Agreement within NATO comes at the same time as disagreement in Britain – or at least within its Government. The former has agreed to recognise Russia as its most significant threat. The latter is at odds over the future of defence spending.
And also over the current settlement. NATO says that Britain is spending 2.1 per cent of GDP on defence this year, just a touch above the two per cent minimum requirement. Boris Johnson counters that the real figure is 2.3 per cent, once the £1.3 billion sent to support Ukraine is included. Further military support for our ally was agreed yesterday.
Ben Wallace will be mindful that the extra Ukraine support isn’t core defence spending, and in any event believes that the two per cent figure is outdated.
He is making common cause with General Sir Patrick Sanders, the recently-appointed head of the British Army, who this week looked back to the past to warn of a “1937 moment”, and has pointed foward towards the prospect of World War War Three. No need to guess who the enemy might be.
Sanders wants a bigger army and Wallace more spending to fund it. It was claimed yesterday that the Defence Secretary tried to bounce the Government into backing a higher NATO minimum.
Liz Truss agrees – so to the Ukraine factor we must add a contemporary second: namely, the prospect of a Conservative leadership election in the near future, which Wallace might also contest. No candidate will want to appear soft on defence speaking, let alone Vladimir Putin.
There is a third pressing element: inflation. The last Conservative election manifesto pledged to “increase the budget by at least 0.5 percent above inflation every year of the new parliament”.
That commitment was one thing before Covid, bottlenecks, Ukraine, and shortages. It’s quite another now. The Prime Minister has been attempting to fudge the promise by claiming that it will be met over the course of this Parliament. But that’s not what the manifesto actually said.
Like those possible leadership contenders, most Tory voters – and a mass of others – will back higher defence spending (at least until they are taxed to fund it, or services that they use are pared back to pay).
But there should at least be a national consensus about who our main enemy is – though making that assessment is less easy than it looks. The Integrated Review covered everything from conventional forces to cyber, terror, climate change, space, border control, aid and making the UK a “science superpower”.
Essentially, it identified three main threats. First, Islamist terror, (and other dangers of a similar kind, such as that posed by far right and far left extremists, the fringe of the green movement, or revived republican and loyalist terror from Northern Ireland).
Next, the fashionable danger, so to speak, at least until Putin launched the first fully-fledged land war between two European states since the Second World War: namely, China. There has been a Tory stampede to confront it during recent years: see the backbench revolt over genocide claims and the rise of the China Research Group.
However, the Government’s trade interest pulls one way and its security one another. The Review’s compromise was to propose “a positive trade and investment relationship with China, while ensuring our national security and values are protected.”
Finally, Russia itself. “Until relations with its government improve, we will actively deter and defend against the full spectrum of threats emanating from Russia,” the Review said, identifying the most pressing danger of the three. “We will also support others in the Eastern European neighbourhood…This includes Ukraine, where we will continue to build the capacity of its armed forces”
So the Review can’t fairly be accused of having turned a blind eye to the threat from the Kremlin. But this site has been preoccupied for some time by governments attempting to spread too little defence butter over too much security bread.
“Having tilted towards the Indo-Pacific, we need a tilt back to Europe,” I wrote last year, questioning the Review’s references to “persistent engagement by our armed forces” and “building on our overseas military bases” in the Far East. Our military presence in the Far East is never going to be more than symbolic.
It seems inevitable now that the Review will itself be reviewed, and that the tilt will be re-tilted. Which brings us to a fourth factor in the political mix: to Ukraine, future leadership jostling and inflation add the views of Conservative backbenchers.
I once worked out that if the same proportion of the public had served in the armed forces as Tory backbenchers, the number would run into the low millions. My arithmetic may have been faulty but my thinking was not, at least when it applied to their views and the army, in which most of those who have armed forces experience have served.
Their instinct is to back calls for more boots on the ground and equipment for those who provide them. “Obsolescent and outgunned: the British Army’s armoured vehicle capability,” the Defence Select Committee reported last year.
Tobias Ellwood, the committee’s Chairman, tends to want Britain to engage abroad militarily; John Baron, the Chairman of the recently-formed Conservative backbench Defence Committee, tends not to. But both and their committees too will surely agree that a larger army is needed than the 72,000 headline number to which it is to be reduced.
Sanders himself follows in a long line of army leaders who have pressed for a bigger force: indeed, name me a predecessor who went out to campaign for a smaller one.
“Use it or lose it,” Sir Richard Dannat, then head of the Armed Forces, said to Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, then our man in Afghanistan (at least if you believe the latter, for the former denies saying it). But either way, it is always as well to be sceptical of those who lobby for more money, even when they wear brass hats.
Especially given the condition of procurement. There have been 13 reviews since Lord Levene’s famous one the best part of half a century ago.
Yet an analysis last summer of 36 major defence projects worth £166 billion found none likely either to be on time or on budget. Rishi Sunak will do nothing to boost his own leadership aspirations by resisting more spending and demanding better value, but he has a point. It applies elsewhere, too: see the NHS.
Nonetheless, Wallace and Sanders must be right, but the prospect of a larger army raises big questions. What lessons can be learned from Ukraine about the use of armoured vehicles?
Is the balance right between people, cyber and other considerations? Then there are questions that spill out beyond the army itself. In particular, given the possibility of a “last throw from the bunker”, however remote, is it time to be working more closely with America’s Missile Defence Agency?
Above all: is the British public really ready for government to act on its NATO obligations? A lesson of Ukraine is that Putin can’t be assumed unwilling to take a gamble.