Defence

If David Cameron wants a military capable of toppling Assad, he’ll have to pay for it

Libya is a success from which David Cameron might not recover. This, at any rate, seems to be the fear of Sir David Richards who has marked his exit as head of the military with a Daily Telegraph interview. He appears to reinforcing a point David Cameron once made: ‘I am not,’ he once said, ‘a naive neo-con who thinks you can drop democracy out of an aeroplane at 40,000 feet.’  The Prime Minister was proved right in Libya: the Tomahawk missiles he fired at Libya cruised at just 400 feet before sinking into their targets which (in Gaddafi’s case) was enough to restrain the tyrant and introduce democracy. Bur

Soldiers’ right to protection remains, and so it should

Last week’s Supreme Court ruling in the Snatch Land Rover / Challenger II cases, which allowed the families of four soldiers who lost their lives while serving in Iraq to sue for damages, has provoked some strong opinions. Some say that the MoD is in all ways different from other employers and that it should not therefore be held accountable in the courts. Of course soldiering is not ‘just another job’, but surely it does not follow that we should tolerate the deaths of young British citizens if those deaths are caused by the Government’s failure to provide adequate training or equipment. Soldiers should be no less entitled than the

Did the taxpayer contribute to the ‘Royal Wedding of the North’?

Mr Steerpike is a romantic at heart and a conservative, so I like love and marriage. Yet I was irritated by one detail of the nuptials of Lady Melissa Percy and Thomas van Straubenzee (pictured), dubbed the ‘Royal Wedding of the North’ at Alnwick Castle, which took place this weekend. It was quite a bash. Prince Harry was caught between two blondes, when his ex and latest squeeze came face to face. Prince William (who was Best Man to his childhood friend van Straubenzee) was flying solo after the heavily pregnant Duchess of Cambridge decided to stay in London lest she be forced to give birth in a northern NHS

Bring on the drones – the Supreme Court has changed the way we fight wars

On the face of it, the Supreme Court’s decision to allow three suits to be brought against the Ministry of Defence is surprising, almost shocking. My colleague Alex Massie has castigated the judgment; but, while I don’t necessarily disagree with Alex’s sentiments, the judgment merits very close attention. It is a politically far-reaching decision. The Court was asked to consider whether British military personnel on active duty overseas are under the jurisdiction of the European Convention of Human Rights. If they are, then the British state has a duty to secure the human rights of its overseas personnel (specifically their right to life under article 2 of the Convention) as

Cameron wants to change the military balance in Syria, but how do you do that without arming the Islamists?

David Cameron and Vladimir Putin have just concluded their pre G8 talks, the main topic of which was Syria. Cameron wants to use the next few days to try and persuade the Russians to stop backing Assad; the weapons they’ve been sending him have enabled him to gain the upper hand on the rebels militarily. Cameron instinctively wants to do something about the slaughter in the Levant for both strategic and moral reasons. As one figure intimately involved in British policy making on Syria told me earlier, ‘The one certainty is that, if nothing is done, not only will lives be lost, not only will Assad not negotiate, but we

Why Defence Secretaries go native

When Philip Hammond was sent to the Ministry of Defence, his skills as a bean counter were much lauded. Colleagues hoped that he wouldn’t, like other Defence Secretaries, go native. He quite obviously has done that, and quicker than many thought, holding out as the strongest shop steward of the National Union of Ministers in the 2015/16 Spending Review negotiations. His case may well be boosted by General Sir Peter Wall’s intervention on Jeff Randall’s programme last night – the head of the Army warned that further cuts could damage the force’s ‘professional competence’ – but Hammond’s own interview on the same programme is worth watching as well. When asked

Do the Americans want Britain to renew Trident?

What is the point of Britain’s nuclear deterrent? If it is an insurance policy it is a remarkably expensive one that might not, in any case, ever be honoured. I suspect that, more importantly, retaining an independent [sic] nuclear capability is a psychological crutch for politicians who fear that leaving the nuclear club would somehow make it harder for Britain to remain a member of the Top Nation club. And perhaps it would. This is not necessarily a trivial thing. It would change the way we think of ourselves and might, in some sense, be considered an admission of defeat or as some kind of retreat. No Prime Minister wants

Cutting and running from Afghanistan

MPs on the Defence Select Committee made a similar warning this morning about the UK’s withdrawal from Afghanistan as Con Coughlin made in The Spectator last month. He wrote that Britain’s ‘attempt to undertake a dignified retreat from Kabul has all the makings of yet another Afghan disaster’. You can read the full piece here, but here are the main points that it makes, followed by the main warnings from the select committee’s report: 1. Is the ANSF ready to take over? Because of a failure to defeat or reach a political settlement with the Taleban, the withdrawal plan depends on trusting Afghan troops ‘who have already shown a worrying

Nuclear weapons, Scotland and the future of the United Kingdom

David Cameron – who, in case you’d forgotten, leads the Conservative and Unionist Party – made a rare visit to Scotland yesterday. He spoke about defence. His message was clear: an independent Scotland could not expect to win defence contracts from what remains of the United Kingdom. Jobs and expertise, therefore, would be lost. Vote no. This is, as Iain Martin notes, smart politics. The Nationalists are weakest on those briefs which are the central functions of a nation state: defence, foreign policy and welfare. Cameron, as the British Prime Minister, should make more of this natural advantage. (Incidentally, Alex Massie has an excellent account of the referendum battle. It’s

Nemo me impune lacessit: defending an independent Scotland

Sometimes I wish Conservative cabinet ministers would couch their arguments in favour of the Union in terms of principle, not process or drab accountancy. Philip Hammond, the unimpressive Secretary of State for Defence, is the latest minister to warn that some of the perfectly solvable problems that are an inescapable feature of unwinding the United Kingdom are in fact so intractable that it’s a fool’s mission to even think about resolving them. Mr Hammond’s interview with the Daily Telegraph today is but the latest example of this question-begging. He appears to believe that Scottish independence is an idea so obviously ridiculous that it effectively refutes itself without the need for

The Great Defence Procurement Rip-Off, Housing Edition

There’s no business like government business. Reacting to Philip Hammond’s statement on future army basing yesterday, today’s newspapers have led on either the decision to strip the Desert Rats of their tanks or on the broken promises on basing made to some parts of the country. Bringing the army back from the Rhine makes plenty of sense. That is, there’s no conceivable need for British troops to remain in Germany. It is, perhaps, remarkable that, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, it will have taken (by the time the move is completed) more than a quarter of a century to achieve this. No-one can accuse the MoD of rushing

Vince Cable tells Philip Hammond, cut Trident not welfare

On The Sunday Politics today, Vince Cable told Andrew Neil that he disliked ring fencing particular departments. But he accepted that the NHS and DFID budgets would remain protected for the rest of this parliament Cable, who joked that he was being fingered as a shop steward of the National Union of Ministers, made clear that he opposed any further welfare cuts. When asked about Philip Hammond’s comments that welfare should be cut not defence, Cable responded by saying that the Ministry of Defence should scrap Trident. Interestingly, Cable conceded that capital spending was still too low and that he would push for further increases in it in the Budget.

The Tory branch of the National Union of Ministers says cut welfare, not our budgets

Philip Hammond is a cautious and loyal politician. He is not a boat rocker. This is what makes his interviews in the Telegraph and The Sun today so noteworthy. He would not have started conducting spending negotiations in public unless he felt he had to and that he had a chance of success. Hammond tells The Sun his case is this, ‘You take half a percent out of the welfare budget, you’ve solved the problem in defence — HALF a percent. There is a body of opinion within Cabinet that believes we have to look at the welfare budget again.’ In truth, the argument about the 2015-16 spending round is

Little Britain

The foreign news pages read increasingly like some terrible satire on western military decline. Two years ago French and British forces, with the help of the US Navy, managed to help Libyan rebels topple Colonel Gaddafi. This year, the French needed British support to go to war against some tribesmen in Mali. It was a successful operation, but the ‘Timbuktu Freed’ headline rather summed up the extent of European military power today. The French have only two drone aircraft (the Americans have hundreds) and had to drop concrete bombs on Tripoli when they ran low on real ones. As the foreign policy rhetoric of our media and political leadership grows,

Europe’s defence budgets may not be noble, but they are at least rational

Gideon Rachmann is unhappy that european defence budgets are still falling: Since 2008, in response to the economic downturn, most big European countries have cut defence spending by 10-15 per cent. The longer-term trends are even more striking. Britain’s Royal Air Force now has just a quarter of the number of combat aircraft it had in the 1970s. The Royal Navy has 19 destroyers and frigates, compared with 69 in 1977. The British army is scheduled to shrink to 82,000 soldiers, its smallest size since the Napoleonic wars. In 1990 Britain had 27 submarines (excluding those that carry ballistic missiles) and France had 17. The two countries now have seven and six respectively.

Govt confusion on defence shows how painful the next spending review will be

The government’s position on defence spending is, to put it politely, confused. After the completion of the SDSR and the defence spending settlement, there was an expectation that the military budget would begin to rise again in real terms from 2015. There has long been talk in Whitehall that David Cameron assured senior military figures that this would be the case and, as James Kirkup notes, he told the Commons that he believed that this would happen. So, this morning when we woke to the news from the Prime Minister’s plane that the defence budget would rise in 2015-16, it seemed that Cameron had imposed his will on the bureaucracy.

Alex Massie

Half of the British Army’s officer corps is privately educated. Does that matter? – Spectator Blogs

An interesting spot, courtesy of the good chaps at Think Defence. From Hansard: Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North, Labour) To ask the Secretary of State for Defence what proportion of new recruits to the Army at (a) soldier and (b) officer level previously attended state school. Andrew Robathan (South Leicestershire, Conservative) The proportion of soldier recruits that had previously attended a state school is not held centrally and could be provided only at disproportionate cost. Including the most recent intake of officer cadets to the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, in January 2013, 53.5% of the UK educated intake over the last 12 months came from state schools. While the

Isabel Hardman

Cameron: defence spending is protected. Hammond: no it isn’t

After Cabinet tensions on the matter, David Cameron was trying to reassure those worried about further defence cuts while visiting Algeria. The Telegraph reports a senior government source saying the Prime Minister will honour his pledge to increase defence spending from 2015. The source told the newspaper: ‘The Prime Minister does not resile from anything he has said about defence.’ But rather less reassuringly, Philip Hammond decided to clarify that reassurance this morning. The Defence Secretary told Sky News that the PM was only referring to the equipment budget, and that he would continue to make the argument for maintaining the ‘resources that we need to deliver Future Force 2020’:

UKIP is not a libertarian party – Spectator Blogs

I’m sure, as James says, that the idea of some kind of Tory-UKIP non-aggression pact will not go away. But that’s because many Tory backbenchers are remarkably stupid. Proponents of a Tory-UKIP alliance ignore the stubborn fact that many voters – voters the Tories need if they are to win a majority – aren’t too keen on UKIP. There is no point adding one vote from the right if it costs you two from the middle, mainstream ground of British politics. Besides, the Tories are not every UKIP voter’s second-choice and, anyway, the real battle is for the Liberal Democrat vote. Be that as it may, it is UKIP’s insistence

What today’s Trident announcement is really about

When Nick Harvey was sacked in September’s reshuffle, leaving the Ministry of Defence without a Liberal Democrat minister, anti-nuclear campaigners and the SNP claimed the move put the future of the review into alternatives to the current Trident nuclear deterrent in doubt. To underline the review’s security, the party announced at the start of its autumn conference two weeks later that Danny Alexander would lead it instead. But though the review may be continuing, it appears rather insecure in one crucial respect, which is whether anyone will actually pay it the blindest bit of attention. Today Philip Hammond announced a further £350 million of funding for the design of a