The dangerous dysfunction at the heart of UK defence

Are we being ineptly governed? The evidence suggests so.

Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton giving the Annual Defence Lecture to RUSI last Friday for the first time as Chief of the Defence Staff.

Has anyone else noticed something strange going on in the weird world of UK. Defence? Last week I wrote an article in Englesberg Ideas about the failure of the UK Government to match its rhetoric in the Strategic Defence Review in June with any form of concrete action. The silence has been palpable, even embarrassing, but I don’t see any policy makers – not a single member of the Cabinet in fact – getting worked up by it. What is going on? The UK seems to be speaking with a forked tongue: bigging up what it says, while doing nothing with its policy book or with its wallet.

Then, last week, we’ve had even more evidence of something strange going on. The previous Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Patrick Sanders, caused ire among the ignorant by warning in 2022 that in a time of war we would need, as a country, to resort to conscription and suggesting that we were in a 1937 moment. It was calm, sensible stuff. It was as if he had been reading the book that General Lord Dannatt and I penned together about the inter-war years. Then, a couple of weeks ago a depressed sounding First Sea Lord Staff, a Royal Marine for the first time and new to the role, gave a very blunt assessment of the threats facing the UK, suggesting that collectively we need to raise our game. Then, last Friday, we had the new Chief of the Defence Staff and this Monday the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service sounding anxious about the threat posed by an angry, vengeful and resurgent Russia. Its as if they had been reading the same script or at least had been reading the same briefing notes. (A long time ago, I used to write these sorts of Briefs, so I know how it works). Don’t get me wrong: these interventions by the people at the top of their organisations are all of course carefully coordinated. They are most definitely reading from the same script. Its one that talks about the consequences for our security and prosperity of an ongoing war in Europe, the ratcheting up of war talk in East Asia over Taiwan, and the worry to domestic stability as a result of our abject failure to defang a wild breed of jihadi settlers to this country who have been energised by Israel’s operations to protect itself from ongoing terror in Gaza.

Yet, this relative noise has been matched by silence from those making policy, and paying for it. What’s more, there has been silence from both the back and front benches. There have been no op-eds in the broadsheets by Government ministers in support of these speeches, no supportive speeches in either house (and the Christmas recess is still two days away) and no politicians of any stripe putting their head above the parapet in support, advocating or urging policy changes or new spending. Nothing. I cannot remember a time when arms of the government including, strikingly, both MI6 and the head of the Armed Forces, have publicly sounded off about the growing threat of instability and disorder in Europe without anything seeming to be happening from where the power actually sits. Don’t get me wrong; speeches by the Chief of MI6 and CDS are carefully vetted and authorized by 10 Downing Street, but I’ve never seen a government presenting its case so quietly, or ineptly. Its almost as though the government want us to believe that its doing something, simply by allowing people such as Air Chief Marshal, Sir Richard Knighton, Blaise Metreweli and General Sir Gwyn Jenkins to publicly articulate the size and scale of the threat. But we aren’t stupid. Explaining - nervously - the dangers we face, while doing nothing about it, just demonstrates that the government doesn’t know what to do, and has no plan.

The response to this unprecedented noise by those on the Clapham Omnibus (and three speeches in two weeks on the same subject by people in charge of our defence and security is unprecedented) has been a resigned shrug of the shoulders, precisely because the UK Government has done nothing to explain what a resurgent Russia might mean for the UK’s national interest. As an aside I have a lurking suspicion that the UK Government no longer believes in the idea of the national interest following the Chagos debacle, but this is no way to persuade us that it knows what is going on, or what to do about it.

We know, I think, what the problem is. There is absolutely no interest at the heart of the Labour Party for defence, and hence there is no money for it, but allowing the First Sea Lord, CDS and the Head of MI6 to bang on about the threat while simultaneously doing nothing about it seems pretty poor politics to me. Are we being ineptly governed? The evidence seems overwhelming.

Should we be worried when the ship of state seems captain-less? I’ll leave you to decide whether we should do as Lance Corporal Jones advised Captain Mainwaring. I suspect its time that we ought to think about doing precisely this.