The ‘knife fight in the telephone phone box‘ is underway in earnest, with coverage in the dailies likely to keep us entertained all the way to the SDSR later this year. I’ll leave the detail to others, but there’s one, rather large, fault line running through this. Some in the army apparently want to prioritize land forces and maintain as our guiding ethos the capacity for sustained expeditionary warfare, at the less-intense end of the warfighting spectrum. To afford that, deep cuts will be needed elsewhere, in air and maritime capabilities. But the results from Afghanistan have been limited, and the appetite for remaining there, or indeed for undertaking similar operations elsewhere in the near future, is diminishing.
Might we end up with plenty of deployable light infantry, burdened only by their copies of JDP 3-40, at the expense of the capacity to fight more capable adversaries than the Taliban? And if so, who might their Taliban-like adversaries be, if we’re getting leery of the nation-building business?
You can’t achieve control of the air with a Super Tucano. And you can’t project maritime power from carriers that don’t have aircraft to fly off them. Are we really at a ‘horse and tank moment’, in which Hybrid warriors the world over will come at us with little more than mortars, mobile phones, and well-thumbed copies of Mao? Perhaps we are, but it’s certainly a bet I’d want to hedge. We may be about to shrink significantly, but let’s not forget that the UK is still the third biggest spender on defence in the world.
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The SDSR is certainly starting to heat up now, but it really is too certain to tell what the outcome is as most reporting on the matter bears most resemblance to partisan briefing of worst-case horror stories to tempt some juicy headlines in support of service “x”.
I have followed as many of the relevant think-tank / political inputs into the SDSR process with my “Britain’s future strategic direction” series of articles, but there is doubtless more to come before the SDSR itself is released in autumn:
http://jedibeeftrix.wordpress.com/category/military/
But the results from Afghanistan have been limited, and the appetite for remaining there, or indeed for undertaking similar operations elsewhere in the near future, is diminishing.
If it was but for appetite, Kenneth… but I fear that the choices are no longer all ours to make. It doesn’t require a piercing intellect to predict how Afghanistan is going to end. And I, for one, am now thinking about how we should prepare ourselves for the next round: Pakistan.
Pakistan is the next round?
That is less doubting your analysis but the appetite for anyone to get involved there after Afghanistan goes down.
I think one of the reasons there has been so little interest is because it is going to be an exercise in cutting, like all previous reviews that have gone before it.
If one reads the text of any of the previous reviews the language is surprisingly similar but the end result funnily enough tends to be the same.
There is no doubt some serious thinking going on but I am afraid that most of it will be dashed on the rocks of budgetary reality.
“Britain the third largest spend on defense” I have heard and seen this before I would ask how is this figure gained, is it by actual spend, by per capita?
Roy, it’s a SIPRI figure. Click the link in the blog to go to the wiki entry for it. It’s raw spend, not per capita. If you do it per capita, you get lots of small countries that spend disproportionately large sums.
I’m sure there’s a lot of estimating involved – defence spending is sensitive stuff in lots of places, with much off-budget activity. And in some cases you’re comparing apples and oranges: the PLA, for example, owns shopping centres (malls) – should that be in their budget? Is it?