Defence Review
This has been touched on in the election campaign, mainly in connection with Trident, but it is not really a campaign issue, not least because each party plans to hold one if in government. This blog is now going to look at some of the considerations which ought to be on the table when the process begins.
It is not possible to look at defence requirements without looking at Foreign Policy. This Blog has repeatedly argued against clinging to US coat-tails. Moreover under Blair and Bush the doctrine of military intervention to impose desired improvements became the bedrock of the joint US/UK foreign policy. Blair was willing to go to war whenever the opportunity arose. First Iraq air strikes, then Kosovo, then Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq. We are still at war in Afghanistan and we have been fighting somewhere almost the whole of Labour’s thirteen years.
We cannot go forward like this. It does no good, mostly fails in its objectives or in solving one problem opens up another. We are not a superpower and all of those are now more restrained, even the US, if it could get out of Afghanistan. There are certainly problems but the military option aggressively used no longer provides a lasting outcome. Can you imagine the repercussions if the US decides to attack Iran? Al Qaeda bosses would fall off their chairs with laughter. The Americans would have dealt them a golden hand.
It must be established therefore that the days of our using force as an instrument of foreign policy are well and truly over. Defence means defence. Of our islands, our shipping lanes, our airspace, our infrastructure our communications technology and our energy supplies. That defence must be world class but not scattered across the world. I suspect we need a larger navy with more ships of the latest guided missile destroyer class, a more focussed air force and a better equipped army based in the UK. We need to give priority to anti terrorist forces and intelligence gathering and we have to up our cyber- war capability for our own security. We need to retain a nuclear deterrent, but a smaller more flexible system could follow Trident as that comes to the end of its useful life.
We also need to put uniforms back on our service personnel when they are out and about among us. Putting them in mufty in public was a victory for terrorism which should never have been conceded.