Donald Trump threw his political toys over the side of the ship of state and threatened to cut European NATO adrift. The political tides and currents turned stormy. What was needed on this side of the Atlantic was thoughtful calm to make sensible decisions. Instead, last month the EU bamboozled its naive and willing victim, Kier Starmer, into a defence and security agreement loaded with political and cash charges for the privilege, such as EU access to our fishing grounds for another twelve years. In exchange British companies might be invited to bid for EU defence equipment contracts but the EU would own the intellectual property. We are still obliged to defend them as NATO members. To me that sounds another holdup. Starmer should have released the strategic defence review before signing anything drafted in Brussels.
Was there an EU defence goldmine? Divide 150 billion Euros by five (years) and EU extra defence spending is actually 30 billion Euros a year. Divide that last figure by twenty-seven EU member states and you arrive at just over a billion Euros each – in theory. That’s not earth-shaking. And certainly isn’t worth our sovereignty plus our fish. Moreover, French diplomats already lobby for the exclusion of British companies from bidding for contracts
Meanwhile in the world beyond Brussels and North London, there is no such muddle and confusion. Lord George Robertson, Fiona Hill and General Sir Richard Barrons have released their strategic defence review for the United Kingdom and our overseas territories. This was not a straightforward task. The Prime Minister and much of his Cabinet still try stubbornly to delay spending more on defence until after the next General Election. The Treasury is on board but its manager resists all attempts to start rebuilding our defences. The Ministry of Defence are on board as are the Cabinet Office, industry and the City, according to General Sir Richard Barrons on Forces News. All the review team could do was offer the most comprehensive shopping list of what all three armed services and our intelligence services need to safeguard our population, industries, infrastructure, commercial air fleet, merchant and fishing fleets in a much more dangerous world. As Sir Richard Barrons puts it, the world has changed; our situation is no longer post Cold War. RAF airfields along the East Coast were places we flew from, now they are places we may have fight from.
We’ve seen lists before, orders for warships halved. This time is different, he says, this time we can’t delay. We have to start now. Somebody should be put in charge and let’s get the job done. There isn’t any time to waste. Sir Richard with Michael Clarke (former RUSI Director-General) and Commander Tom Sharpe RN retired were talking to Forces News.
The review may be found here:-
STRATEGIC DEFENCE REVIEW 2025.docx
When real life takes charge.
Donald Trump’s fickle politics are the underlying reason for this defence review. No sooner was the ink dry on the AUKUS deal than one of Trump’s advisers revealed that the President now wants to pull out of the submarine programme.
I welcome this development – otherwise Trump will squander months trying to force the Australians to buy American which would mean no nuclear and submarine technology jobs for Britain and Australia. We don’t need the Americans, the Astute submarine design is home made in Britain. We should place the whole programme entirely beyond reach of the most two-faced White House since Richard Nixon. There will be threats over some technology but our long and close relationship with the US Navy will survive Trump and his defence secretary. Surely, together, we and the Aussies can find the money, recruit the shipbuilders and naval crews. BAE will need a second launching slip. Perhaps the Canadians would join the programme. They’re a Commonwealth Pacific nation.
The AUK programme would build a fleet of next generation Astute class nuclear submarines and develop long range missiles, some armed with tactical nuclear warheads. Australian crew and shipbuilders should be welcomed by the Royal Navy and BAE Systems in Barrow-on-Furness. We should start this programme today. The Americans are welcome once Trump is no longer President and the real Republican Party takes back control – or the Democrats.
Global Alliances.
The review team began by reminding of our existing tapestry of treaties. NATO remains our core alliance. Apart from the NATO treaty we also have bi-lateral treaties with several NATO allies. The reviewers suggest that we should make more use of this existing diplomatic architecture. There is no potential big gain from replacing the long established and smoothly operating NATO machine with an EU command structure that would complicate military operations and take years to drag decisions through layers of committees. EU ambitions on defence are simply to gain control of defence as part of the Commission’s control of Europe’s politics, economics and industrial base. The EU objective is about tightening its control of Europe, NATO is about our freedom.
The review lists our alliances with the Commonwealth and important trading partners. Perhaps the oldest is with Nepal for recruiting Ghurkhas. The Gulf Co-operation Council is our main ally in the Middle East. We benefit greatly from long relationships with Jordan and Kuwait, also with Egypt and Iraq. We have treaty arrangements with South Korea that go back to the Korean War during the early 1950s. The Five Power Defence Arrangements in the Far East go back to Confrontation with Indonesia when Malaysia became independent in the 1960s. This provides bases in Singapore and Brunei. A new AUK treaty with the Australia brings collaboration at the highest technical level building a fleet of next generation nuclear attack submarines. Losing Trump is a big gain – no more handbrake turns. We are designing and building the Tempest sixth-generation fighter project with Japan and Italy. Most precious is the Five Eyes intelligence sharing club of the USA, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand which goes back to Churchill and Roosevelt’s meeting at Placentia Bay, Newfoundland in April 1941.
Meat and Potatoes
Much of the opening chapters of their review cover what the American Army describe as ‘meat and potatoes’ – all those basic nuts and bolts that have to go down on paper simply to make certain they are not overlooked or ignored.
The approach is to safeguard the core of the Royal Navy, Army and Royal Air Force while getting started on restoring numbers plus adding punch. Build more surface ships and submarines, more tanks and fighters, but give them all force-multipliers, squadrons of drones to sail or fly as wingmen. And don’t place orders for enough ships then immediately halve the order. The Type 45 Daring destroyers should number twelve, not six, and then we wouldn’t have most of them in dock. Provide the home base with a home built anti-missile ‘dome’ and provide similar protection for our offshore cyber network and power generation. Provide a space programme for gathering intelligence of all kinds.
Above all rebuild our defence industrial base.
I would add that there’s a great deal we can learn from the Ukrainians. Let me give just one example – those drone attacks on Russia’s bombers. As a long, fairly narrow island, all our ports and airfields are very vulnerable to drone attacks launched from ships just over the horizon. So are our fibre-optic cables and telephone cables criss-crossing the seabed the length of our islands. Do we really want foreign fishing boats dragging nets and sharp metal along the seabed for another twelve years?
But, as Tom Sharpe pointed out, avoid drawing the wrong conclusions. What the Ukrainians succeeded in doing to the Russian fleet within the narrow waters of the Black Sea, proved beyond the power of the Houtis in the open waters of the Arabian Sea. Royal Navy and US Navy warships have been shooting down drones and missiles for a number of years.
Tactical Nuclear Weapons
Tony Blair gave up Britain’s tactical nuclear weapons nearly twenty years ago. He also reduced our stock of deterrent warheads by 20 % to 160. Both decisions gambled with the peoples’ safety and nation’s future. He left a situation where we might have to gamble London (22% of UK GNP) for a chunk of Russian open country where an invading army was assembled. The absence of British tactical nuclear weapons made Putin’s calculations much easier before grabbing the Crimea in 2014. A tactical nuclear weapon dominates any battlefield without even leaving the storage bunker. The very knowledge of its existence is enough to inhibit potential foes. For a start it becomes dangerous to assemble a hostile force within range of a tactical nuclear weapon launcher or aircraft. Restoring Britain’s tactical nuclear weapons is the quickest way to reduce Russian threats to the Baltic states and Finland. I am much relieved to see the reviewers have the courage to suggest this mistake is rectified as swiftly as possible.
Rebuild our Seapower.
Britain is a sea trading nation. Almost half our economy is created from exporting and importing. Europe and the United States are being rapidly overtaken by the Far East and Pacific Rim as the planet’s economic locomotive. That’s the fast growth zone today and tomorrow. By 2050 half the planet’s trade will take place around the Pacific Ocean.
Our three pressing strategic weaknesses are the shrunken industrial base for defence, the lack of a strong and versatile air defence over the British Isles, and a highly capable navy that ought to be double or triple its present size.
I stick with my long-standing approach. Leave the NATO Central Front to those who live there – nowadays Poland fields the largest army within European NATO, Germany is rearming on a huge scale, France is rearming. By all means have a proper British Army corps to support the Scandinavians and Baltic states or global intervention but learn from history. Someone clever and hostile might try to harm us when least expected. That’s exactly what happened in 1982 – fortunately we still had small aircraft carriers. The present pair would have taken out Argentine’s air force as they sailed south.
Look at it from Donald Trump’s horizons. Trump knows the US Navy has eleven carrier strike groups (CSG) of which four or five are at sea – presently one CSG is off the Eastern Seaboard, another patrols the Arabian Sea ready to clobber Houties, one CSG supports the Philippines against China and another CSG patrols off Japan. The US Navy has ten Amphibious Ready Groups – at present one is off Sumatra and another one off Venezuela.
Modern technology such High Powered Microwaves (HPM) already provides blanket defence against all missiles whether cruise or hypersonic. HPM effectively microwaves the electronics guiding the missile until it simply falls from the sky. We can thank the Houties for the speedy development and introduction of HPM. The bills for shooting down their cheap rockets with modern ground-to-air missiles were eye watering. Something had to change and it did. Lazers are another development for layered defences.
When Donald Trump is told that we’ve sent a CSG to the Pacific, he’s mildly interested but only because he wants it tied to Europe. However, Trump, and most Britons, don’t remember Confrontation with Indonesia when Malaysia became independent. Between 1966 and 1969 not only were 10,000 British soldiers in the Borneo jungle every day, but a third of the Royal Navy patrolled those tropical seas. At least two or three strike carriers plus commando carriers and about fifty frigates and destroyers as escorts were sailing Far Eastern waters. It’s been done before, non-stop for three years. What if the modern Royal Navy had four carrier strike groups and we sent one off Northern Russia but two through the Suez Canal towards the Far East?
It’s a pity that President Macron is so keen to score commercial points off Britain – his fish leverage only worked because its victim – other than our fishing industry – was an aging civil servant and EU lover who lacked the self-confidence to cancel the whole London charade. Were there better leaders of both Britain and France, we could add Italy and deploy four CSGs on this side of the Atlantic. Two more from Britain would give Eastern Atlantic NATO more firepower than the US Navy has in our waters today. But the Prime Minister would need to stop dithering and buy our full order F 35 jump-jets to gain the real value of the nation’s investment in two carriers, let alone a couple more. Our carriers need their full complement of F 35s.
