Britain in the Second Division

Last week saw the award of colours to units of the Royal Marines. In the regal surroundings of Windsor Castle and in the presence of their Captain General, the King, the occasion was everything that could be expected from a major piece of state ceremonial. It was the sort of event at which the British excel – an immaculate display of military choreography but with an accessible, human touch – and the audience left reassured that defence was in good hands. Meanwhile, decisions were being made in Whitehall that ensured that Britain would be relegated to the second division of military capability.

The Strategic Defence Review (SDR) was completed last year and was welcomed as a cool and balanced response to the security challenges we now face. The government accepted its recommendations in full, and it remained only to fill in the funding detail and a new NATO-centric and Euro-Atlantic focussed strategy would be in place. That was a year ago and the cost of SDR and the remediation of gaping holes in defence was £28 bn. However, after the settlement which provoked the resignation of Defence Secretary, John Healey, defence was asked to get by with £13.5 bn.

To some extent, the SDR was a marketplace for single Service ambitions. For the Royal Navy it was the opportunity to restate the enduring verity of maritime force to an island nation, wrapped up in a new(ish) concept termed Atlantic Bastion. This included everything from securing the operating space for the nuclear deterrent, through to dominating the area where the Atlantic meets the Norwegian Sea – all of which was to be facilitated by operations to secure the continental flank of the High North. It had the advantage that it was demonstrably seamless, blending the various dimensions of naval capability to meet an inalienable NATO requirement: security of the North Atlantic.

The Army hung its hat on providing a contribution to the Strategic Reserve Corps for NATO. A corps headquarters and two divisions held at echeloned readiness for deployment anywhere at SACEUR’s discretion was the ask from NATO. This would reinstate the operational level of command – fighting big wars with big formations – which had atrophied during the small wars of Iraq and Afghanistan and is the ambition of any Army worth its salt. The manpower bill was 100,000 of mixed regular and reservist forces, building from a regular base of 73,000 today.

The Royal Air Force was concerned less with roles than with technological transformation in support of ground and maritime operations. The ubiquity of drones and the introduction of the next generation of autonomous air vehicles represents a salutary challenge in itself. The one notable change of role was the proposed introduction of an air delivered dimension to nuclear deterrence.

So far, so good. A fully funded SDR offered a prominent place in the collective security provided by NATO, a position regarded as part of the national vocation by successive governments. However, Treasury intransigence changes all that and we are left with the unpalatable alternatives of doing everything badly or one thing well.

All of this needs to be seen in the context of the threat posed by Russia. Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 and has been in conflict for a period longer than the First World War. In four years of fighting Russia has sustained 1.2 million casualties, around 300,000 of them fatalities; it occupies approximately 20% of Ukraine, but is losing ground; it faces an adversary that has, of necessity, embraced novel forms of warfare and has a clear lead in drone warfare, the defining technology emerging from the conflict, in both the close and deep battles.

Above all, Russia faces an hiatus on the battlefield. To gain territory requires the concentration of force, to concentrate force in a transparent battlespace is to die and simply exchange expensive tanks for cheap drones. The result is an immobile – and largely deserted – battlefield where the initiative lies with the defender.

This is an impermanent condition and a solution will be found. If an historical precedent is sought it is probably the Battle of Amiens in August 1918 when a British offensive broke the tyranny of positional defence and acted as the prelude to the 100 days of manoeuvre warfare which concluded the war. But, for the present, it is a profound brake on Russian ambition and whether they have the intellectual and material capacity to solve an apparently intractable tactical problem remains to be seen.

So how real is the Russian threat? For the denuded Russian Army to fight through the expanse of western Ukraine, take on the rapidly rearming Poles as well as the deliberately rearming Germans, at the same time contemplate fighting the sophisticated nations in arms of Finland and Sweden, and all set against unfavourable tactical terms of engagement, seems vanishingly small. A localised threat against the Baltic states is more real but will be fought by forces already in place, such is the quality of surveillance that would see any Russian invasion force coming a mile off.

So, are we guilty of manufacturing something for the benefit of the defence companies, the pan European enthusiasts and military warmongers seeing an opportunity? Categorically not. Acting rationally and learning from Ukraine, the Russians will avoid symmetrical engagement on terms of equivalence or disadvantage but seize every opportunity to profit from areas where they enjoy an asymmetrical advantage. And they enjoy that advantage at opposite ends of the conflict spectrum: below the level that marks formal military engagement, often termed Grey Zone operations; and at the higher level of the register where high performance missiles edge over the boundary into weapons of mass effect.

As far as Grey Zone operations are concerned, we are already perilously close to being at war. The insidious combination of information operations, cyber-attacks, the probing of underwater elements of critical national infrastructure and selective assassinations are particularly effective in times of political uncertainty, and we can expect them to continue and escalate.

Turning to operations around the nuclear threshold, Putin has periodically flirted with the nuclear card during the war with Ukraine. He does so because he feels he has a number of advantages: he is the custodian of a warfighting doctrine that consciously connects sub-threshold operations, through successive steps of escalation, with nuclear release; he regularly exercises escalation and de-escalation and is comfortable with the mechanisms that involves and the strategic agility it bestows; and, he is the sole authority for nuclear release that gives the process a singularity that NATO lacks. But there is something new in the deterrence equation which may encourage him even further.

Whether the United States would accept the sacrifice of Chicago or New York during a nuclear war has always been a moot point. Whether the United States would accept that sacrifice when it is disinvesting in the conventional defence of Europe and could find itself on the strategic hook of nuclear release without any control over the process of escalation that got it there is even more contentious and implies a far greater reliance on the French and British nuclear deterrents.

This is a complex area and this article can only scratch the surface but, if the ultimate guarantee of British and NATO security is patrolling somewhere in the North Atlantic, it is self-evident that we need to build our strategic posture around it. There is a natural tendency to think in terms of territorial integrity when considering Russian intentions. It is certainly prudent to prepare for the worst case but that is not necessarily the most likely Russian course of action; indeed, there is a certain lack of intellectual curiosity in cleaving to a single eventuality, especially when much of the supporting evidence is ambivalent. Taking the parochial example of Britain, there is a great deal of geographic distance between the homeland and any potential front line in Eastern Europe and a great deal of military capability. Compare that to the exposed Atlantic flank and the oceanic fastness within which any number of threats can be concealed. This is a situation with more than one strategic dimension and the relatively under-invested defence of the Northern Atlantic would benefit from closer examination.

First, there is the shift in nuclear saliency that I have tried to capture above; second, the unilateral revision laid out in the US National Defence Strategy reveals priorities in the Western hemisphere and the Indo Pacific which can only come at an opportunity cost to NATO; third, the new generations of stealthy Russian missile firing submarines – which have been unaffected by operations in Ukraine – are increasingly contesting sea control of the North Atlantic; and, fourthly, by history, geography and nascent capability we are uniquely well equipped to fulfil the role.

Role specialisation is anathema to NATO which is guided by the principle of shared collective responsibility. But if the government of the United Kingdom is determined to favour butter over guns there may be no alternative. We currently languish close to the bottom of the NATO league table for meeting force goals and have vacuous plans to increase defence spending to 3.5% over the next 10 years, which will fall risibly short of the requirement. A possible plea in mitigation is the crippling cost of nuclear ownership which, given the increased emphasis placed on European deterrence, is currently indispensable and comes at the cost of additional conventional capability. But it’s a weak argument and unlikely to impress the force planners in Brussels.

So, the scene is set for the new and luckless Defence Secretary, Dan Jarvis, to go to the NATO summit in July and keep a straight face while claiming a major investment in defence. He will know that our claims to an all-court defence capability are mendacious and that he is in fact announcing Britain’s relegation to the second division of military nations, capable of only doing a range of things badly. Perhaps our greatest mistake was to assemble a body of pre-eminent experts to conduct a transparent and well-ordered process leading to the publication of the SDR – and then to ignore it.