Peter Quentin was a special adviser to Ben Wallace when the latter served as Defence Secretary. He is an Associate Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute and a serving reservist.
Nowadays Conservatives are rarely fortunate enough to be accused of complacency. Lord Hague’s intervention in The Times last week should therefore be a ‘bugle call’ to Conservatives to rally the nation from its complacency over defence. His spotlighting of this subject in the week of the Autumn Statement was itself a signal of its significance, in the face of vast imbalances in this month’s populist political coverage of budgets and protests.
I have been fortunate to serve as policy adviser to both William Hague and Ben Wallace. Both have been steadfast in their advocacy for defence – not simply increased investment, but the broader argument for its urgent reprioritisation within public policy, given rapidly increasing threats to our nation’s security.
As Conservatives, we define ourselves on our commitment to the ‘first duty’ of government, defending the realm and protecting its people. As a nation, we pride ourselves not on lofty political ideals but simple and practical principles: doing the right thing in difficult circumstances, our sense of fair play, backing the underdog, standing-by our friends, standing-up to bullies, as a “problem-solving and burden-sharing nation with a global perspective”.
It is why our proactive international leadership on Ukraine has also been so well-received at home. For some time now, defence has been the only policy area in which polling shows a lead for this government over the opposition, but it is an issue of principles and leadership not just polling and public support.
We did not rush forward those anti-tank NLAW missiles ahead of Russia’s full-scale invasion because we had calculated the outcome, or some narrow national or even political interest. We did it because it was the right thing to do; helping Ukraine’s citizen-soldiers defend their homes and their families in the face of unprovoked aggression and – ongoing – brutal infliction of mass war crimes on innocent civilians.
The price of Putin’s imperialist folly continues to be paid in the blood of innocent Ukrainians. It is also costing the wider world, starving the global south of vital grains, disrupting global supply chains and energy markets, spreading a contagion of instability across other regions and upending the very rules-based system on which all our security and prosperity remains dependent.
There is no need, or space, here for a full geopolitical survey of its impacts, or the dependencies and vulnerabilities of ultra-globalisation. But Russia’s invasion represented the first open attack on an already-fraying rules-based system. The post-Cold War status quo, about which we absolutely became ‘complacent’ is gone. Everything has changed.
After three quarters of a century we are confronted with the compound security challenges occasionally framed as ‘CRICKET’: China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and ‘Everything’ else from state-sponsored serious organised crime to Terrorism. But the sporting analogy ends there because it is no game. Sadly, geopolitical bad weather will not stop play.
Yet that seems to be precisely the strategy for much of Westminster, with more proximate political priorities, continuity bias, exaggerations of our agency and timelines, veto-based policy making, assumptions that multilateralism is an alternative not product of our hard power, creating the common misconception that this status quo is somehow self-perpetuating.
Meanwhile, many of those in opposition and/or protest cleave to the false promise of geopolitical revolution, the demise of Pax Americana and supposed ‘equity’ of a multipolar world. In reality, that world means even more tragedies like Gaza or Bucha, Idlib or Darfur, Yemen and Mali and Myanmar and all those other conflicts adding to the growing insecurity and suffering around the world.
Conservatism is perhaps best expressed as the “belief in sacred things and the desire to defend them… [because] the work of destruction is quick, easy and exhilarating; the work of creation slow, laborious and dull. That is one of the lessons of the twentieth century” (Roger Scruton, naturally). And it is surely the lesson most pertaining to international security and our relationship with conflict, its appeasement, its deterrence and resolution.
We instinctively understand and believe in this need to preserve the imperfect peace which we have been so fortunate to inherit, but so often we struggle to act on our convictions with sufficient urgency and decisiveness. If my experience in government has taught me anything it is the truism of public policy, that we only ever act when we are forced and by then it is invariably too late. Like pandemic preparedness, defence planning requires foresight and sustained prioritisation because it is both complex and non-discretionary.
We have, since 2020, begun to address this challenge under successive Prime Ministers, but not yet as the issue of national importance and urgency it demands. If defence truly remains the ‘first duty’ of government, then at this election the public must be presented with a clear choice on how that duty is to be discharged for the remainder of this most threatening decade. Defence will, of course, compete with all the immediate voter priorities of the day, but it can and should be made a political issue for all responsible political parties.
There is no shortage of personal association and admiration for the Armed Forces among our political ranks, but surprisingly few politically affiliated policy professionals working on these issues. The sector is dominated by largely apolitical defence and security think tanks, and few of our more political domestically focused institutions give much regard to the interdependence of their own research agendas with national security.
That should change rapidly so in the coming months we hope to stimulate a more active discussion on defence priorities for a manifesto. There are plenty of bold ideas out there for confronting our current defence challenges and they deserve wider consideration, for example:
- Increasing ‘mass’ through autonomy, with a commitment to reversing the balances of hardware-software and crewed-uncrewed programmes by the end of the decade, and not for cost-saving but force-multiplying.
- Limited and competitive ‘national service’ for high-skill trades, or a US-style ‘GI Bill’ providing educational opportunity as a return for service, or even military service as a route to citizenship.
- A ‘Single Armed Forces Bill’ to end the segregation of regular and reserve forces, to the benefit of recruitment, retention, productivity and national resilience.
- Enshrining in law the impressive veterans initiatives driven by Johnny Mercer could, whilst obligating central government adherence to the Armed Forces Covenant.
- Placing our spending commitment on a statutory basis – akin to the NHS Funding Act – is needed for long-term defence planning and reducing waste alongside procurement reform.
Defence is neither a zero-sum cost or about ever-higher GDP percentages, but an investment in the UK’s prosperity as much as its security. Over £21 billion is injected into UK industry annually and over 400,000 high-skilled, high-paid and highly-productive jobs are supported. Making defence our nation’s greatest engine for both economic productivity and social mobility.
If we are truly committed to that ‘first duty’, the responsibility in government to lead and not just reflect, and our ability to keep delivering change, then we must mobilise such thinking. We must present the nation with those long-term decisions needed for a brighter future in place of the darker, and ultimately far more costly, insecurity that looms on the horizon.
Peter Quentin was a special adviser to Ben Wallace when the latter served as Defence Secretary. He is an Associate Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute and a serving reservist.
Nowadays Conservatives are rarely fortunate enough to be accused of complacency. Lord Hague’s intervention in The Times last week should therefore be a ‘bugle call’ to Conservatives to rally the nation from its complacency over defence. His spotlighting of this subject in the week of the Autumn Statement was itself a signal of its significance, in the face of vast imbalances in this month’s populist political coverage of budgets and protests.
I have been fortunate to serve as policy adviser to both William Hague and Ben Wallace. Both have been steadfast in their advocacy for defence – not simply increased investment, but the broader argument for its urgent reprioritisation within public policy, given rapidly increasing threats to our nation’s security.
As Conservatives, we define ourselves on our commitment to the ‘first duty’ of government, defending the realm and protecting its people. As a nation, we pride ourselves not on lofty political ideals but simple and practical principles: doing the right thing in difficult circumstances, our sense of fair play, backing the underdog, standing-by our friends, standing-up to bullies, as a “problem-solving and burden-sharing nation with a global perspective”.
It is why our proactive international leadership on Ukraine has also been so well-received at home. For some time now, defence has been the only policy area in which polling shows a lead for this government over the opposition, but it is an issue of principles and leadership not just polling and public support.
We did not rush forward those anti-tank NLAW missiles ahead of Russia’s full-scale invasion because we had calculated the outcome, or some narrow national or even political interest. We did it because it was the right thing to do; helping Ukraine’s citizen-soldiers defend their homes and their families in the face of unprovoked aggression and – ongoing – brutal infliction of mass war crimes on innocent civilians.
The price of Putin’s imperialist folly continues to be paid in the blood of innocent Ukrainians. It is also costing the wider world, starving the global south of vital grains, disrupting global supply chains and energy markets, spreading a contagion of instability across other regions and upending the very rules-based system on which all our security and prosperity remains dependent.
There is no need, or space, here for a full geopolitical survey of its impacts, or the dependencies and vulnerabilities of ultra-globalisation. But Russia’s invasion represented the first open attack on an already-fraying rules-based system. The post-Cold War status quo, about which we absolutely became ‘complacent’ is gone. Everything has changed.
After three quarters of a century we are confronted with the compound security challenges occasionally framed as ‘CRICKET’: China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and ‘Everything’ else from state-sponsored serious organised crime to Terrorism. But the sporting analogy ends there because it is no game. Sadly, geopolitical bad weather will not stop play.
Yet that seems to be precisely the strategy for much of Westminster, with more proximate political priorities, continuity bias, exaggerations of our agency and timelines, veto-based policy making, assumptions that multilateralism is an alternative not product of our hard power, creating the common misconception that this status quo is somehow self-perpetuating.
Meanwhile, many of those in opposition and/or protest cleave to the false promise of geopolitical revolution, the demise of Pax Americana and supposed ‘equity’ of a multipolar world. In reality, that world means even more tragedies like Gaza or Bucha, Idlib or Darfur, Yemen and Mali and Myanmar and all those other conflicts adding to the growing insecurity and suffering around the world.
Conservatism is perhaps best expressed as the “belief in sacred things and the desire to defend them… [because] the work of destruction is quick, easy and exhilarating; the work of creation slow, laborious and dull. That is one of the lessons of the twentieth century” (Roger Scruton, naturally). And it is surely the lesson most pertaining to international security and our relationship with conflict, its appeasement, its deterrence and resolution.
We instinctively understand and believe in this need to preserve the imperfect peace which we have been so fortunate to inherit, but so often we struggle to act on our convictions with sufficient urgency and decisiveness. If my experience in government has taught me anything it is the truism of public policy, that we only ever act when we are forced and by then it is invariably too late. Like pandemic preparedness, defence planning requires foresight and sustained prioritisation because it is both complex and non-discretionary.
We have, since 2020, begun to address this challenge under successive Prime Ministers, but not yet as the issue of national importance and urgency it demands. If defence truly remains the ‘first duty’ of government, then at this election the public must be presented with a clear choice on how that duty is to be discharged for the remainder of this most threatening decade. Defence will, of course, compete with all the immediate voter priorities of the day, but it can and should be made a political issue for all responsible political parties.
There is no shortage of personal association and admiration for the Armed Forces among our political ranks, but surprisingly few politically affiliated policy professionals working on these issues. The sector is dominated by largely apolitical defence and security think tanks, and few of our more political domestically focused institutions give much regard to the interdependence of their own research agendas with national security.
That should change rapidly so in the coming months we hope to stimulate a more active discussion on defence priorities for a manifesto. There are plenty of bold ideas out there for confronting our current defence challenges and they deserve wider consideration, for example:
Defence is neither a zero-sum cost or about ever-higher GDP percentages, but an investment in the UK’s prosperity as much as its security. Over £21 billion is injected into UK industry annually and over 400,000 high-skilled, high-paid and highly-productive jobs are supported. Making defence our nation’s greatest engine for both economic productivity and social mobility.
If we are truly committed to that ‘first duty’, the responsibility in government to lead and not just reflect, and our ability to keep delivering change, then we must mobilise such thinking. We must present the nation with those long-term decisions needed for a brighter future in place of the darker, and ultimately far more costly, insecurity that looms on the horizon.