Are we ready for war? Welcome to The i Paper’s opinion series in which our writers tackle a grim question that, until recently, few had thought to consider.
• Ray Mears: This is the golden rule of preparing for war• ‘Little green men’ and ghost fleets: How Russia could drag us into war before 2030• The wartime scenario most worrying for the UK’s generals• Britain is closer to nuclear war than you think. This is how it will unfold• Britain is getting ready for war – and paying with Ukrainian blood• This generation of Britons couldn’t handle the death toll of a modern war
The Ministry of Defence, apparently, has discovered once again that there is a black hole in the nation’s defence budget – this time, a shortage of a cool £28bn.
The Government aims to plug the gap – which has led to a shortage of trained personnel in all three armed services – by calling on Dad’s Army. The new Armed Forces Bill, out this week, establishes that the nation’s Strategic Reserve – in which veterans are compelled by law if called upon – is extending the maximum age of eligibility for national service from 55 to 65.
Captain Mainwaring and Sergeant Wilson will be spinning in their sleeping bags beyond the grave. Imagine: in times of national emergency, threats from enemy drones and missiles, mass cyber bombardment, nationwide pandemic, and cyclones of weird weather, we may have to depend on platoons of Corporal Jones.
The Armed Forces Act has to be renewed every five years. The new requirement to beef up and extend the remit of the Strategic Reserve in part fulfils what the current crop of military chiefs have requested. They are short of people, and are having a greater variety of jobs and roles thrown at them.
The Navy has nowhere near enough personnel to support the submarine force or the aircraft carriers, or the increasingly complex task of meeting the threats from underwater drones and submarines. Or to address malevolent third parties operating the “shadow fleet” of sanctions-busting oil tankers tasked by Russia, Iran and Venezuela until the week before last.
The new call-out for reserves in case of “national danger, great emergency or attack in the UK” indicates the Government’s confused attitude and policies on defence, which is under-resourced and underfunded – despite all the fanfare and bluster about increasing expenditure to 3.5 per cent of GDP when the Strategic Defence Review was published last June. The promised figure was only to kick in after the next general election – when presumably the fate of the Starmer Government will have disappeared up its own smoke screen.
There was barely any mention of defence at all in Rachel Reeves’s Budget of last November. The Treasury has asked for more “efficiency economies” – i.e. government departments finding ways to achieve their objectives at a lower cost. So far, there is no sign of the Defence Investment Plan (DIP) for 2025, which lays out what money is actually being put into defence, and was due to be published at the end of last year. The latest forecast is that the DIP will not see the light of day until at least March.
It’s time the Government and Whitehall in general wised up to reserves and what they can and cannot deliver. The head of the Army, General Sir Roland Walker, proposes a fully paid, trained and provisioned reserve of about 40,000. This will enable specialist recruiting for disciplines like languages and cyber operations.
The country is short of operators with cyber skills across the piece – needed to meet the challenges of AI and quantum computing. In my view, the Strategic Defence Review was startlingly weak on the implications of AI, automation and autonomous weapons – yes, the “killer robot” phenomenon which is becoming reality on the battlefront of Ukraine.
Professional soldiers tend to look down on the reservists, as at worst being an unreliable nuisance, at best just gutsy amateurs. The Army was delighted to see the end of national service conscription, 1916-1920, then 1939-1960, during which teenagers were forced to serve by the million.
And yet, time and time again reserves, the citizenry as well as veterans, prove their worth – as in both the great wars of the last century. They prove their worth today. During Covid, many of those involved in converting the Excel Centre in London to a 2,000 bed pandemic hospital in the space of a week were reservists.
In fact, military veterans did a lot of heavy lifting during Covid, but got little thanks from the likes of Matt Hancock and Health officialdom. General Sir Nick Parker has pioneered a disaster response charity once known as Rubicon, now called REACT. Many of them are veteran volunteers, who have been working with refugees in hot spots and helped out in earthquakes.
As for age: the possible sight of a squad of Clive Dunn/Corporal Jones lookalikes trying to hold back the ravages of the Severn Bore, or a hole in the Thames Barrier is daunting.
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But being 80, I have a dog in this fight, and a strong message. We must get the best of the physically and mentally able, whatever their age. The ageing Trump, and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei give the us octogenarians a bad name. They shouldn’t be allowed to.
Reservists at 65 and 75 even, are perfectly feasible provided they have something to offer. But then, I have known commanders in the field in their early forties suffering crippling exhaustion and burnout.
It’s time the Government and Whitehall get out of their lazy thinking about reserves and volunteers – and properly values the need for defence and resilience, and our ageing community.
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square Opinion Is the UK ready for war? Tobias EllwoodOur nuclear weapons are no longer enough to keep us safe
Levison WoodNot enough people want to die for Britain – and who can blame them?
Tim CollinsI’ve seen the state of our weaponry – helping Ukraine has left us exposed
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