Defence of the realm: policy incoherence

The pont I’ve been making over the last few posts is that if you want to destroy the establishment parties, you have to develop the alternative. What’s the point of creating a political vacuum if what fills it is as bad or worse?

What ails Britain particularly is the lack of joined-up thinking, and the siloed approach to policy making, and usually, we find lazy tropes and soundbites in place of policy. This is particularly true of the Reform Party. Today I've been looking at Reform's defence policy, where again there is a serious lack of thinking.

They say "Increase Defence Spending to 2.5% of National GDP by year 3, then 3% within 6 years. This will increase the size and capacity of our armed forces, ensuring our lead role in NATO".

This is actually the same as Labour's plans to raise defence spending to 2.5 percent of GDP.

The first question to ask is when has an arbitrary spending target ever been a good idea? We had a spending target with foreign aid and look how that panned out. And why do we want to expand the size of our armed forces? In peacetime, it's possibly the most unproductive use of money, assets and people.

What we actually want is national readiness. I personally do not believe we will see a war with Russia. The Ukraine war will be fought to a bloody stalemate and Russia will fortify its gains in Eastern Ukraine, while NATO deterrence prevents Russia from attacking further.

But if we take the view a conventional war is likely, then readiness matters. To that end, what actually matters is not the size of the army. It's how readily we can mobilise an army and deploy it. The two things we need to be good at is training and logistics.

Currently we have a lean army, no bigger than it should be for low intensity peacetime operations. We have competent special forces andthe means to deploy them globally. If, however, we want to rapidly expand the army, we make it so that regular soldiers can become the training NCOs. What will make mobilisation easier is if we have a potent reserve force. We have about thirty thousand reservists, and we need a debate as to whether that's enough.

If not, and I don't believe it is, what can be done to expand and enhance the reserve force, and in what ways can we encourage more people to sign up? How do we enhance the social status of being a reservist? Our education system must be geared to the need for rapid military expansion. You can't build a military out of a totally demilitarised population. You have to start military training in schools and universities.

But in the event of mobilisation, we would probably struggle to put a hundred helicopters in the air, when I'd say we need a magnitude more. Only we don't want, in peacetime, to have the expense of running military helicopters for their own sake. Is it then possible to acquire reconditioned Chinook airframes for long term storage with a view to rapid reactivation? What other cost-effective readiness measures can we take?

As to sustaining an army, as we're finding in Ukraine, we have difficulty supplying gun barrels and ammunition. The lessons are there to be learned, which should inform our military industrial strategy. We can’ make tanks if we don’t make steel. Our industrial policy should be structured in such a way as to support our defence policy. The two must, essentially, be integrated, or we haven't got a defence policy at all.

Though weaponry changes over time, the one thing that doesn't is the requirement for decent logistics. The basic army truck configuration has hardly changed in a hundred years, the most successful of which have been adaptations of civilian vehicles. We should, where possible, look to existing designs where there are already established supply chains for spares.

Meanwhile, the Ukraine war has brought drone warfare to the forefront. As with tank warfare, it's a numbers game, where swarm attacks are especially lethal. What's needed is high volume at low cost. These are expendable devices. We need to be able to produce them without reliance on Chinese electronics, and we can't let MOD gold-plating of specifications drive the cost per unit into the millions. And as much as anything, we need major investment in counter-drone warfare technology.

There's then the matter of heavy lift capacity. Cancelling the highly capable C130 was a mistake. The A400M is expensive to buy and operate, and complicated to maintain. It takes a year to build one. Having C130 means a global market of readily available spares. One of the more intelligent decisions of the MOD was to acquire the P8 Poseidon (based on the Boeing 737) because of its commonality with commercial airlines. This should be the preferred approach to procurement.

Any war we fight is as much an economic war as it is a shooting war, and our combat effectiveness is fundamentally dependent on secure supply chains and availability of materials. As such, our trade and industrial policies should take these matters into account, and no trade deals should endanger Britain's capacity to mobilise new defence production lines.

As to air power, the RAF has roughly the right approach to standardisation, and instead of reinventing the wheel, we should look to long term operation and production of the Eurofighter Typhoon, ensuring they can be replaced at a point in their lifespans with enough remaining airframe hours so they can be pulled out of storage and reactivated if necessary. Meanwhile, there remains an argument for the Army to operate its own low-cost, high endurance close air support aircraft.

As to to the Royal Navy, we are growing the fleet, but the critical problems are recruitment and retention. Pay is only part of it, so we need a commission to examine how to improve conditions at sea, length of deployments and family time.

I'm just spitballing here, but this is an example of how to think about defence policy. We're not rich enough to maintain a well-equipped standing army for all eventualities, nor do we want to waste taxpayers money on overly complicated weaponry that we cannot mass produce. We have Rolls Royce kit but too few in number, when future large wars will require lots of everything. The watchwords for defence policy should be "readiness" and "scalability".

Ultimately there’s no excuse for having a poor defence policy. There’s a wealth of expertise available on public platforms like X and Reform could easily have availed themselves of it.

But then, defence policy now has to go far beyond conventional armed services. Defence is now as much a matter of cyber warfare, bio-weapons, disinformation and psy-ops, and media warfare. Russia is even looking for ways to weaponise immigration, using foreign policy to turn African states against Europe. As such, we need a coherent foreign policy which is linked to trade, immigration, industrial and defence policy.

Siloed thinking on defence doesn't cut it. Defence policy has to be comprehensive, and it won't be coherent unless it is values-based with properly defined objectives. Part of the problem we have now is that defence policy is pulled this way and that as objectives change, thus every branch of the armed services is always in a state of transition - from one fashionable toy to the next, while neglecting the basics.

Ultimately you’ll never have a coherent defence policy unless you have a coherent foreign policy. That's especially difficult when the country lacks a sense of purpose and in the midst of an identity crisis. That is a far harder problem to solve, where we have to address not only the culture of the foreign office and the MOD, but the wider culture of government - not least the creeping wokery, institutional capture, and poor leadership which is now endemic to all parts of the state.

That is where we desperately need high quality policy rather than vague tropes about streamlining the civil service and recruiting from the private sector (which is every bit as bad when it comes to fads and virtue signalling).

As with other issues discussed in previous posts, the poor leadership is a symptom of the regime it operates in. The MOD operates inside the constraints of the Equalities Act, and is occupied by the corporate Human Resources tendency. Meanwhile the FCDO exists to implement UN Sustainable Development Goals, and trade policy is once agin the domain of Brussels addled policy wonks who struggle to think in multidimensional terms.

The problem, I think stems from the way manifestos are written. Parties decide on a list of subject headings and fill in the blanks instead of thinking about objectives, the barriers to achieving them, and the difference between a symptom and a cause. Whenever you find problem, in most cases it is the product of a higher level decision or law.

When it comes to defence, we’ve had decades of policy incoherence, where we’ve equipped for maximum theoretical European defence cooperation while operationally following the USA into its wars. Defence procurement has suffered especially from attempting to ride two horses. Meanwhile, defence is ill-served by the establishment obsession with reaching Net Zero, which has already destroyed our steel industry. We also find the MOD exploring greener, low emissions military vehicles. We are a profoundly unserious country.

As to Reform, it may have serious problems squaring the defence circle even in its own ranks. Defence of the realm is a multi-tier area of policy where there are several real and potential threats to consider which ought to inform our foreign policy priorities. In recent years the populist right has taken a more isolationist turn. Our involvement in unwinnable interventions in the middle east has severely bruised the national ego and willingness to be active in the world. These were high cost endeavours for no discernable gain, which resulted in yet more immigration as we destabilised half of the region. There is a prevailing view that active foreign policy does more harm than good.

The problem with this mentality is that if we aren’t meddling in Africa and the Middle East then Russia and China will. Russia, kicking at an open door, has used propaganda across Africa, pushing the “woke” leftist view that the West are exploitative colonisers, and they’ve successfully weakened Europe’s influence in Africa. There is evidence to suggest the Russia is pushing more migration to Europe which contributes to the rise of Putin sympathising populists.

This has obvious consequences. It can very easily weaken European resolve on Ukraine and, on a long enough timeline, even precipitate the breakup of the EU and hobble NATO.

This presents an interesting dilemma for Reform in that many of its supporters are far more neutral on Ukraine than its leader, Richard Tice. In pledging 2.5% of National GDP, Reform clearly supports the NATO guideline and wishes to play a “lead role in NATO”, when many on the insurgent right blame NATO for provoking the war in Ukraine, and would leap for joy if the EU did break up.

Ultimately, though, the direct national interest is promoting peace and stability in Africa, promoting trade, creating centres of employment, and even investing aid into trade infrastructure if that contributes to slowing migratory flows. Immigration policy must deal with push as well as pull factors. Allowing Russia free reign in Africa is not in our interests.

To that end, there is a role for our military and the FCDO in an international development policy. This then clashes with Refrom’s somewhat arbitrary promise to halve spending on foreign aid. As discussed previously, foreign aid could have foreign policy and defence applications.

If Reform is to resolve these dilemmas, it needs to decide if it is internationalist or a nativist, isolationist populist party. It cannot be both, and the vagueness and incoherence of its current stance means it will be unable to develop a coherent foreign policy and, consequently, defence policy will be equally incoherent.

Though Reform seeks to replace the Tory party, it is in danger of replicating the same internal divisions. The Tories have their warmongering “one nation” liberal internationalists, and an increasingly nativist isolationist wing. The two wings cannot coexist. A similar schism could take hold on the insurgent right.

Reading into Ben Habib’s views, he broadly agrees with my view that national sovereignty must be reasserted over the “international rules based order”, bringing an end to liberal internationalism, but then we must ask what our new role in the world is to be, who are our allies, and what are our objectives?

If Reform is broadly in favour of NATO and supports the war in Ukraine, why does its president, Mr N Farage, rub shoulders with European populists who seek to undermine it? It’s one thing to be eurosceptic, but is outright hostility to the EU in our interests? Until Reform decides what it stands for, and why it exists, the chances of a coherent foreign and defence policy are nil. Moreover, it will not be meaningfully different to the party is seeks to destroy.

This neatly illustrates the point I’ve been making throughout. Not having an intellectual basis for your party eventually leads to policy incoherence, unbridgeable divisions, and results in the perception that the party has no idea what it would do with power. It’s one thing to gloss over minor differences in policy, but when it comes to core philosophy, like defence, you can’t ride two horses at once.