Yet what seems to some of us remarkable is that our governments still demand power-projection, while being unwilling to fund armed forces of an adequacy which alone can give effect to our pretensions. Few modern politicians like defence. They know the electorate is not much interested, save at the crudest level of battlefield heroics. A century ago, during the great controversy about how many new dreadnought battleships should be built, every middle-class household in Britain understood- even if not all sympathised with- the slogan ‘we want eight and we won’t wait’. Today, debate about whether this country should build new aircraft-carriers or buy Joint Strike Fighters has been conducted within a tiny defence constituency, and commands negligible understanding or interest in the country, the media and parliament.
The Ministry of Defence has an unenviable reputation for waste and incompetence on a scale that costs billions. Some service chiefs have crippled their credibility by pursuing big-ticket programmes which cost hugely, but add disproportionately less to our usable forces. There is a respectable, though by no means conclusive case for replacing the Trident nuclear deterrent. But I am highly sceptical about doing so on a like-for-like basis, because it seems almost certain that the price of doing so will be further to weaken our conventional capabilities, since the government is adamant that such a programme’s costs must be borne without increasing the overall national defence spend. This is certainly the view of RUSI researchers and other expert witnesses.
All these things add up to a woeful failure, spanning decades, to adopt a credible national strategy, to which last year’s Strategic Defence and Security Review added another ignominious contribution. The problem is unchanging: paper commitments are preserved, while resources to fulfil them are slashed merely to accommodate the latest in successive budget crises.
Today, Britain’s armed forces are almost threadbare- not, it is true, by the standards of our European partners, but by those of preserving the capability to make a contribution to an allied deployment overseas appropriate to this country’s size, aspirations and yes, wealth. If the prime minister is serious in wishing the United States to perceive our bilateral relationship as ‘essential’, then during the years ahead it will be indispensable to find cash to do more, not less. If present plans go ahead substantially to cut the size of the army, this objective will be compromised, arguably fatally. If, today, it is a source of dismay to Washington that Britain is spending little more than a meagre 2% of its GDP on defence, in the years ahead it seems likely that a big political fight will be necessary, to sustain even that figure.
In the newspaper industry we have a cynical saying, that a journalist is as good as their last story. In international relations, an ally is worth as much as, and no more than, the resources and specifically military resources it is capable of contributing towards implementing a shared purpose by force or the threat of it. Robin Renwick was surely right when he wrote 15 years ago of the vital task Britain can fulfil, ‘to help ensure that the US is not left alone to respond to crises in which the interests of the West generally are engaged’. Yet as Robert Gates says: ‘If current trends in the decline of European defense capabilities are not halted and reversed, future US political leaders…may not consider the return on America’s investment in NATO worth the cost’. In conclusion, I return to my earlier remark about the folly of seeking to inject sentiment, as distinct from warm and proper courtesy, into Anglo-American diplomacy, because this is a formula for disappointment. As in the past, so in the future our friendship will command as much respect in Washington as our standing as a nation in the world deserves- political, economic and military. It is the responsibility of the British people, as well as of their government, to ensure that we earn this through the twenty-first century, recognising that it will not come as of right or out of admiration for the colour of our eyes.