The security situation the UK faces is the most tense and dangerous for 80 years. The recent publication of the US national security strategy (NSS) was extremely alarming, portraying European liberal democracies as somehow a political or ideological threat to the United States. Even if this was written by an unrepresentative voice or rogue actor within, the fact that the US administration allowed it to be published is concerning. The aggressive tone about Greenland reinforces the messaging in the NSS.
There are clearly MAGA oriented idealogues in the US who do view Britain and Europe in this way. But even more traditional Atlanticist Republicans are adamant that Europe must fund and enable its own defence. The era in which taxpayers in Missouri or Virginia pay for the defence of Europe is long gone.
The United Kingdom must plan for the worst: America being distracted by China’s aggression in the Far East, or being simply unwilling to come to Europe’s aid. Still, we must continue to fight to try to keep the US engaged. Even if this doesn’t involve the US fighting alongside us, they have indispensable enabling technologies and intelligence that it is in our interest to continue to be able to use as allies. It is in their commercial and economic interests to continue to allow us access to these.
The US is also in the process of trying to engineer a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine. Clearly, the war there cannot be sustained in perpetuity, either something will break economically in Russia or Ukraine’s manpower deficit will break it militarily. A harsh peace treaty might involve a Ukraine with borders that are not realistically defensible from a third Russian invasion, with constraints on the size of its military that remove the largest and most battle-hardened anti-Russian force from any future conflict.
Even a relatively benign peace treaty will start the clock ticking on Russian ability to launch a new war of aggression against another of its western neighbours. This time, it could even be a NATO member state. An end to the horrific slaughter in Ukraine means that Russia will be able to move hundreds of thousands of combat-experienced troops to the border with the Baltic states or Finland. Russia has already been renewing its heavy armour, tanks and artillery, which are not the correct weapons for the current attritional struggles with Ukraine involving drones and trenches, but would absolutely be effective in the first days, perhaps the only days, of an all-out attack on another western neighbour. Within two years, Russia will have re-equipped itself to exactly the same level of offensive capability that it had when it invaded Ukraine in February 2022, this time having learned the lessons from that experience
An all out attempt to annex a small neighbour is perhaps less likely than a scenario where Russia seizes, for instance, the Estonian border town of Narva, claiming that it is liberating the predominantly Russian-speaking residents there. Such a scenario would provide a test to try and break NATO politically, to force a decision on whether to invoke Article 5 that would presumably see southern European nations, those countries like Hungary that are more closely oriented to Russia, and perhaps the USA, refuse to go to war over a “far away country of which they know little”. This would be the end of NATO as an effective security guarantor.
To stop this happening, the UK and its European allies must develop more effective deterrence. Britain has an independent nuclear deterrent, but it lacks almost any of the conventional rungs in the escalatory ladder below global thermonuclear war. We need many conventional escalatory options that will deter different conventional attacks from Russia. We also need air and missile defences, and defences against grey zone warfare, here in the UK that will negate or reduce Russia’s ability to harm the UK itself. To avoid a war, our enemies must know that we are prepared for one.
That does not just involve scale of forces and quality of and quantity of equipment, it involves the political resolve of the British political system and public. There cannot be a choice of guns or butter, because unless we have a strong enough military, our good society could be ripped away from us instantly, and unless we have a fair and good society worth defending, there will not be the public and political will to fight. Knowledge of the absence of that will is an incentive for Russia to attack. Were the Estonia town of Narva to face an attack, the UK’s highly trained but small battlegroup in Estonia would serve as a political tripwire to put Russia into direct conflict with a NATO ally as soon as it enters Estonia.
Russia could even seek to bring the war to the UK homeland. This could involve a mix of grey zone asymmetric warfare – like attacks on internet connections, energy and power supply, or cyber-attacks on businesses or public services like the NHS. They would aim to take advantage of perceived societal weakness and political divisions to knock us out of the conflict very early by making it politically impossible for us to continue. It could involve mass political protest spontaneously organised by useful idiots like the Stop the War Coalition or stirred up by Russian political or social media assets.
It is right that the Labour Government is investigating Russian attempts at political influence in the British system. It is unlikely that the bribery of Reform’s leader in Wales, Nathan Gill, which has led to his imprisonment, is an isolated attempt to subvert the British political system.
At the top end of the spectrum is the possibility of kinetic strikes against significant military targets or civilian targets, such as airports and power stations, using air or sea launched conventional cruise and ballistic missiles, swarms of drones, or in the near future, hypersonic missiles. There could also be quasi-terrorist attacks on similar targets.
Russia is fully aware that the UK is not the strong cohesive society that it was in World War II. We have been weakened by years of internal political and societal divisions, and we have very few people with direct experience of military service. We lack the whole of society resilience that the Nordic states have developed.
Our military is simply too small for anything other than a very short, symbolic fight. We completely lack the mass of either troops or platforms such as armoured vehicles, warships and aircraft, for a sustained fight. Spending on defence, even after recent promised increases are delivered, is nowhere near the 4% of GDP in the Cold War years. Procurement decisions over the last decades have focused on small numbers of exquisite platforms that enable our RAF and Royal Navy commanders not to be embarrassed about the kit that they have being any more than one generation behind their US counterparts. But that has been at the expense of depth and mass.
It is worth noting the reluctance of the military towards building up reserve forces and formations, even though you can fund five times as many reservists as you can for any given number of regular troops. In contrast to countries nearer to Russia which have rearmed, such as Poland and Finland, we have very few tanks or artillery – having given all our AS90s correctly to Ukraine, but not properly replaced them – or for that matter, men and women trained to take up arms.
The Strategic Defence Review (SDR) – published in June last year – correctly identified these and other shortfalls, such as long-range strike capabilities, to take the fight back to Russia, and all types of air defence. The particular strategic role that we have which contrasts to that of countries on the European continent to our East, is our responsibility to and the vulnerability of the sea area known as the North Atlantic Bastion. As in the Cold War, anti-submarine warfare specialised frigates, and the new generation of AUKUS nuclear powered but conventionally armed submarines, are essential. An attack on Britain itself would not have to come across the European continent, because Russian’s main air and naval bases exit out of the North Atlantic, so an attack could come from our North, West or East. In this context, Norway is one of our key strategic partners, as it holds the other side of that air and sea gateway, and the Norwegian decision to procure British made frigates is exceptionally welcome.
Whilst the SDR accurately assessed what we need, it took far too long to publish and is taking far too long to implement, and there is constant delay waiting for the next documents in the series that follows it up. Right now, the end of 2025 deadline for the Defence Investment Plan has been completely missed. The defence industry, rather than getting contracts signed by the Ministry of Defence, is having to lay off the skilled workers who should be building the kit stipulated in the SDR.
The welcome extra funding the Government has committed to our defence capabilities has largely been swallowed up by items that are essential for morale and retention of forces, such as enhanced pay, pensions, and bringing the appalling housing provided to our troops back in house so it can be brought up to a decent standard. But we have simply not got moving yet on building the new equipment we need, and procuring kit, whilst slow, is easier and faster to do than recruiting and training new soldiers, sailors and airmen.
In all likelihood, we may not even have the five years that our own intelligence assesses Russia needs to re-arm. Countries nearer to Russia, where the threat is more obvious, have an assessment of closer to two years. We need a crash rearmament programme. The irony is that the same officials that move at glacial pace through Britain’s procurement process were quite capable of moving at great speed when making procurements on behalf of Ukraine. It can be done; it just needs a clear signal and instruction from the top of Government that the peacetime rulebook and timelines need to be torn up.
We also need to involve small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) rather than the giant prime contractors for the procurement of items such as drones. Ukraine has shown that SMEs have a technological development cycle far faster than anything the major prime contractors can do. The Army needs to also be given a clear responsibility for defence of the UK homeland. A less glamorous task than expeditionary warfare, this is something that our armed forces have shied away from. Part of this must involve a massive expansion in the Army’s ground-based air defence capabilities. The Cabinet Office must tightly coordinate the build-up of civil resilience capabilities.
We can’t escape our ultimate sovereign responsibility for our own national defence, but we share a small continent with many other allied nations, so deeper military and procurement collaboration and cooperation is essential. The Joint Expeditionary Force provides a good model of how the Northern European countries that are most serious about defence can operate together as a coalition of the willing.
It is ridiculous that this one small continent has multiple competing parallel procurement programmes for major platforms. There is more than enough work for every country’s defence industry, but it is not a good use of resources or know-how for France and Germany to be designing a future fighter programme (FCAS) at the same time as the UK, Italy and Japan are designing another one (GCAP). Similar wasteful parallel programmes exist for tanks and warships. It is deplorable that the EU didn’t let Britain into the SAFE programme – a €150 billion defence loan scheme to allow member states to jointly procure European-made military equipment. It illustrates a complete lack of seriousness about the threat that we face.
As social democrats, we need to be making the progressive case for a national defence which is, given the nature of Russia, effectively anti-fascism, for solidarity between democratic nations with the same values, for building the type of fair society that people will consider it worth defending, and for targeting the increased industrial spend that we need to make at building more prosperous communities in our left behind deindustrialised regions.
For more on defence, specifically procurement, Investing In Drones Means Investing In People.
