning the war does not work when it takes years to build sophisticated modern military equipment. In short, if deterrence fails, and the Army is not appropriately provisioned, there will be no comeback. There will simply be defeat.”

In the officers’ mess at Hyde Park Barracks, there hung a depiction of the regiment’s officers from 1857. It showed an all-male, blue-blooded ensemble, in elaborate dress. The new painting was to take the same format, but was meant to showcase how the Household Cavalry — traditionally the socially “smartest” section of the British Army — had changed. The unit now had black and Sikh officers. In common with other infantry and armoured units at the time, there were still no women formally within the regiment, but there were some working with it, including a vet.

The young painter, Louise Pragnell, agreed to take on the project. In time, the huge 3m-by-1m painting almost drove her insane. The resulting image also embodied the British Army’s confused attitude to diversity in the 21st century.

Olver explained the concept: “We’ve got these two women here, and we’ve got a Sikh and we’ve got two black guys.” The sitting took place in May 2008 at the barracks south of the Serpentine. The 25 subjects wore a variety of dress, from ceremonial “state kit” with its gleaming breastplate to the scarlet bum-freezer jacket of mess kit, service dress, or combats. Some eschewed uniform altogether, coming in polo kit, hunting gear and Ascot tails. There was a strong equine theme.

As a message, the scene was a mixed one: we have black people, it said. We have women. But we’re all still really posh. Notably, both the black officers — one Ghanaian, the other Zimbabwean — spoke with received pronunciation. Meanwhile, one sitter liked the idea of a soldier servant pouring him a glass of champagne while he stared imperiously in the other direction. That hardly seemed to concur with the diversity message, but Pragnell included it.

I’m always reminded of these mixed messages, whenever a row erupts about diversity in the British military. In August, the head of Royal Air Force recruitment resigned, reportedly due to a focus on hitting “impossible” diversity targets. (In response James Heappey, the armed forces minister, denied claims that job offers for white men had been put on “pause” to achieve such targets, clarifying that air force leadership had paused offering training slots to all candidates while they examined how they might take legal steps — so-called positive action — to assist improving diversity levels on courses.)

Earlier in the year, shortly before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the British Army put all non-essential work on hold for a “diversity training day”, to address concerns including drug and alcohol abuse, bullying and racism. In his first speech in post last December, Admiral Tony Radakin, professional head of the armed forces, said that diversity is “not about wokefulness”. “It is about woefulness,” he added. “The woefulness of too few women. The woefulness of not reflecting the ethnic, religious and cognitive diversity of our nation.”

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Indeed, the British Armed Forces have long failed to reflect the society they are tasked to defend. The full-time military is still 90.4% white and 88.7% male. Female representation is roughly equal between the services, but ethnic minorities make up 14% of the army (in which 40% of ethnic minority personnel originate from abroad), compared to 4.9% of the Royal Navy and Royal Marines, and only 3.5% of the air force.

Meanwhile, there is an elephant in the room when it comes to military diversity: social class. Just as Louise Pragnell’s painting displayed ethnic diversity but class homogeneity, all three services are still split into distinct commissioned and non-commissioned universes — between officers and soldiers, in army language. Each track features its own entry requirements and career trajectories. And this split is traditionally based on class: historically, officers were posh; the soldiers were not.

There is some movement between these worlds. For instance, the army sends some promising young soldiers to train at the officer academy at Sandhurst, alongside direct-entry, predominantly graduate cadets. At the other end of the spectrum, there is also now no section of the army where it is impossible to live on your pay as an officer — in the past high mess bills and the prohibitive costs of tailored uniforms could mean a private income was required. Nonetheless, the officer-soldier divide is still the defining fault line in the military’s organisation, and it is most acute in the army. In 2019, 49% of Sandhurst direct-entrant cadets had attended fee-paying schools — whereas the equivalent figure for the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth was 36%. (The RAF does not gather information on educational background.)

Britain’s military institutions are pushing a race and gender diversity agenda, while largely failing to acknowledge that their basic shape is still profoundly non-egalitarian. British Army recruiting adverts released in 2018 included short, animated advertisements with titles like “Can I be gay in the Army?” and “Can I practise my faith in the army?” They did not ask “Will I have to call someone younger and less experienced than me ‘sir’?” or “Can I get into a smart regiment if I don’t know that shirts with single cuffs are taboo?”

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An official Ministry of Defence action plan, leaked in August, aimed to “build defence into an institutionally inclusive organisation” and “to drive significant change by ensuring that race equality is a driving principle in defence”. Every time something like this happens, anonymous Whitehall sources brief “dereliction of duty” and Tory MPs spit fire about quotas, but no one tends to remark that the diversity initiatives speak less loudly about class than race and gender. People simply accuse the military of putting diversity ahead of defence.

It is worth considering, then, whether diversity initiatives actually make the military a more effective fighting organisation. On class and race, I would suggest the arguments are clear-cut. If the army, in particular, can break away from its traditional upper-middle class leadership cadre by recruiting more working-class and non-white officers, it is likely to be less hidebound by tradition. That is important. For all the pomp of the queen’s funeral, wars are not won by polishing things.

In my book, I focus on a cavalry regiment in the run-up to and during the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003. This organisation — pickled in alcohol, obsessed with standards of tailoring and mess etiquette (junior officers weren’t allowed to go to bed until everyone senior to them had departed), even as the drums of war began to beat, now seems picaresque and bizarre. But that ossification came in part from decades of recruiting the same kind of people, putting them through a brutal process of hazing, and then ensuring they replicated that treatment on those that succeeded them. Recruitment across wider social background shakes up things like that.

The full integration of women is more complex. The ban on women in combat roles — infantry or armoured units — was not lifted until 2016, two years after Britain withdrew from Helmand. But the reality of the Iraq and Afghan conflicts, in which there were no front lines, meant that female soldiers, for instance medics attached to infantry patrols, took the same risks as men. “Some of the best soldiers and most promising officers I know are women,” said General Patrick Sanders, at a ceremony in 2018 to mark all roles in the army becoming open to women. “Simply put the infantry will be more effective in war if we include the best talent our country can breed — male and female.”

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But whether opening armoured and infantry roles to women has improved the army is a complicated question. During the several hundred interviews I conducted for my book, I found that opinion is split. There was clear respect, even from relatively old-fashioned men, for the achievements of women. Many I spoke to suggested that naysayers had been proved wrong. Yet at the same time most men from the combat arms, soldiers and officers alike, remained — in private at least — opposed to the formal integration of women into their units. My sense is that the 2016-18 reform reflected the army leadership’s feeling that keeping some units male-only was now politically impossible, rather than a belief that it would create the most militarily effective army. (“This decision wasn’t forced upon us,” Sanders insisted).

Whenever the subject of women in “ground combat’ is raised there tends to be a lot of sexist and poorly-informed chatter about supposedly innate personality differences or the impact on male behaviour of having women nearby. Much of that is bunkum, as the bravery and effectiveness of female soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan attests. But there does remain an unassailable difficulty: physical requirements.

Many crucial jobs in the contemporary military do not require physical strength. But some do, and within infantry soldiering the ability to move long distances on foot carrying weight remains essential. Some exceptional women can meet and beat fitness requirements designed for men, but they are a minority. The US Army envisioned a gender-neutral new fitness test in 2017, but trials found that only 41-52% of enlisted women were passing, compared to 83-92% of men, depending on the component of the test. Among officers the pass rates were higher, but there was still a significant difference. When the test was actually implemented this year, gender neutral scoring had to be abolished. For example, in the deadlift component, women between the ages 17-21 have to lift 54kg to pass. Men in the same age group have to lift 64kg.

In general, integrating women into ground combat units requires one of two approaches. Either the existing fitness standards are maintained, which effectively means only small numbers of women will qualify. That dooms those exceptional female performers to a kind of tokenistic existence — and isolated women, in units where the hierarchy remains male-dominated, can face the worst of military sexism and harassment.

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The British Army moved to a gender-neutral fitness tests in 2018, with then-field army sergeant major Gavin Paton remarking: “I don’t care if you are a man or a woman, I don’t care what you do, and the enemy doesn’t either.” Notably though, while the test is formally gender-neutral, there are various distinctions depending on one’s role. For instance, Infantry and Royal Armoured Corps troops are expected to complete a 2km run within 9 minutes and 45 seconds, with paratroopers expected to achieve that in 8:15. This means that women in elite units will be few, which can create hazards. Imagine being one of a handful of newly-arrived women in a Parachute battalion when a video emerges, as it did in June, of your colleagues engaged in an orgy (albeit consensual) with a civilian woman.

The alternative is to alter physical standards so that women will pass in greater numbers. That expands female presence beyond the tokenistic, and creates a pipeline for female leadership. But lowering fitness bars also alters the fundamental nature of a unit, and, to an extent, its capabilities.

For eight years after the Afghan withdrawal in 2014, the British Army suffered an identity crisis — it could make no cogent case for what it was for as an institution. The Russian invasion of Ukraine changed that. “This is our 1937 moment,” Patrick Sanders remarked in June. But if the British military’s purpose is now to deter Russian aggression, then fighting efficiently should be the key metric for policy. On those terms, the actual size of the army matters. But so does determining which diversity initiatives help, what gets hidden, and what is worthwhile but fundamentally complex.

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It’s also worth recognising that surface-level reform can hide lingering prejudice, as the conclusion of Louise Pragnell’s project to paint the Household Cavalry showed. The huge image was finally unveiled over lunch in 2010, at the mess at Knightsbridge. The regiment invited Lucian Freud, who had painted a former Household Cavalry officer, Andrew Parker-Bowles, in 2003. In The Brigadier, the ex-husband of our new Queen is decked out in swanky garb, with scarlet stripes down his trousers, but his pose is aloof: he is thrown back in an armchair, jacket unbuttoned and belly spilling out.

At the unveiling, Freud, an octogenarian by this point, with advancing Alzheimer’s, kept forgetting what was going on.

“Who are these people?” he asked Pragnell. Around the table, everyone was pretending to talk while in fact listening to what he was saying.

“They’re officers of the household cavalry,” Pragnell replied.

“So why is there a negro here?” Freud asked.

You could hear a pin drop. All at once, the whole awkwardness of the regiment’s diversity experiment was dragged into the open; the fundamental weirdness of “we’ve got two women and two black guys but we’re still posh” was exposed.

It is difficult to square this perception with the Army’s shambolic and wasteful recent record in procurement. And yet a sense lingers, whether true or not, that the armed forces remain a refuge area for a type of stoic effectiveness lost to the rest of the country, an ability to get the job done, without complaint, against intimidating odds.

This may say as much about Britain as a whole as it does of the armed forces itself. Consider the wave of affectionate sentimentality about the Army, perhaps a working-class analogue of middle-class sentimentality about the NHS, which swept the country in the late 2000s. The popular mood at the time, manifest in the Help for Heroes campaign (est. 2007) and the Sun’s Military Awards (est. 2008), was immediately inflamed by the sense that troops in the field were being put in harm’s way by the Government’s budget cuts, and by dissatisfaction with heckling and burning of poppies  by jihadist sympathisers as troops paraded home from Afghanistan. Then the Army was a potent symbol of a pure, betrayed institution around which the British people could explore its wider anxieties, a metaphor for growing unease with the direction of the British state itself.

Yet even the Army’s most devoted supporter would be forced to admit that the past two decades have not enhanced its reputation. Both the Labour government’s two wars of choice were painful strategic and tactical failures, entered into with little popular enthusiasm and abandoned with little fanfare. In both wars, units and individual soldiers fought bravely on a tactical level, in pursuit of misguided and ultimately fruitless strategic aims. 

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It is within this context that two recent books aim to dissect the Army’s failings in Iraq and Afghanistan to make sense of this lacklustre performance. In The Changing of the Guard, Simon Akam, a former gap-year officer, chronicles the Army like a disappointed lover, twisting the knife into the institution’s sorest wounds. In Blood, Metal and Dust, Brigadier Ben Barry, a former director of the British Army Staff, chooses a higher target. Yes, the successes of the small interventions of the Nineties had led military chiefs to rest on their laurels, so that “operational success had become the mother of complacency.” But for Barry, whose book draws from his still-classified official postmortem of the post-9/11 wars, the ultimate cause of failure can be placed at the hands of the Labour politicians managing the war. 

Both retell the bare, painful facts of the Army’s two most recent defeats. In Iraq, the initial capture and occupation of Basra, entered into with soft hats and the self-congratulatory confidence of an Army that believed it led the world in peacekeeping and counterinsurgency, ended in a humiliating negotiated withdrawal of British forces to the edge of the city, where, pinned down by constant bombardment by the Shia militias who now ran the city, they lost all capacity to exert their influence. 

The Americans, distinctly unimpressed at the failure of the British officers, were forced to help Iraqi forces retake the city in 2008’s Charge of the Knights operation, a humiliation for Britain. “This damaged the reputation of British forces with the US and the Iraqis and inflicted major dents in British military self-confidence,” Barry notes. Akam is less stoic, describing it as ”an acute and lasting humiliation to the British Army”, which “will linger and follow the troops halfway around the world to Afghanistan”.

Indeed, to exorcise this ghost Britain’s political and military leaders recklessly volunteered for a campaign in a Helmand landscape of walled farms and thick vegetation which the Soviets had struggled to pacify, even while the Army struggled with Iraq. In Afghanistan, they believed, the Army would regain its reputation, leaving the difficulties of Iraq behind.

They were wrong. Thinly spread out in isolated rural compounds, or “platoon houses”, British troops were besieged by waves of Taliban fighters, and only avoided being overrun through devastating use of air power, which in turn alienated the civilians whose homes it destroyed. Along with a desperate need to avoid casualties, the reliance on short-ranged patrols, magnets for Taliban ambushes and bogged down by IEDs, meant that the Army could never retain tactical dominance in the countryside, let alone gain the strategic initiative.

As in Basra, force protection became the dominant goal and so initiative passed to the local enemy. Attempts to upend the balance of power, through bold but misconceived operations like Operation Panther’s Claw or through grandiose hearts-and-minds schemes like the transporting of a gigantic turbine through Taliban territory to the dam where it would remain unused for years, all failed. In Afghanistan, as in Iraq, the rich tribute of blood and treasure Britain poured into the dust was entirely in vain.

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Where does the blame lie? Barry lambasts Labour politicians such as Clare Short, whose intransigent refusal to provide the British troops who found themselves suddenly governing Basra, a city of 1.5 million people, with even basic DFID support due to her opposition to the war, did much to incite local anger in the first vital weeks and months of occupation. He takes aim at Gordon Brown, who as Chancellor forced through defence cuts that reduced the Army’s helicopter fleet, and then lied about it as Prime Minister when soldiers died in Helmand as a direct result. 

But he reserves his greatest ire for the architect of Britain’s entry into these needless wars: Tony Blair. Yet as Barry makes clear, military chiefs also failed to impress upon politicians the need to reassess their strategy in light of their failing mission. The plain-speaking and sober appreciation of hard facts for which the Army is renowned were here tragically absent.

For Akam, much of the blame can be laid at the Army itself. He draws an ethnographic portrait of an institution struggling to make sense of a changing world, whose cherished regimental ethos, the wellspring of individual pride and striving for excellence, also reduces it to “an awkwardly organised collection of warring tribes, inadequately co-ordinated and often fighting each other”. Fearful of future cuts, Generals volunteer the Army for the underestimated Helmand mission even as Iraq is failing: “It’s use them or lose them,” Akam quotes General Sir Richard Dannett on the ill-fated decision. Generals tell politicians what they want to hear, instead of the difficult truths that would blight promotion: “the British Army’s determination to ‘crack on’ got the army into a terrible mess.” 

For Akam, the absence of accountability for such failure is corrosive to the Army’s capability. Junior ranks are hauled before the courts for individual war crimes — rightly, he feels — while generals are rewarded for strategic failure with titles and sinecures. Unlike in Israel, where the failure of the 2006 Lebanon War led to a purge of failed senior officers, “no British general was fired or resigned over Iraq and Afghanistan”. The result, for Akam, is institutional rot: “that hypocrisy had trickled down into the institution below them and was souring it.” 

Moreover, Akam asserts, defence think tanks such as RUSI “can seem more like comfy clubs funded partly by arms manufacturers — friendly forces, in the forces’ jargon — than rigorous external overseers”, inhibiting them from guiding the Army through painful reform. 

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The American presence looms large over both books like a Victorian father, whose approval is yearned for, yet who emanates instead only cold disappointment. The tragic irony, as both Akam and Barry note, was that both the Basra and Helmand campaigns were entered into entirely to win Blair cachet in American eyes, yet the result of the Army’s disappointing performance was only American disdain. As Akam notes of his soldier informants on the eve of the Iraq invasion, “many appreciate that the real reason they are here is to maintain British military standing in American eyes”. 

Yet even during the invasion itself, before the humiliating retreat, the winnowing capacity of the British state had already lowered the Army’s reputation in American eyes. Basra, just over the border from Kuwait, was chosen as Britain’s target, in Akam’s telling, because the Army’s recent adoption of just-in-time logistics had left it with insufficient spare parts to travel any further. Lack of armoured vehicles, of body armour, helicopters, even ammunition left the Army scrounging what it could from unimpressed Americans and almost entirely equipping itself through emergency Treasury funds. 

Citing long-ago Malaya and more-recent Northern Ireland (as if that were an unqualified military success) in its favour, the Army deflected its sense of insecurity at its vastly reduced capacity compared to the US with an arrogant and ultimately mistaken belief that population-centric counterinsurgency was its unequalled métier. American officers quoted by Barry rolled their eyes at “‘more British tripe’” as events proved otherwise.

But even the Americans, whose resources were limitless in comparison, ultimately lost both wars. As Barry observes: “The US government’s decision to invade Iraq must stand as the worst military decision of the 21st century. It was a military strategic folly on a level equal to that of Napoleon’s 1812 attack on Russia and Hitler’s 1941 attack on the Soviet Union.” The failure, then, was ultimately a political one, of British politicians blindly following their American patrons into unwinnable wars: the Army’s essential sin was only one of trying to do the best of a bad job, a not ignoble character flaw. 

It is difficult to avoid the painful conclusion that the British Army functions for the Americans as the Gurkhas do for the British Army: a highly motivated, loyal auxiliary force, incapable of prosecuting a campaign on its own, whose colourful traditions still carry the romance of an earlier, more glorious era. 

Today, however, even this limited role is now in doubt: with the Government’s new focus on naval capacity and the much-vaunted Pacific Tilt forming the basis of Britain’s defence vision, the incoming Chief of Defence Staff, Admiral Sir Tony Radikin, is allegedly poised to oversee a dramatic cut in the Army’s already-dangerously pared-down numbers, cutting infantry ranks by more than one third of its current numbers. 

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The “Best Little Army in the World” may be getting littler, but it is not for the better. As the defence analyst Francis Tusa warns, the result of its decades-long and self-inflicted procurement woes is that it is now more or less “combat incapable against high-end threats”. Two decades of fighting poorly-equipped insurgents has distracted the Army from its primary mission of defending the country against a competent and well-equipped adversary like Russia or China.

Perhaps this is less a disaster than it may at first seem. The danger is not so much the Army’s incapacity as our politicians’ inability to match their ambitions to its resources, or the moral courage of its generals to gently dissuade them. For all that we mock Germany its military weakness, it is not abundantly clear that Britain has gained much for the decade or so of warfare that the Germans managed to avoid. After Blair’s promiscuous use of the Army to assuage his lust for glory, perhaps a period of enforced abstinence might do the institution some good, if it is to re-equip itself for the graver, and unchosen challenges of the coming century. 

The Army’s focus on the new Ranger battalions, tasked with training and directing local partner forces, in place of line infantry hints at a world of conflict where the business of fighting is increasingly left to expendable proxies. Yet a shrunken, more tightly-focussed Army also presents a challenge for a denuded British state, which has increasingly come to rely on soldiers to make up for its own lost capacity.

Its willingness to take on tasks outside its core role may fend off cutbacks, for a time, but is not necessarily in its own or the state’s best interests; it distracts from its urgent task of modernisation and reorganisation, and gives British governments cover to further winnow away state capacity, confident that soldiers will always be there to pick up the slack. 

As the Chilcot Report on Iraq observed, “a ‘can do’ attitude is laudably ingrained in the UK armed forces, a determination to get on with the job, however difficult the circumstances — but this can prevent ground truth from reaching senior ears.” Perhaps the Army’s capacity to win the next war, like the British state’s to weather the next crisis, would be better served by generals finding the courage, when necessary, to tell politicians that some things simply can’t, or shouldn’t be done.

“Attempts over the past four years to articulate a coherent, post-Brexit foreign policy,” the thinktank RUSI cautions, “have largely been unsatisfactory,” and the Government’s grand-sounding but content-free Global Britain rhetoric does “not provide sufficient guidance for those charged with determining how to prioritise the use of scarce national resources.”

With our foreign policy establishment “at a loss about what to do next,” the SDSR is tasked with reshaping the Armed Forces to support a grand strategy in flux, and defend us from this newly dangerous world. It is unfortunate, then, that previous SDSRs, focussed on incorporating the hard-won lessons of the near past, have had a poor record of predicting the challenges of the near future. 

The 2010 SDSR assumed that the future of conflict would be interventions within failed states rather than against powerful adversaries, and cut the Army’s numbers drastically, only to see Russia’s 2014 invasion of eastern Ukraine prove that war between states remained a serious threat even on our own continent.

The 2015 SDSR arrested cuts to the Army’s capabilities to meet the new  Russian challenge, and placed greater focus on a terrorist threat made newly-salient by the rise of the Islamic State, yet it also explicitly aimed to “build a deeper partnership with China, working more closely together to address global challenges,” an assumption that now looks dangerously naive. The challenge for this year’s SDSR will be how to prepare our armed forces to defend Britain’s interests in an era of multipolar competition, where COVID has simultaneously heightened the risk of great power confrontation and ravaged the domestic tax base on which our defence budget depends.  

In this context, the details published in the Times of the proposed cuts to the armed forces the SDSR is expected to unveil are alarming. According to the leaks, the Army will lose a quarter of its personnel, shrinking from its current size of 74,000 down to 55,000 soldiers; the Royal Marines will lose their capacity to deploy as an amphibious brigade, losing their landing craft, artillery and engineering assets; and the RAF will lose its Hercules transport planes, diminishing its strategic airlift capacity, as well as its fleet of Puma helicopters.

Instead, the UK will commit a greater share of the defence budget to managing threats to cyber-security and in space, essentially leapfrogging the known and rapidly increasing risks of war between states to face the nebulous hybrid threats of the future. 

Of course, alarming leaks like this are a traditional feature of defence reviews, designed to either make the actual cuts seem less disastrous when revealed, or, as part of the internecine warfare within Whitehall, to make the political pressure on the MOD so great that planned cuts are quietly reversed. We can expect and hope, then, that the actual cuts will be less severe than the early leaks make them seem, and it’s reassuring that the defence secretary Ben Wallace has come out with a strong denial that the Army in particular will face such a brutal pruning.

The crucial question from which all these decisions spring is one of grand strategy: what are our armed forces actually for? How will they be deployed, against which threats, and to what ends? Looking at our newly unstable world, the most pressing threats are of a great power conflict with China in the Pacific, of a need to defend NATO’s eastern frontiers in the Baltic against actual or threatened Russian encroachment, and of a need to intervene in failing states in Europe’s “near abroad” of the Middle East and North Africa.

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At the heart of the problem, as recent analysis argues, is the question of whether “post-Brexit, the UK wishes to be a European or global actor… the more European security dominates, the greater the case for Army size and investment in recapitalising land equipment, while a more global Britain places greater emphasis on the rapid projection of UK forces, which tends to favour the maritime capabilities.”

But with the limited budget at our disposal meaning we are unable to adequately prepare for all these threats simultaneously, we are left to either gamble the nation’s security on which will be the most likely, or spread our bets evenly to meet all these challenges with insufficient resources, guaranteeing failure from the start. 

Of the three likely conflict scenarios facing us — a land confrontation with Russia in Eastern Europe, a naval one with China in the Pacific and stabilisation operations in the greater Middle East — the first two are beyond our current capacity to sustain, and the third has been a disaster almost every time we have attempted it. Even the significant armoured forces we deployed in Germany throughout the Cold War would have had a lifespan of days in the event of war, and we have long lost the ability to assemble such a force, let alone sustain it in the field.

The extravagantly expensive new aircraft carriers that have soaked up so much of our defence budgets were sold as enhancing Britain’s global reach and standing, but seeing them sent to the bottom of the South China Sea in the first hours of a major conflict would have the opposite effect. The prospect of stabilisation missions in failing states have long since lost whatever savour they once held for British politicians seeking glory on the world stage. Of the options available to us, then, none of them are enviable with our current capabilities.

A recent RUSI paper on the forthcoming SDSR is instructive on the debates within the foreign policy establishment on how we should plan for the future. Regarding intervention in failed states, it notes with brutal frankness that the SDSR should start “with an honest examination of the lessons that need to be learnt from the failure of recent interventions. The track record of recent discretionary state-building interventions has been so poor, and so consistent, that it no longer makes sense to use the possibility of future such operations (such as those in Basra and Helmand for the UK) as planning assumptions for force design.” 

Regarding the Pacific theatre, where China’s sudden assertiveness has rudely awoken British politicians from their Global Britain dreams, the RUSI paper notes that “the UK should operate on the assumption that it would only deploy forces on significant operations in these regions in a supporting role to the US, and then only with a small part of the UK’s available force.” Instead, it argues, “the UK’s expeditionary capabilities should be optimised for their contribution to NATO forces for the defence of Europe,” leaving the role of garrisoning NATO’s eastern borders to our European allies, particularly a Germany that has long shirked its defence responsibilities.

Instead of amassing our dwindling armoured forces on the plains of Eastern Europe , Britain should “optimise its ground forces (British Army and Royal Marines) for responding rapidly against a wide range of hybrid and limited threats across Europe’s periphery.” 

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The strategy proposed here is that our area of focus should be “the defence of the UK homeland and its immediate neighbourhood” on Europe’s outer borders, working alongside NATO allies, but only in pursuit of limited goals, providing strategic capabilities our European partners lack, but leaving them with the responsibility of supplying the critical mass of troops we can no longer field.

Yet cutting the Royal Marines’ capacity to deploy by sea or the Army’s ability to deploy by RAF Hercules would seem to be the exact opposite of planning for limited interventions even in our near abroad. Focussed on the expensive big-ticket purchases that allow us to project air power on a global stage in support of our American patron, we may be distractedly cutting our ability to defend ourselves from the threats closer to home with which the US, distracted by China and by its own domestic instability, may have limited interest in engaging. 

Indeed, given our total strategic dependence on the United States, it’s worth following American discussions on how they see the role of their allies in future wars. To this end, a fascinating recent paper from West Point’s Modern War Institute ought to give our planners pause for thought. It argues that, given China’s inbuilt advantage in a Pacific war, and the extreme vulnerability of US carrier fleets, let alone those of weaker allies like ourselves, to withstand Chinese missile barrages,“the United States has little use of mid-sized nations that pay a premium for expeditionary, high-tech capabilities” — a succinct description of the UK’s current defence posture — but should “encourage its allies to build forces that can withstand war in their area instead.”

This plan to rebalance America’s assets to cope with the stresses of a multipolar world explicitly cites the British Empire’s policy of complementing naval hegemony through alliances with European powers willing to take up the unwanted burden of land warfare, and tallies well with the developing consensus in British think tanks that we should do much the same on a far smaller scale. 

Yet even this is only a stopgap solution. As for the pivot to a low-cost, high-tech future, the hope that investing in technology can fill the gap between our growing needs and our dwindling resources must be seen for the wishful thinking it is.

The rebalancing of our armed forces to focus on the hybrid threats of cyber-warfare, allegedly Dominic Cummings’ pet project, threatens to make an undoubtedly necessary additional capability our main effort, and RUSI is right to warn that “pretending that future war will be bloodless, limited to creating virtual or cyber casualties, makes the carnage of real war more likely,” and that ultimately, “the use of hard power to inflict pain on an adversary in pursuit of national political objectives remains at the heart of a state’s power.”

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While Cummings’ drive to reform the MoD’s grotesquely mismanaged procurement strategy is urgently necessary, there is, unfortunately for the government, no other way out of addressing the strategic threats facing us over the coming decades than taxing voters more and spending more money on defence, whatever the political costs in doing so. Doing more with less was shortsighted even when the times were good, and with the international situation deteriorating so rapidly, underinvestment is a luxury we can no longer afford.

The risk of major conventional warfare between states is greater than it has been in any of our lifetimes, and Britain needs to maintain the ability to deploy hard power quickly enough and with sufficient threat of force behind it to deter our adversaries from escalating threats to a level we are unable to match.

Given that “the UK’s relationship with the US is now less reliable than at any time over the last half-century,” it is in our interest to maintain our ability to defend ourselves from as many of the rapidly accumulating risks on our own doorstep as possible, while rebuilding alliances with our estranged European partners and enhancing military ties with likeminded powers further afield.

In the meantime, our defence aspirations should be focused on the regional threats we still — just — retain the capacity to manage, leaving the more ambitious global challenges to our American patron. For too long, there has been a striking mismatch between the government’s “global Britain” aspirations and the more homely reality of our capabilities, and we are perhaps fortunate that by accelerating global trends that may otherwise have taken decades to play out, COVID has helped reveal our meagre hand before we have committed ourselves to playing it. 

It is understandable that nations and alliances would want to minimise the harm and insist that, whatever happens, defence capability will be unimpaired — a part of defence, after all, is credibility. Even from published reports, however, it can be deduced that this is not quite true: there have been disruptions, some quite serious, to the plans and operations of many armed forces — and there may well be more to come.

Among the most vulnerable are maritime forces, which is logical, given that naval vessels share many characteristics with cruise ships, or “floating petri dishes” as they’ve been described. Crew live in close and often cramped quarters and use communal facilities for weeks on end.

An early alert was sounded in March, when the US Naval authorities faced a near-mutiny after the captain of the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt went public with a warning that there were several hundred cases of coronavirus among the sailors on board and that there could be multiple deaths unless action was taken. The captain, Brett Crozier, was summarily dismissed, but has become something of a folk hero and could be reinstated following an ongoing inquiry. The aircraft carrier was evacuated and is docked at the US naval base in Guam. Of a crew of more than 4,000, more than 1,100 cases have been recorded.

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The UK has taken precautions of its own. The new aircraft carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth — one of two controversially commissioned by the Royal Navy — had to delay its first extensive sea trials for two weeks so that all the crew could be tested for coronavirus. It set sail from Portsmouth on 29 April, but only after securing the agreement of what were described as “senior leaders across Defence”, and its operations appear to have been adjusted, with the Navy saying that “as a further precaution” the carrier would “conduct a period of isolation at sea” before training begins, it would be operating in waters close to the UK coast, and the commanding officer had “the discretion to cease the training if it is deemed necessary”.

The French aircraft carrier, Charles de Gaulle, is also smitten by the virus and currently quarantined at the port of Toulon, with a reported 600 cases. This means that of the 15 carriers (11 of them US) available to the Nato alliance, three are out of commission — 20% — and these are only the instances that have been reported.

Nor is it only navies that are affected. The UK is one of several countries that has not divulged the extent of the infection in the military, but there have been reports of unhappiness at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst with how social distancing and other precautions are, or are not, being observed. Sports and weekend leave have been cancelled, and suspected Coronavirus cases housed in separate accommodation.

Some army deployments have been reduced. The UK’s training mission in Iraq has been “paused”, with most of the UK’s 400-strong contingent there being recalled. Troops have also returned from Germany. And while the Defence Secretary, Ben Wallace, insists that the UK’s defence capability has not been harmed, there has been some evidence of increased Russian probing — by air and sea — in recent weeks, suggesting that Moscow is testing what it might see as a new vulnerability.

Russia, though, has its own problems with coronavirus. Although the country as a whole has not so far been as badly affected as major West European countries or the United States, outbreaks have been reported in several Russian military units and academies, and the Prime Minister, Mikhail Mishustin, who said he had contracted the virus last month, is reported to be in hospital.

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The virus has also dealt a big political blow to President Putin. He had planned a massive Victory Day parade to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the end of the Second World War — known as the Great Fatherland War in Russia — on 9 May. He had also hoped for a big turn-out of international leaders to signal Russia’s return from the diplomatic cold, six years after its seizure of Crimea from Ukraine.

The spread of coronavirus, however, has put paid to all that. Putin waited until mid-April before finally conceding the inevitable. The anniversary commemoration has now been provisionally moved to September, but it will not have the same resonance then.

Perhaps the most significant consequence of the pandemic in the military sphere, however, is the effective cancellation of one of the North Atlantic alliance’s biggest sets of manoeuvres in Europe since the end of the Cold War. The exercises — named Defender-Europe 20 — were planned to last several weeks during April and May. They were due to involve 37,000 troops from 18 countries, including 20,000 from the United States, and to demonstrate not only the US’s ability to deploy rapidly across continents, but the continuing US commitment to the security of Europe.

The purpose was to practise deploying a Nato force sufficient to combat an (unspecified, but clearly Russian) attack on an ally (also unspecified, but clearly one of the Baltic States). As such, Defender-Europe 20 was conceived as an unambiguous signal to Russia to keep its hands off eastern and central Europe and to those more recent Nato members that Article 5 — an attack on one is treated as an attack on all — would, and could, be honoured. (The US President’s lukewarm attitude to Nato had sometimes placed that in doubt.)

There was an additional purpose, too. The crossing of borders by foreign military personnel and hardware — even within the European Union’s Schengen Zone and between Nato allies — remains a sensitive issue, with convoys requiring advance permission, which limits speed of deployment. Defender-Europe 20 was also in part intended to show that this difficulty could be surmounted.

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Except that, as the Coronavirus swept through Europe and then reached the United States, everything proved too complicated. President Trump banned all travel to the US for European nationals, while the EU closed the Schengen Zone. In mid-March, the US European Command downgraded US participation and announced the recall of most of the thousands of troops, vehicles and equipment already dispatched. Those who stayed would be redeployed to help individual Nato countries combat the pandemic.

Officially, the exercises have only been scaled back. What remains, however, are little more than fragments of the original grand design that had spanned 10 countries, with the main action in Germany, Poland and the Baltic States.

The extent of Nato’s change of plan came across starkly from an unusually gnomic “special” media briefing given by General Tod Wolters, Commander of the US European Command and Nato Supreme Allied Commander Europe on 16 April. In it, he made almost no direct reference to the disintegration of Defender-Europe 20, insisting repeatedly that the alliance would be “laser-focused” on delivering “effective deterrence and defence” and that forces remained at the ready.

There was no need to read between the lines, though, to conclude that the Defender-Europe 20 was now a shadow of its former self. A separate, Baltic-based exercise planned for June-July would at best be “adjusted” in its scope and scale and, at worst, cancelled.

It was a comprehensive admission that the best of plans, laid over many months by the leader of the world’s foremost military power and the world’s most powerful military alliance, had been totally derailed — not by an enemy assault, but because of a disease.

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It is clear that coronavirus is having a direct and widespread impact on military operations in many parts of the world. Of those countries reporting the incidence of infection in their militaries, France had confirmed 600 as of early April, Spain and Germany more than 200 each, and the United States more than 1,500.

But it is not just the debilitating threat that disease poses to human capital that militaries will need to confront in future. Disease has the potential to exacerbate other vulnerabilities. Morale is one. If crew who have spent months at sea have no opportunity on return to reconnect with family without delay, how effective will they be as a fighting force when they next go to sea? If, to the usual privations of service is added lockdown or quarantine, how will officers motivate their teams?

This was the dilemma that faced John Lewis, the commander of HMS Trenchant, one of the UK’s three nuclear-powered submarines last month. He ignored the advice of superiors to cancel an end-of-voyage party at the Devonport base at Plymouth — and paid for that decision with his command. It can be seen as an isolated incident, but similar dilemmas will arise all the time.

The other, not unrelated, concerns propaganda. The fear and uncertainty that surround illness make it natural material for enemy propaganda to make a bad situation worse. A recent example was a faked communication from Nato Secretary-General to the Defence Minister of Lithuania, saying that the US was withdrawing all its troops from May, because of the strain on capacity from Coronavirus. The context of the cancelled Nato manoeuvres made this all the more credible.

***

It is hard to see how there will not also be profound reviews in military and defence establishments around the world. Doubtless the potential threat from biological weapons will be subject to renewed scrutiny; but the debilitating effects of a new disease on military capability — a disease with as yet no cure and no vaccine — will soar up the hierarchy of official concerns.

In recent decades, the top brass across the world have set great store by procuring the last word in military technology, from ships to fighter planes to weaponry. One of the reasons some senior officers are so wary of the defence and foreign policy review announced by Boris Johnson after he won the December election is that it lumps military capability along with diplomacy and aid policy — it considers “soft” power as well as “hard”. They fear that that this could reduce the emphasis on prestigious state-of-the-art hardware that would be assumed in a defence-only review.

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In fact, the emphasis of defence leaders was already shifting towards new technology, especially cyber capability and unmanned drones. Now, the more insidious threat from disease will have to be added. If humans are seen as more vulnerable than they were, could this accelerate moves towards conflict by remote control?

That is for the longer term, though. In the short-term, the pandemic may be having an effect not only on military capability but, because of that, also on actual wars. An attempt by the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Gutterez, to call a global truce during the pandemic was blocked by the US and Russia. But the scaling back of Turkish operations in northern Syria and of Saudi-backed operations in Yemen have led to welcome lulls in the fighting. France has repatriated some troops from West Africa after they became infected with Coronavirus, and decided not to dispatch others. It is not impossible either that the spread of the pandemic in Libya and the emergencies declared in Russia and Ukraine could not only reduce the fighting in the Donbass, but force cooperation across battle-lines.

Which might just suggest a perverse side-effect from this otherwise destructive pandemic. Just as the lockdowns have brought unforeseen environmental benefits, could it be that, by reducing even slightly the capacity of armies to fight, the virus is offering some respite from conflict? Realism would dictate, however, that neither will last.