Britain is sleepwalking into someone else's war

From day one I’ve been sceptical about supporting Ukraine. It should have been European foreign policy to steer clear of any moves that would give Putin any further pretext to invade while building up Ukrainian defences to ensure credible deterrence. But we didn’t do that. The next most intelligent position was to arm Ukraine sufficiently to hold the current lines and use our diplomatic influence to freeze the conflict.

The reason for that is that war is bad and dangerous. That’s something people seem to have forgotten. Such an approach would not have been optimal but from our perspective (the only perspective from which we should view it), there is nothing in that scrap of Eastern European rust belt that makes the escalation worth it.

By supplying Ukraine with long-range weapons with which to attack strategic targets deep inside Russia, we have turned this into a proxy war where we can no longer lay any credible claim to not being directly involved in the conflict. That has shifted the war up a gear to the point where it is spilling out, becoming one major hotspot among many. We are sleepwalking into a third world war. And here’s the thing. I do not want a third world war. It should be avoided. I don’t think I need to explain why.

You might have a different opinion about that, and you might even successfully persuade me your logic is sound, but what is not in dispute is that Britain is not ready for any kind of major conflict. Our already depleted armed forces are shrinking further in the wake of the Defence Investment Plan, and there is no coherent doctrine behind our existing defence spending. We are also badly behind the technological curve.

There is also the question of the national interest. In writing my defence policy for the Manifesto Project, I’ve been scrupulously neutral on the question of NATO. I do see the utility in maintaining Western interoperability, but I do not see the Western alliance as a reliable defence backstop. We cannot trust America.

There are two reasons for this. Trump is one of those reasons, and more broadly, the isolationist American right, many of whom have bought into the British insurgent right narrative that Britain is already conquered by Islam and a lost cause. Meanwhile, as the US grapples with an international humiliation over Iran, it will choose its allies on a much more expedient basis, and America cannot be trusted to respect or diplomatically uphold Britain’s claims to its overseas territories. Namely, the Falklands.

The other reason is the American left which is now completely captured by anti-Western influences. The special relationship is dead and demographic trends will bury it. Our fondness for Uncle Sam is not reciprocated.

Then, as I alluded the other day, Britain is not actually a coherent enough demos to fight any war. Young men born to immigrants will sooner decamp to their place of ethnic origin than die in a ditch in Eastern Ukraine or Estonia, and I don’t really blame them. Certainly I would oppose the complete obliteration of Britain’s technically competent native young men in a war against an enemy that poses no serious conventional threat to us. We should ready our maritime defences against Russia, but we have enough of our own problems. Low-level civil war is not a remote possibility.

You might then raise the issue of European solidarity, but France’s actions of late (flooding Britain with its unwanted garbage immigration) have not been those of an ally, and the EU will always side with Ireland’s progressive faction even though Ireland contributes nothing at all to Europe’s defence.

As much as anything, Europe’s own defences are badly degraded for the same reasons ours are. Neglect. Worse still, our industrial capabilities have been imploding over the last decade thanks to net zero policies. We do not have the industrial capacity for a long war, and Europe cannot expect any help from America since we’re leaving America to go it alone in dealing with Iran (which controls a vital supply of oil). As Ukraine grapples with Iranian drones and wider material support, Europe will not commit to any meaningful action against them.

It’s worth exploring here why Europe has collectively washed its hands of the Iran question. I was never wholly on top of the issue, but from the early days I was sceptical about what could be achieved by air power alone. That much is widely understood and the only way we are ever going to take the Iranian regime out of the picture is to put boots on the ground and remove it. But alas, after the catastrophic unfolding of our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is no appetite for that.

As to whether we should, I’ve been hesitant about that for much the same reasons. I don’t particularly want to see a nuclear-armed Iran and I think the world would be a better place without the Iranian regime’s persistent stoking of the Israeli-Arab conflict. But then toppling the regime brings instability of its own. There are compelling arguments on the web as to why Iran is not Iraq, and would not unfold in the same way since Persians do actually want rid of the regime, but Iran could become an Iraq for the same reasons Iraq became Iraq. Western military incompetence. That is the one constant.

But it’s a moot point. Europe can only afford one war of choice at a time, and it has chosen Ukraine. We are going to keep feeding ever more expensive and lethal weapons into Ukraine until it either becomes an all-out war, that could easily go nuclear, or until Russia collapses, which presents dangers of its own. It risks uncontrolled fragmentation, nuclear dangers, humanitarian crises, and power vacuums filled opportunistically (especially by China and Iran). Any way you look at it we are drifting towards total chaos, because nobody has the good sense to avoid it. Arguably, World War Three has already started.

Meanwhile, Britain’s immediate security interests are being overlooked entirely. While Ukraine and Iran soak up our attentions, little attention is paid to the unravelling of Africa. Russia being significantly reduced or expelled from its key footholds in Africa (primarily the Sahel states of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger via the Alliance of Sahel States, plus Central African Republic, Sudan, and others) would have major ripple effects.

Africa Corps (Russian Ministry of Defence-controlled paramilitary organisation) provides regime protection and limited counter-insurgency for military juntas that seized power via coups (2020–2023). Their removal would likely accelerate advances by groups like JNIM (Al-Qaeda affiliate) and IS Sahel. Jihadist sieges on capitals (already occurring near Bamako), fuel/power disruptions, and territorial losses could intensify. Mali has already seen coordinated attacks killing officials and overrunning northern bases.

As it happens, things are unfolding all over Africa. South Africa is in a state of ongoing collapse which will soon accelerate. Sudan is in the middle of a brutal civil war which shows no sign of ending soon, and has created the world’s largest displacement crisis and one of the worst humanitarian emergencies globally. The situation is extremely dangerous. The RSF’s push toward El Obeid has triggered urgent international warnings of potential mass atrocities. The humanitarian crisis is worsening rapidly, with famine, disease, and displacement feeding into each other.

And you know what that means. A massive wave of migration. This is where the British right has no strategic depth to its thinking. The clamour is to end foreign aid and fight the immigration war at our own border. This is dangerous because it risks further destabilisation in Europe and a souring of Anglo-French relations.

As such, there is a strategic case for foreign aid as part of a layered approach to foreign policy. There are two immediate tasks for any incoming government. The first is that the asylum system, as currently constituted, must be closed. The concept of refuge rests on the premise that wars eventually end, allowing refugees to return home once they do. To make that return realistic, refugees should ideally remain in neighbouring countries, since this both speeds up eventual repatriation and supports regional rebuilding once conditions allow it. Refuge should, as a rule, only be granted on the same continent as the conflict that produced it.

Where Western nations want to help (and service their own security interests), the more effective and more honest form of assistance is to fund orderly refuge systems in the regions themselves, preventing the kind of destabilisation that triggers secondary migration further afield. Investment in peacekeeping, healthcare and clean water access does more to contain a conflict and support a displaced population than accepting a fraction of that population thousands of miles away.

That is the limit of any moral obligation, and it happens to align closely with our own self-interest. Western countries are not morally obliged to accept an open-ended number of refugees simply because a crisis exists somewhere in the world.

By conducting this kind of activity, Britain has a claim to moral leadership which strengthens its case of principled ECHR non-compliance (with much more aggressive border security employing FPV drones to puncture dinghies in French waters). It doesn’t require us to find any extra money since we just use the money we’re currently spending on asylum.

This in my view is necessary even if the plan is to leave the ECHR (which is neither intelligent nor necessary). If Britain is making the case that it does not need to be part of the ECHR in order to operate to higher standards then it actually has to be an exemplar. That much-vaunted “global leadership”. Britain is going to have to build up political and moral capital because something tells me our foreign policy is going to require much bolder and aggressive moves as the global order begins to unravel.

This, though, brings me back to defence policy. We cannot hope to have a coherent defence policy without a coherent foreign policy. With all of the above in mind, Britain should be less concerned with equipping for a high-tech peer fight on the plains of Eastern Europe, and more concerned with extending its maritime deterrence and peacekeeping expeditionary capabilities which suggests maintaining our COIN capabilities. We cannot be everywhere doing all things. If we are to do anything well, we need to decide what the national interest is and where our strategic priorities are.

In that respect, my own foray into defence policy has fallen victim to the same lack of coherence. Most of the intellectual effort has gone into understanding high-tech battle formations with Ukraine and Russia in mind, when it’s more Europe’s problem than ours, and well within the means of Poland and Germany to sort it out for themselves if they get their act together.

We can assist with that much. My thinking on defence at the moment is that we should give our entire fleet of main battle tanks to Ukraine along with whatever Ajax junk got delivered. At the very least, they can strip out the electronics and put them to better use. Britain needs to start over, not least because Ukraine has rendered most of our land forces doctrine obsolete. Current British doctrine is flawed on two basic counts.

Firstly, the accountancy tier pushing for fleet standardisation and common platforms. This doesn’t work. Combat vehicles either have to be general purpose or built from the ground up for a particular purpose. The modular approach looks very good on paper, but in practice it just leads to vehicles that don’t do any job well and seldom work.

The second problem is the obsolete doctrines driving procurement that simply haven’t kept up with the pace of change. Big set-piece armoured thrusts are never going to be relevant again. The battlefield now favours light, fast, unmanned technologies. We’ve seen enough drone footage now to know that any form of vehicle is rapidly detected and soon eliminated. The lifespan of an average conscript on this kind of battlefield is now measured in minutes. The digital battlefield is area denial.

The defence pundits I’m reading seem to think we simply have to get used to the idea of heavy losses to retake ground, and for that you need massive expendable armoured thrusts. I can see the logic, but we’re now in the era of mass-produced low-cost anti-tank missiles, GPS-guided artillery and drone swarms, at a time when close air support is similarly obsolete and the airspace is also closed to anything that isn’t small and unmanned. With the advent of autonomous drones, air superiority doesn’t buy you very much.

The issue is not strictly the armoured thrusts themselves, it’s the inability to form up and mass forces prior to the thrust. The modern battlefield is saturated with sensors and they can see such things coming a mile off. You’re attacked before you even launch.

Again, we can draw certain conclusions from Ukrainian tactics. We’re now seeing much more aggressive deep strikes aimed at crippling Russian infrastructure, with a view to eroding industrial capacity and creating civilian disquiet. There’s a reason for this. With limited manpower, Ukraine cannot risk an all-out assault to retake lost territory. It’s too big a gamble. Ukraine only has to lose one major engagement for it to be game over. Britain would face the same constraints given how few troops and vehicles we have.

As to what we should buy instead, that’s a more difficult question. I’m leaning towards the view that saturation artillery is the only way to push the front forward. I was leaning in the direction of light tanks with big guns, procured in sufficient numbers to endure big losses, augmented by unmanned platforms, but then I had an important epiphany.

Western defence procurement is shit. Not only is it shit, it is never not going to be shit. Supposing the doctrines we arrive at are correct, they are obsolete by the time vehicles are delivered, and what does get delivered will be late, over budget and too complicated. Bureaucracy cannot meet the demands of a highly fluid battlespace.

I think, then, that the model for drone production currently employed by Ukraine should apply to everything. Right now, their drone production is distributed over hundreds of small workshops, taking telemetry directly from the battlefield and feeding it into new innovations. What matters, then, is that they have the basic components to work with and the means for units to cobble their own solutions together.

I think that could also work with fighting vehicles. My idea is as follows, and feel free to shoot me down. We establish a fighting vehicles sandbox at a dedicated facility. RAF Topcliffe would be my nomination because you can develop it there. Rather than giving specifications for whole weapons systems to the likes of BAE Systems, we just buy generic off-the-shelf trucks, quads, bikes, sensors, guns, missiles, mortars, MRAP chassis and let units cobble together their own kit and see what works. Give combat units their own engineers, mechanics and developers, and deploy them to forward positions.

Essentially, we have to take the accountants and the bureaucracy out of the loop and create a more flexible development environment. If we then happen upon something that really works, we can proliferate the knowledge between units, harden up specifications and feed them back into mass production.

It seems to me that any procurement is dead in the water the nanosecond you introduce it to the LinkedIn class. What we need is for the geeks to inherit the earth - linking up tech colleges directly with the forward engineers and demoting MoD procurement to just sourcing bog-standard components and platforms.

If it turns out that we do need force mass, I think we’d do better with a universal platform like the JLTV that we can deploy in the thousands, each with mission-adaptable kit from the quartermaster hangars, and let the soldiers choose their own tools. Meanwhile, it is vital to maintain a force of MRAP vehicles in the event of any African deployment.

The bottom line is that we’ve been attempting to fix centralised procurement for decades. We failed, and we’re going to keep failing. As such, we need to get back to ad hoc innovation in the best spirit of British make-do-and-mend. It cannot possibly be any worse than the situation we find ourselves in now.

Again, though, I reiterate that military coherence is downstream of foreign policy coherence - but that is far downstream of political coherence, which brings this blog back to its usual fare. British politics is hopelessly degraded and getting worse all the time. The incoming replacement prime minister is set to surpass his predecessor in the unpopularity and incompetence stakes, since he’s as much of a throwback to a previous iteration of Labour as Jeremy Corbyn was. Andy Burnham has a leather-bound man-bag full of 1997 ideas and is all set to crash and burn(ham).

As dreadful a prospect as that is, the British right shows no great promise either. The slop-right has nothing in the way of policy or expertise to bring to bear, perhaps pointing to a recovery of the Tory party, but there’s no sign of perspicacity there either. British politics is increasingly parochial and more concerned than ever with the soap opera of Westminster politics. Our politics is not fit for purpose and our media is even worse. You know, folks, I think we might be in trouble. Britain is sleepwalking into someone else’s war, and we can’t even be sure which one.