The UK must now rebuild its strategic defence stockpiles and its military forces are not ready to fight or deter foreign aggression, Britain’s Defence Secretary warns.
The United Kingdom and Germany signed a “landmark defence agreement” this week, prompting Britain’s Minister of Defence to hail new cooperation with Berlin while warning the UK military must now change to face up to future threats. In remarks to Politico, defence minister John Healey — a little more than 100 days in-job after the left-wing Labour party had a good election earlier this year — said a defence review now under way would “not only step up and continue our support for Ukraine, but at the same time we rebuild our own British stockpiles and the strength of our forces.”
Healey also responded to earlier comments by the head of the British Army Sir Roland ‘Roly’ Walker that between “dangerous” Russia, China’s designs on Taiwan, and Iran they present between them a major risk of “global detonation” in the years 2027-2028, meaning the UK armed forces needs to “double then triple our fighting power” quickly. The minister said this week of those remarks made by the General in July that the UK like many Western nations is fit to conduct military “operations” overseas but simply could not fight a sustained war against a peer. Indeed, the experience in Ukraine has shown the NATO alliance incapable — if not unwilling — to keep Kyiv supplied with enough artillery shells to sustain its defensive war against Moscow.
He said: “the UK in keeping with many other nations become very skilled and ready to conduct military operations. What we’ve not been ready to do is to fight, and unless we’re ready to fight, we’re not ready to deter. And this is at the heart of NATO thinking. We’ve got to not just be capable of defending our NATO nations, but more importantly, got to be more effective in the deterrence that we can provide against any future aggression.”
The British military will have to “innovate… take the new technologies and some of the lessons from Ukraine” he said. This would make the UK military “more lethal” and a better deterrence”, Healey said, saying the path to the future means a bit of “doing more of the same” — a larger military, in other words — while also investing in new technology. “It’s a combination of the two that’s required”, he said.
While Healey broadly spoke of the defence situation in the context of Britain’s ability to deter foreign aggression and in the context of the lessons of the Ukraine war, the left-wing politician also missed no chances to score political points, linking all deficiencies in the Ministry of Defence to the previous Conservative government.
While it is true, as Healey asserts, that the Tories cut defence spending back in their 14 years of power and new increases planned now would simply put spending back to 2010 levels, these points obscured the broader truth that those Conservative cuts had been a continuation of decades of decline under both parties. Labour itself had cut defence spending in real terms in its final full year in power. Of course, Labour defence spending in the early part of the century would likely have been considerably lower also, had the Tony Blair government not elected to join the Bush White House on the Iraq War adventure.
In this week’s defence agreement is a new factory for artillery gun barrels in the UK by a German defence contractor, and an arrangement for German anti-submarine warfare aircraft to fly out of Scotland, one of the best locations for North Sea deterrent patrols. It has been claimed Britain’s small force of anti-submarine aircraft is insufficient to provide total mission coverage alone, and the gun barrel factory will be the first one in the UK for several years, after the government gave up on its own indigenous facilities years ago.
Healey’s comments this week underlines how different people appear to be drawing very different lessons from the Ukraine war and how it should pertain to future NATO defence thinking. As stated in a report last week, Healey’s apparent vision to go heavy on new tehcnology for a reimagined British Army rubs up against the findings of a recent Parliamentary report, which cautions against such utopian thinking, warning the constant churn on the battlefield sees advances cancelled out very quickly.
Far from drones allowing armies to do more with less — the mantra of British defence reviews this century — in a near-peer conflict both sides are able to field very similar technology and countermeasures. The House of Lords report stated, in their finding that Ukraine had taught that sheer weight of fighting men still matters:
The size and capability of the UK Armed Forces is predicated on a now apparently out-dated idea that any unexpected conflicts would be resolved in weeks, which has very much not been the case with the Ukraine War. The Lords’ report notes it has been the case a shrinking manpower has been explained away by increasing technical sophistication making up the capability, but argues this position too has been proven as wrong-footed.
The report stated: “…the UK has a well-trained and well-equipped force, but that it is too small and inadequately set up for large, prolonged conflicts like the one in Ukraine… the use of advanced technology has at times been used to justify smaller troop numbers. The war in Ukraine, however, has shown that in a conflict between two technologically capable states, technology is not a magic bullet that can swiftly end a war.”
