The recent, empty point-scoring, hoo hah over the misfiring UK Trident missile test, and the flag-waving, posturing in Parliament and the mass media last year over the, up to £100bn, renewal of the Trident ballistic missile system, has highlighted yet again the ideological vulnerability of the Labour Left on defence issues.

Quite understandably, the left, working within a capitalist state with a major colonial/imperialist past, and now a junior partner, in the global structures of “Pax Americana”, has tended to respond with “nothing to do with me guv”, or an outright pacifist, approach to problems of the UK defence strategy and capabilities. The exception to this lack of interest being the Left’s almost universal hostility to nuclear weapons, from the moment Labour’s Attlee government established the UK as a nuclear weapons state – without informing the full Cabinet, never mind Parliament! The spirit of that decision has been well-described:

In October 1946, Attlee called a small cabinet sub-committee meeting to discuss building a gaseous diffusion plant to enrich uranium. The meeting was about to decide against it on grounds of cost, when [Ernest] Bevin arrived late and said “We’ve got to have this thing. I don’t mind it for myself, but I don’t want any other Foreign Secretary of this country to be talked at or to by the Secretary of State of the US as I have just been… We’ve got to have this thing over here, whatever it costs… We’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it.

Unfortunately the British Left has tended to adopt the moral absolutism of liberal pacifists who have always composed a significant cohort of CND and the anti-nuclear weapons lobby. Ignoring the larger defence issues has provided the flag-draped “Dr Strangelove” nuclear weapons posturers of the Tories and the Labour Right, with an ideological weapon with which to smear the Left as ‘unpatriotic’, ‘pacifist dreamers’ , ‘agents of Moscow’. It has also driven a wedge between it and the craft unions whose members build and maintain the nuclear weapons system.

The Disfunctionality of Defence Strategy and Capabilities Today

The lack of interest across the Left about defence strategy and capabilities has left the entire field essentially unsupervised and unchallenged by any but the likes of Private Eye, and occasional newspaper articles and a few dissident military men. There is a lot to uncover – the endless dodgy arms deals themselves, but also the directly related, extremely common, corrupt, ‘revolving door‘ interchange between generals, admirals, MOD officials and key politicians, and the major defence firms. Links to some of those ‘revolving door’ articles can be found here.

Yet any objective investigation of the UK’s overall defence strategy today, and the interconnected weapons purchasing record of the MOD over the last 30 years at least would, I believe, reveal gross incompetence, political cowardice, and systemic corruption, on the part of senior ministers in all Labour and Tory governments, key senior military staff, and Mod officials, leaving the UK vulnerable to a wide range of potential military threats.

The UK’s focus on ‘prestige’ military systems, like Trident or the two new mega carriers, are now leaving the Royal Navy, for instance, seriously lacking in the ‘bread and butter’ smaller craft required to police home waters, and defend global trade routes, from the growing scourge of piracy. Similarly, the army has long suffered the consequences of poor equipment choices, as evidenced by the sad saga of mine-vulnerable personnel carriers in Iraq and Afghanistan. The run-down of infantry numbers now makes it increasingly hard for the UK to contribute effectively to any future UN peacekeeping initiative.

There is nothing historically new about this, across all states, given the power and wealth of the “military industrial complex”, and the perennial gullibility of politicians when fed the snake oil sales promises of the arms lobbyists and their military hierarchy allies. The tragic, gigantic resource squandering, of inter-war France on its, useless, Maginot Line fortification, is a good parallel to today’s obsession with the technologically redundant, £100bn Trident missile system. A system funded at the expense of cash, manpower and resources which should be used for a sensible strategy-driven, balanced defence capability. My claim about the redundancy, or looming redundancy, of submarine-based deterrent missile delivery systems needs a short explanation, because it shifts the balance of past arguments on such systems somewhat.

The era of the Polaris and Trident submarine-based systems is over

When Emily Thornberry, in 2016, as part of the now abandoned Labour Defence Review dared to suggest that the fast developing technology of automated anti-submarine drones called into question the entire premise of submarine-based ballistic missiles, the mass media, the Labour right and the arms industry went into concerted overdrive to rubbish and ridicule her claim. But she was right.

Major developments in anti-submarine drone technology, linked no doubt to fixed position SOSUS type detection networks at key seaway pinch points, will soon make this type of launch platform redundant. And this includes hiding under the Arctic ice – where pre-positioned, temporarily dormant, hunter-killer automated drones will be, maybe even have been, “seeded” on the ocean floor, by Russia, and the West, ready for activation when required. This Guardian article gives a flavour of (known) developments.

Current UK defence strategy and weapons procurement is a shambles

Labour and Tory governments periodically undertake “Defence Strategy Reviews”. The common denominator of every Review has been a major failure to anticipate the actual major areas of conflict that have actually drawn armed forces into military action, eg, the Falklands, The Balkans, Iraq, Libya, etc, and an obsessive inability to get over the Cold War focus on the now, very third rate, military and economic power of the Russian Federation. Which is not to write off Russia as a threat to its previous Soviet empire neighbours, but contemporary Russian military capability bears no relation to that of the old Warsaw Pact. This series of strategic planning failures, is linked partly to the British political and military class’s determination to remain a slavishly loyal, junior partner to US global power.

The outcome of this strategic development shambles, driven too often by this capture of the politico-military elites by the sellers of the most profitable weapons systems, and the almost comical ‘big power’ delusions of the politicians, and institutional corruption in the MOD procurement system, is that across all the services the UK has the wrong military hardware, or not enough of it, and what we have all too often simply doesn’t perform properly.

Some examples of current UK equipment disasters

Space precludes going into great detail, but a few examples across the three services will suffice to illustrate the scale of the problem.

The Navy

Squandering billions on the Trident system has left the Royal Navy in an extraordinarily parlous state to do vital, routine, coastal defence and trade route protection duties. The Parliamentary Defence Select Committee warned in November 2016 that :“The Royal Navy has a “woefully low” number of warships that risks leaving Britain vulnerable to future threats.”

The same Parliamentary Defence Committee fumed at the extraordinary fact that all 6 of the new £1bn each type 45 destroyers had fundamentally faulty engines/power systems, that made them pretty much inoperable in “warm waters areas” until a complete engine refit was done!

The Committee found to its amazement that, due to poor forward planning the navy’s mid-range, ship to ship, Harpoon missiles would be phased out in 2018, with no replacement, and the same with its helicopter launched missiles. Leaving most ships with a single deck gun to provide mid-range fire power until new missiles were fitted after a two year gap!

In 2020 the Royal Navy is going to acquire the two (or possibly only one operationally) biggest ships it has ever had, the £3bn each Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carriers. These huge ships, very vulnerable to modern sea skimming missiles, without a surrounding “screening fleet” which only the US can provide, were built without vital steam catapults. This extraordinary decision means that the carrier is pretty much tied forever to its US made Lockheed Martin F35 Lightning II (STOVL) aircraft. Unfortunately the vertical take-off variant of the F35 is now widely recognised as a turkey of an aircraft, that will never meet its design specifications. Yet the carrier cannot operate any other possible replacement aircraft! The UK is buying 138 of this under-performing aircraft, shared between the Navy and RAF, at around £70m each.

The RAF

The disaster of scrapping the early warning and reconnaissance Nimrod fleet – awaiting hugely overpriced US supplied Boeing P-8 Poseidon replacements.

As with the Navy, the utterly underperforming F35 fighter bombers the RAF will be buying.

The scandal of the PFI /private supply air refueling fleet, which can’t even refuel many of the aircraft the RAF uses.

The Army

Apparently endless problems for a decade or more in acquiring suitable mine-proof vehicles to transport troops, at the costs of hundreds of mutilated soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. As detailed in the Chilcot Report. As so often, The MOD found British industry incapable of supplying the right vehicles.

The UK’s Main Battle Tank, the Challenger II, now needs replacement. Unfortunately British industry, BAE Systems essentially, in the country that invented the tank, is apparently now incapable of investing to build a replacement. The German firm of Rheinmetall is carrying out a gun upgrade, but eventually the best choice seems to be to buy the German Leopard II!

Recruitment

The MOD privatised army recruitment in 2012 to that perennial sub contractor favourite, Capita. This has been an unmitigated disaster for recruitment.

The strategy of both the Tory-Lib Dem and the current Tory government to fill the yawning manpower gaps produced in the arm’s ranks by its cuts, by getting Territorial Army part time reservists to fill the gaps by a hoped for 18,000 by 2018, has predictably failed to enthuse civilians expected to become “zero hour contract soldiers”.

Conclusion

Even a brief overview of recent and current British defence ‘strategy’, and its weapons procurement programmes, shows that it is riddled with poor judgement, a systemic revolving door with the arms firms corruption, and slavish compliance with the global strategic interests of the USA.

Far from the relentless talk of Trident being based on ‘patriotism’ or a deep understanding of defence issues, by Labour’s Right (and now by the Corbyn-led Shadow Cabinet) and most Tories, it is clear it is based on technological ignorance and short term political advantage, and, too often, expectations of benefit via that ‘revolving door’.

The consequence for the British people is that for our huge, circa 2% of GDP, spend on defence we have currently bought a deeply disfunctional overall defence package, that will simply fail to protect us from a wide range of likely future threats. In a short article it isn’t possible to detail these future threats (which will most likely be against irregular and/or relatively low tech enemies, as per Iraq, than against a Warsaw Pact quality of conventional opponent) or our real future equipment requirements, but it should be quite clear that the UK needs:

Fewer prestige armaments like Trident and the mega carriers which are based on our subservience to US global strategy rather than our own defence. In the age of Trump this new approach is more likely to serve our interests than ever before.

More, and much higher quality, ‘bread and butter’ weapons systems, including more well-equipped ships for the Royal Navy, and more, attack helicopter backed, infantry resources for the Army, to support a defensive military posture, and participation in UN peacekeeping operations.

A new, more ‘unaligned’ UK military posture, that is prepared to question the uncritical participation in all the old Cold War structures, from NATO specifically, to uncritical US strategy acceptance in general. Not to do this today risks the UK getting embroiled in both a hot war with China in the South China Sea, and a shooting war with Russia over the Baltic States.

The Left needs to renounce its previous quasi-pacifist attitude to the issue of national defence. It is a vital function in any independent state. The Left needs to embrace the validity of a credible, affordable, defensive national defence capability, for a Left government led state with a progressive foreign policy. It needs to challenge the Labour right’s unwarranted, claim of special competence in this area along with their claims to be the “true patriots”. We need to rip up all previous Defence Strategies, and assumptions, and question all existing armaments programmes in order to consider from the basics, what resources a modern, non-global power UK, needs to secure its defence for the next 30 years or so. Labour needs a proper defence review based on objective arguments and which is put before party members.