Putin is preparing for war. This is what we need to do

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Almost all defence reviews since 1945 have resulted in cuts, intended and unintended, and often disastrous. The Strategic Defence Review (SDR) last year, complemented by the ongoing funding row, is no exception.

If present proposals from the Treasury are adhered to, there will have to be major cuts across the board – very likely reducing Army personnel by another 10,000 and similar reduction in the other services.

Defence and security at home and abroad didn’t feature in the Makerfield by-election. Such matters rarely do in by-elections, unless in the time of outright war. Whoever sits in Downing Street come next September will need to address matters of defence, homeland and cyber defence especially, with urgency.

The Starmer Government seems to have succumbed to chronic fatigue syndrome on defence. The grudging proposal to offer £10bn extra to implement plans sketched in the review of 2025 fell well short of the at least £18bn requested by defence officials.

The Navy is in desperate condition, down to only four frigates and two destroyers that are fully operational. Another Type 23 frigate, HMS Portland has now been confined to port this month, most likely because the hull is too thin and knackered to be risked in a sustained voyage – a fate suffered by three sisterships in the past year.

The shortfall is symptomatic – all three services have run low on ammunition and ordnance. The Government ordered eight new munitions facilities last year – not one is working to capacity yet.

The authors of the review, George Robertson, Fiona Hill and General Richard Barrons, have warned that the UK cannot avoid the widening threat from Vladimir Putin’s Russia out of the war in Ukraine.

Their alert came well before the burgeoning crisis in the Middle East, which also directly involves important British interests, and is likely to fester to the end of the decade and beyond.

It’s not just a question of preparing for the coming storm. If our closest allies are to be believed, the storm has already come.

The Punch and Judy show involving the Russian frigate Admiral Grigorovich in the English Channel this week, and the performative seizure by Marine Commandos of the tanker Smyrtos are mere shadows of what is on the way, according to Poland’s foreign minister Radek Sikorski.

Russia set to move on Baltic states

Russia is behind at least 200 serious, potentially catastrophic, cyber attacks on the UK since last autumn, according the National Cyber Security Centre. These could cause lethal damage to systems such as the National Grid, HMRC, the Treasury and the NHS.

The detection of activity by submarines, manned and unmanned, belonging to Russia’s GUGI surveillance and sabotage unit, around vital nodes for gas pipes and communication cables earlier this year, should have put the UK Government on notice. Sikorski hinted that this was likely a reconnaissance operation leading to further hostile action.

He said he expected Russia to make a move this summer on Poland’s Baltic neighbours, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – all members of Nato – as a diversion from its embarrassment in the stalled offensive in the ground war in Ukraine.

The UK government, whether under new management in Downing Street or not, must heed the oldest cliché in the military playbook – don’t reinforce failure.

Instead, it’s time for a short programme of urgent military reform to meet the dangers and threats now closing in. It should be a radical understated reform – low on promise and Whitehall spin (chance would be a fine thing) – with the focus on delivery.

It can be done. The first step would be to ditch the grandiosity and fantasy elements of the SDR.

A short-term practical plan should be drawn up aiming at what is needed over the next three years. This could take the form of “an extra chapter” to the SDR.

This happened when the SDR of 1998, also authored by Roberston, needed urgent updating after the 9/11 attacks.

The reform project should first acknowledge the fundamental flaw of both SDRs, of 1998 and 2025.

Neither worked to a clear and agreed budget, they were uncosted and unfunded. Hence we come to the bust up over the Defence Investment Plan, which last year’s review left hanging to be agreed at a later date.

A second flaw of SDR 25 is that it has no recognition of the changing shape of the British society it serves and relies on for support. This week one of the first observations made by Sikorski in his Rusi presentation was that it was essential for the UK to understand the implications of its ageing society.

This has consequences of all kinds for all public services, not least the forces. When John Healey launched the SDR last year, I asked him why the review made no recognition of the effect of demographic wintering – an ageing population. “Never heard of it,” was the then defence secretary’s succinct reply, “what is it?”.

There should be an office, at ministerial rank or above, for defence reform. The saga of broken promises, failed projects, Byzantine political wrangling across the Civil Service and politicians’ special interests has gone on too long—and at tedious expense.

The reform process needs to look at everything, funding, personnel and support, equipment, tactical and strategic doctrine. It must say what military support is needed for, the ultimate insurance policy for security at home and abroad, and how it should adapt.

Under the all things considered heading, we need to look at some of the barmier procurements. Take the two large aircraft carriers mooted first by SDR 98, which evolved as a classic pork-barrel scheme to bring jobs to the Firth of Forth, where Gordon Brown and Desmond Browne – chancellor and defence secretary – had constituency interests. The carriers have never performed to their potential, and are never likely to, and consume a large chunk of the surface fleet budget and personnel roster.

The UK government also needs to reconsider the ballistic nuclear weapon, the Trident missile, and its support. It consumes between a quarter and a third of the overall annual defence budget of about £62bn – the nuclear warhead programme alone this year is costed at £2bn.

We are wedded to the concept of one nuclear boat with a clutch of missiles aboard being at sea all the time – this is known as Continuous at Sea Deterrent (CASD). It is enormously costly and it supports the myth that the UK deploys its very own “independent” deterrent. The whole system is shared and ultimately controlled by the US.

Ajax tank is good money after bad

The greatest mystery of procurement is the saga of the Ajax infantry fighting vehicle. The project is 15 years old, and the vehicle itself has grown exponentially.

In its present form – still not fully working – it is a light tank of over 40 tonnes. Well over £3bn has already been spent, and proposed remedies have been costed at anything between £250,000 to £1bn. Good money after bad?

The troubled Ajax armoured fighting vehicle. MPs have questioned whether the Army’s £6.3bn light tank will ever be fit for use in combat (Photo: Andrew Linnett/PA)

The poor relation in the debates of the think-tank world, parliament and the political parties is any serious discussion of personnel.

Who and what kind of service personnel should we recruit and support? Most important is the empowerment of reserves. Labour and Conservative ministers have tried to address the modernisation of reserves, and the engagement of cadets and veterans – but all have been nixed by the lack of funds.

Reserves showed their value in the Covid crisis. The almost unknown Logistics Strategic Reserve knew how to knock up a Nightingale isolation hospital for up to 2,000 beds in London’s Docklands in under a week.

Any future pandemic, animal or human, will require their services. Any combination of unscripted emergencies – say, a foot and mouth pandemic at the same time as a nationwide storm and flood episode – will mean the reserves will have to be in the lead of first responders alongside the fire and ambulance services.

Any government has to ditch aspirations for Britain being a global power in the old sense. The forces and aspirations are spread too thin for today’s needs. UK defence must move to a concept of an integrated force – not just a coalition of the individual Armed Forces, too often tempted to do their own thing.

Only by reform and concentrating capability and effort can we handle what is about to happen in warfare. The challenges range from AI, autonomous weapons, new dimensions of biological and chemical warfare, and what quantum computing may do.

We face the decision point posed by the plot of Dr Strangelove, the nuclear war drama: this is the role of human decision and ethics in a world dominated by robot, and now avatars in cyber space. This is the challenge brilliantly stated by the outsider in the plot, Group Captain Mandrake, whose wonderful plea for tolerance and humanity was carefully written and reworked by both Peter Sellers in the film, and Steve Coogan in the recent stage version.

Can we and our politicians think rationally about this difficult and embarrassing issue ? Time for answers, please.