Armed Forces Day. So what?

Today is Armed Forces Day. If we discount the disingenuous political types keen to be seen shaking hands with servicemen and women - and their families - over the weekend, whilst at the same time refusing to fully fund the defence of this country, Armed Forces Day is most definitely an opportunity to celebrate the men and women of our Army, Navy and Air Force as they serve to protect our country and its interests. Beyond the razzamatazz Armed Forces Day (I was always a cynic about it) does allow us to reflect on the nature of defence more widely in a year in which we remember the 80^th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. Eight decades is a long time, and direct memories of history’s greatest conflict are now fading. Very soon there will be no one alive who experienced its horrors. The direct connection we have with an existential war, when the very survival of our country was threatened by a rampaging evil that cost the world perhaps 100 million lives, is quickly being lost. It’s now the job of historians to keep its memory alive.

Captain Phin Lyman 5 Rifles, second from the right, with his training team on Operation Interflex in 2022

But recalling the sacrifices of the wartime generation, who preserved for us the freedoms we enjoy today in our democracy, is not just a role for historians. All of us have a duty to consider the issues of defence. Why? Well, like the fire brigade, defence has an important role in keeping us safe. How? I was at an event recently, considering the Strategic Defence Review, when someone in the audience asked “Why do we need more people in the Army? We aren’t at war; no one is fighting us?”

It’s a fair question, and needs a response. The first one I would offer is a counter-question: “Do you insure your car against an accident?” Of course you do, not merely because it’s the law. It is common sense to take precautions against accidents, and insurance is one of them. We never know when they’re going to happen. Accordingly we insure our homes, and whenever we travel we make sure we are insured against accident, delay or emergency. It’s exactly the same with defence. We need to pay our insurance premium for defending our country against threats, no matter how vague these might appear at any one time. I might add that, as an historian, I consider that Western Europe is currently in as dangerous a place in terms of defence and security as it has ever been in modern history. It’s certainly as dangerous as the late 1930s. The Russian Armed Forces are continuing to wage an unprovoked war in Ukraine, continuing a pattern of aggression against its neighbours that began as long ago as its annexation of Georgia in 2008. Russian forcibly annexed Ukrainian territory in the Crimea in 2014 and began military operations in the eastern part of the country, all designed to force Ukraine to bow to Moscow’s will. Full invasion of Ukraine followed in February 2022.

But why is this of interest to us? My simple answer is that any regional instability of this kind, a little like a bush fire, has a nasty habit of spreading. Allowing Russian aggression to run unchecked in eastern Europe, as history attests, could lead to Russia thinking that it has carte blanche to do what it wants in Europe, in spite of the strictures of international law, which forbid military aggression against another country for any reason other than self-defence. We have a duty to prevent President Putin from doing what he wants. It was the failure to prevent Hitler from treading all over Czechoslovakia in 1938 in a policy known at the time as appeasement, that led directly to the Second World War. It is this we need to prevent.

So, how do we do it? One way is to make sure that we have strong defences, able to contribute to our NATO allies in a security framework that has worked very successfully in all the years since 1949.

But there is another reason why defence is important. It’s because strong defences can themselves be effective deterrents against bad behaviour by states like Russia. There is a strong belief among strategists that Russia became emboldened to invade Ukraine in 2022 precisely because it believed that NATO, and the West in general, was too militarily weak to oppose it. I think this is true. If NATO had presented itself – along with the European Union of course – willing and able to stand up to the sort of territorial aggrandisement we saw in Ukraine, Moscow almost certainly would not have taken the chance it did. But NATO’s defences – as well as the U.K.’s – have been hollowed out by several decades of ‘peace dividend’ cut backs, and we were in no position militarily, or politically for that matter, to stand up to Russia’s aggression when it happened. My argument is simple: if the U.K. and its allies had the requisite military forces to support Ukraine before the Russian attack, it’s likely that Russia would not have taken the chance it did. Deterrence works, as many decades of Britain’s Continuous At Sea Deterrent (CASD) demonstrates.

There is a good example I often cite to demonstrate how military deterrence could have stopped the Second World War from ever happening. After 1919 the U.K. dramatically demobilised its Army, to the extent that within a year it would have been unable to refight any of the great battles that brought the war to an end in 1919. Fifteen years later Hitler decided to send his troops back into the Rhineland, that area of western Germany demilitarised by order of the Versailles Treaty. But Hitler and his generals were nervous about possible British and French reactions to its illegal reoccupation, and had decided that they would withdraw their forces at the first sign of a reaction from either London or Paris. In the event Hitler need not have worried. France and Britain did nothing, directly encouraging Hitler’s territorial ambitions elsewhere in Europe. In part this was because the U.K. did not have at its disposal in 1938 or 1939 the ability to intervene militarily on the continent. The British Government could not threaten the Germans with something it did not possess. The impressive capability it had boasted in 1918 no longer existed. This is the problem with deterrence; it only works if you have the forces to make it credible. Today, it is arguable that we have lost the deterrence effect, at least insofar as land forces are concerned. Putin’s rampant aggrandising in Ukraine seems to be proof of this.

So, this is my response to the person who asked the question. First, we need our Armed Forces as an insurance premium in case the unexpected fire of war sweeps once more towards our shores, or those of our friends and allies. Second, we need our Armed Force to act as a deterrent to those who might wish to do us harm, or behave badly, as Russia is currently doing in Ukraine, by breaking international law and disturbing the peace of the world. The Armed Forces of this country and our allies exist to protect us not merely from war if it eventuates, but to prevent it from happening in the first place.

Armed Forces Day is an opportunity for all of us to pay tribute to those who don a uniform on our behalf. It is this fundamental reality of military service that Armed Forces Day is designed to recognise. In Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem ‘Tommy’ (‘It’s Tommy this, and Tommy that…’) he mocks those who disparage the men in uniform ‘that guard you while you sleep.’ In 1942, at the lowest point of the Second World War, George Orwell observed that ‘People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.’ Orwell should of course have included ‘women’ in his comment, as by 1942 millions of women had joined the ranks of the Armed Forces and had donned uniforms to support the war effort in a variety of other, no-combat ways, such as in factories and as Land Girls labouring on farms to produce much needed food for a nation besieged. The further we go from a common, collective remembrance of these events, however, the more important it is to understand exactly why our Armed Forces remain critical to our security, and the preservation of peace in our world.