The British Armed Forces is underfunded, unprepared for war, and doesn’t even have a plan in place should one come, the Chief of the Defence Staff told Parliament.
The United Kingdom enjoyed the “peace dividend” after the end of the Cold War but this has left the country militarily unprepared now politicians are talking about war again, it emerged from testimony of Britain’s top professional officer at the Parliamentary Defence Committee on Monday. Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, an “defence bureaucrat” engineer who hit headlines last year after he was selected to become the first Chief of the Defence Staff (CDS) from a non-combat arm of the military warned Britain’s ability to discourage other countries from launching attacks was lacking for want of capability.
He told the committee that it is a “statement of the obvious” that the British armed forces is constrained by “the budget that is set” and this leads to “difficult trade-offs” in choosing capabilities. This meant deciding whether to fund “health, education, defence” and, evidently, often defence does not win. He said in a terse session of the committee:
… we have taken a peace dividend and we are not as ready as we need to be for the kind of full-scale conflict that we might face. And that’s how we ultimately deter our principle adversaries, by being ready to fight and win.
Sky News noted that during the course of the session, it was also teased out of the CDS that despite now-years of belligerent rhetoric from Britain’s political leadership, there is still no Government War Book. A detailed plan of the precise steps the government would rapidly take to transition the country to war in the case of a sneak attack, the old war book covered everything from the survival of government in a nuclear strike and retaliating with high-level military capabilities down to wider mobilisation of society, including mobilising national industries into a war economy, stockpiling food, and using the health service to deal with mass casualties.
The old War Book persisted from the First World War until the end of the Cold War, when it was wound up and no longer updated, and many of the emergency reserves maintained sold off or destroyed to save money. CDS Knighton said a new War Book is being worked on, but it being ready for use could be a year, or years away.
He said:
I think that it is a manifestation of the peace dividend… since the end of the Cold War, we have not prioritised those matters. And so as a consequence, the government, for many years, of many hues, has not focused its efforts on developing that kind of plan. I’m pleased to say that partly as a consequence of what’s in the Strategic Defence Review, that is changing.
Britain’s Labour government announced a new Defence Investment Plan (DIP), which will lay out what new equipment and infrastructure is coming and how it will be paid for, but it is now severely overdue. It has been claimed this is because it’s had to be rewritten in light of what is thought to be a massive government funding gap for the military tens of billions of pounds in size.
Member of Parliament Gavin Robinson reacted with alarm to the comments and said they should worry ” those who assume our defence capacity is greater, stronger or more resilient than it is”. Ulster newspaper The News Letter reports he decried the British government for having relied on NATO — largely funded by the United States — to underwrite the nation’s defence. He said:
In the 1980s, we invested the same level of GDP in Defence as Health and Education. As a share of GDP, Education spend has remained steady, Health has increased by 50%, whilst Defence has more than halved. In the last 20 years, the head count of our Armed Forces has reduced by a third.
That trajectory isn’t set to change anytime soon but the Chief of the Defence Staff highlights an even greater frailty. His suggestion that we have neither the ability or capacity to respond medically or societally is matched by the revelation that the Government’s War Book (plan) to transition from Peace to War has not been revised since the turn of the Century!
These comments on Britain’s readiness — or lack thereof — to deter conflict come despite years of alarmist comments from government figures who have simultaneously spoken the language of war while not advancing the nation’s preparedness for it. Much of this has been forced by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the UK government has just closed a deal with France that should a ceasefire ever come to Ukraine, the two countries would deploy their armed forces to the ground to enforce the peace.
The British could contribute to this mission, Knighton said this week, at least “in the short term”.