Whither the Integrated Review. Still tilting at windmills?

The government’s Integrated Review, ‘Britain in a Global Age’ is now over a year old. It was written long before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, an event which has reinforced the essential fragility of what many in the West have for long described as the ‘rules-based’ international order. In this arguably naïve concept of the modern world, states operate within clear parameters of behaviour, all defined by laws, treaties and regulations. The idea of raw power having an ancient rationale that might trump these principles of good behaviour has come as something of a shock to those who have come to believe that international behaviour can always be constrained by things other than brute force. I hope that in the corridors of power in Whitehall this shock is being taken seriously as a challenge not just to all these ‘rules-based’ assumptions, but to the territorial integrity of these islands and those of our friends and neighbours with whom we have defence commitments. At the very least, I would hope that the realities of today would demand that the UK re-examined some of its hoped-for ambitions – and assumptions – of yesterday.

If we are to take these new realities seriously, IR21 needs to be re-thought. Current security realities in Europe have already shown the document to lack anything sensible about building a land-based military capability as good if not better than our potential enemies. The humiliation of the Bundeswehr in attempting to scrape together equipment to Ukraine has been painful to watch. For its own domestic considerations, Germany has run down its conventional warfighting capability to that which is not much more than a joke. I suspect that in Britain the harsh reality isn’t far different. This points to the real problem with the Integrated Review. It is empty of the stuff that matters if this country still wants to have a ‘really serious army’, able to warfight a peer-adversary in a high intensity engagement (‘campaign’) over a sustained period of time. In other words, an army that was at least as capable as that which we allowed to run into the sand as part of the 1989-1991 peace dividend.

In proposing a security tilt to the Indo Pacific, the Integrated Review seems to assume that a conventional warfighting capability of the old kind that characterized the British Army’s commitment to Europe during the Cold War is now such an historical anachronism that it doesn’t even need mentioning. For it is not mentioned, even in passing. Its as if land based warfighting is no longer relevant for Britain. Like the security reviews (if one can call them such) of the 1920s which placed Britain and the empire’s security in the twin hands of the Royal Navy and Trenchard’s bomber deterrent, it looks as if the role of the British Army in recent thinking is that its not much more than that of an imperial fire brigade. The dramatic removal during the 1920s of the British Army’s war winning capability of 1918 offers a direct comparison to the military poverty which we see in the British Army of our own day. At the time, policy makers, both political and military, consigned the British Army of the 1920s and 1930s to that of a pre-1914 armed gendarmerie, responsible for protecting the empire. We know where that led us. The loss of this warfighting capability – by allowing it to waste away after 1919 - meant that the next time we fought an effective, methodological and successful battle like that of General Rawlinson’s Fourth Army during the One Hundred Days, was El Alamien in November 1942.

Think about this. If Britain had retained its core warfighting capability following 1919 it might have been possible to prevent the Second World War altogether. Hyperbole? Perhaps not. During the 1930s we know that Hitler was worried about the British Army and watched it very closely before and after the reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936. He remembered the all-powerful fighting machine this country had been able to deploy in 1918. If the same had existed in 1936, and had been deployed, or threatened to deploy against Germany at the breaking of its treaty pledges, it is unlikely that history would have followed the course it did. Hitler need not have worried. The British Army of 1918 was no more, sacrificed on the altar of a peace dividend, the need to garrison a creaking empire, treasury parsimony and an entire lack of intelligent imagination by both politicians and soldiers alike as to the possibility of future war in Europe.

Having a strong, capable army able to warfight offers Britain a powerful tool in the preservation of peace. President Theodore Roosevelt’s 1903 ‘speak softly and carry a big stick’ comes to mind here. The observation was as pertinent in its own day as it is now. Put simply, in its failure to prepare for the next war, during the 1920s and 1930s Britain failed to prevent war. An incompetent security plan placed an exclusive reliance on the Royal Navy to protect the empire and a Royal Air Force to defend the home islands with an untested ambition based on nothing more than a theory that the bomber would deter war. Both disappeared in a puff of hubris at the onset of war in 1939, as what Britain lacked then was a modern army able to deter and if necessary fight the country’s enemies, at home and abroad. The optimistic, doe-eyed peace dividend of 1919 had in fact, by removing the country’s ability to fight a sustained, high intensity campaign against a peer adversary in Europe – something it had proven it could successfully do in 1918 – led the country directly into another war.

What can be done? In the first instance, we need to reimagine the seemingly impossible, or improbable. Britain might need to deploy an intensive warfighting capability again, on a sustained basis. It will almost certainly need to do so as part of a coalition, as in the old days. It may well be on continental Europe. We need to think through - imagine - the possibilities of future war, rather than merely organising today’s capabilities on the basis of what is acceptable to the Treasury. We then need to act. As General Lord Dannatt said in the Sunday Express on 1 May 2022:

The land war in Ukraine and the threats to all states which border Russia demands an effective land deterrence capability overseen by credible air power. This will not be cheap. The case for the UK defence budget to rise to 3% of GDP is growing. The planned cuts to our land capability must be stopped. There must be a modernisation of our complete tank fleet, the decision to scrap our armoured infantry fighting vehicles reversed, accompanied by a significant increase in our spending on field artillery, air defence weapons and both target acquisition and attack drones. The Treasury will not like finding another £15 to £20 billion a year but all inhabitants of Downing Street must remember that the first duty of government is the security of the state.

Quite. But is anyone listening, or are we still tilting (via the Royal Navy and its carriers) at the Asian windmill?