Category Archives: Military

Economic, Europe, Government, History, Military, Politics, Society, United States

If we are unable to defend Greenland, then Europe is finished

UNITED STATES – EUROPE

Intro: Once you are reliant on foreign forces for safety you must abide by their decisions, like it or not. What is so difficult to understand about that?

IT WAS some two decades ago when Robert Cooper, Tony Blair’s foreign policy adviser, wrote: “The rest of the world… reacts to America, fears America, lives under American protection, envies, resents, plots against, depends on America. Every other country defines its strategy in relation to the United States”. And, in turn, the United States defines its foreign policy aims as effective “invulnerability”.

Fast forward to today, and Donald Trump is ruthlessly pursuing this same policy. Bombing Iran, deposing Nicolas Maduro, threatening war with Colombia, and now musing on the annexation of Greenland. “We need it for defence”.

Presidents change and domestic policy changes with the incumbent; as with the British Empire before it, however, the interests of the American state are eternal and perpetual. It is the duty of the White House to follow them, and the role of others to respond with envy constrained by their dependence or fear. In this case, the reaction in Europe to an explicit proposal for the annexation of European territory has been muted by both.

Denmark has complained that Trump has failed to show sufficient “respect for international law”, and Keir Starmer has politely asked Trump to stop musing on the prospects of conquering part of an allied nation. Beyond this squawking, however, there has been no response because Europe has no response to offer beyond hoping that Trump forgets about this issue and moves on. We are not going to see US forces conducting midnight raids to capture Danish politicians, or shots fired in anger over the fate of Greenland. Europe is not going to fight America because it can’t, and America is not going to fight Europe because it has no need to: if Trump really wants the territory and isn’t just enjoying the sight of European politicians scrambling to cover their shame, then he could apply deeply painful leverage until he gets his way.

Despite all the rhetoric about the US military and how it intends to be used in the future, the continent’s security is still guaranteed by American boots on European ground, and the outcome of the conflict on its eastern flank by the flow of American weapons and intelligence to Ukraine.

If push comes to shove, no one should be betting against Trump using this leverage to get what he wants in Greenland through some means short of outright annexation: declaring that in the absence of new US installations and treaties that deployments to Europe will need to wind down to preserve forces for the protection of the US homeland.

The diplomatic side will be smoothed over, but the faultlines will still exist. Read the responses from European leaders, and there will always be a hint of rulers who have relied on outsiders to maintain their forces, and have belatedly understood that the interests of those outsiders do not always align with their own. In this, at least, they are in company: the last Western Roman emperor was deposed by foreign allies garrisoned within his territory when their demands for land were denied. The Normans entered southern Italy as mercenaries and ended up ruling over swathes of territory. The Mamluks began as foreign slave-soldiers, and became sultans. The European nations of the present day have spent decades freeloading on US defence spending, paying lip service to the American political obsessions of the day on diversity, migration, democracy, and other cultural issues in exchange for this defence. Geir Lundestad coined the term “empire by invitation” to describe this process: embracing dependence and ever greater American intervention in the life of the Continent.

When American and European interests were aligned, this dependence and intervention was tolerable. The constraints rarely chafed. As American relative power has waned, though, the tasks necessary to secure the homeland and to secure Europe have begun to diverge. As one expert previously said some three years ago, the United States did not “have the military capacity to remain so heavily engaged in Europe while ensuring effective defence in Asia”.

Today, that military expert is at the heart of the administration’s defence policy and is putting this policy into action. Subsequently, Europe is now finding that by having a dependence on a nation with interests different to your own is a deeply uncomfortable position to be in. It is also a deeply difficult one to get out of. For all Europe’s talk of strategic autonomy, at every turn it has baulked at paying the costs that this would entail. It left security to the Americans, comforting itself that they would always be there to pick up the bill.

This dependence reaches beyond the military sphere. America and the EU might enjoy the world’s largest bilateral trading relationship, but it is not an even one. The economic might Brussels hoped to rely on is a partial illusion: US companies provide the payments systems that many European nations rely on, the cloud storage their citizens store their secrets in, the search engines, AI models, and social media platforms which determine the information landscape for the electorate. If a dispute really escalated, the kill switch is in Washington. The EU scramble for alternatives is a result of this realisation.

Yet, the mistake politicians made was a simple one. Ariel Rubinstein’s book Economic Fables makes the point that there is more than one set of rules that the world can operate on. What we think of as immutable features of society are nothing of the sort. Rubenstein was elaborating in the context of how we teach economics to students, but there is no doubt this point can usefully be taken much further.

Underneath the logic of economics and international law the base level of reality still exists. The law of the jungle does not operate in gold and contracts, and it is not tamed by them. It only sleeps, and the market is only in charge until it wakes. Wealth is only power until the men with guns decide that it should be redistributed in their favour, and their agreement to forego this only holds if you can create more wealth than they could otherwise take. Europe’s leaders are now relearning at their cost these lessons their predecessors could have taught them for free. Once you are reliant on a foreign force for safety and a foreign power for prosperity, you are no longer completely sovereign. All the cultural soft power and economic heft in the world won’t do you any good if your outsourced military decides it can insist on more favourable terms than you are willing to provide.

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Britain, Defence, Government, Military, Politics, Society

Strategic Defence Review: Falls far short of being “war ready”

DEFENCE

THE UK GOVERNMENT has unveiled its long-awaited Strategic Defence Review (SDR) with great fanfare. Headed by former NATO chief George Robertson, it has been presented as a “root and branch review” of our military policy, and points the way to “a new era for defence”.

How pitiful then that the announcement has been overshadowed by the Defence Secretary quibbling over how much the Government is willing to spend. Just days ago, John Healey declared there was “no doubt” the UK would hit its target of spending 3 per cent of GDP (from the current 2.3 per cent) on defence by 2034, and promised a “certain decade of rising defence spending”. But that commitment now seems less than cast iron, as Healey has retreated to the language of “aims” and “ambitions” when referring to the target.

If he didn’t know how much he’s spending immediately prior to the SDR then what confidence can we have in any of his and Starmer’s promises? It betrays a disarray at the heart of defence, for the Defence Secretary’s main job is to get the money right.

That aside, some of the review’s proposals that have been in the public domain for a while are welcome – in particular, the revelation that the Government will build six new munitions factories, given that our industrial capacity has been depleted for decades.

Supplying arms to Ukraine since 2022 has severely diminished our stocks. Expanding home-grown munitions manufacturing will allow us to replenish our stores and reduce our reliance on the US and Germany. And the jobs it will create, including hundreds of highly skilled roles, can only be a good thing.

The Government’s decision to build up to 12 attack submarines as part of the AUKUS programme run by Australia, the UK and US will also create thousands of jobs. Questions remain, however, on just how many of these submarines will fall under the command of the Royal Navy or go to the Royal Australian Navy. Any expansion of our conventionally armed, nuclear-powered submarine fleet must also be matched by investment in recruiting and retraining personnel, as the service desperately struggles to man its fleet as it is.

It also appears that the Government is finally taking seriously the possibility of the UK coming under ballistic missile attack, with the review pledging to introduce new defence “shields”. While an Israel-style Iron Dome system to intercept long-range aerial attacks sounds justified, it would be prohibitively expensive to envelop the whole of the British Isles. Nonetheless we do need much more than the nothing we have today – namely, missile defences over key strategic targets like government buildings, airfields, and manufacturing hubs.

Yet, the announcement of 7,000 new British-built “missiles” is concerning if that number also includes attack drones, as Healey has indicated. If actual missiles turn out to be a small proportion of this total, such a move will hardly jangle nerves in Moscow or Beijing. The Russians continue to launch hundreds of drones and missiles at Ukraine most nights and China has over 10,000 missiles ready to fire.

And when it comes to drones, what type are we investing in? The Houthi rebels in Yemen have made light work of taking out the US’s £22million MQ-9 Reaper drones, downing six of them in the last three months.

We need to expand and diversify our stocks, training soldiers to operate lightweight, cheap drones, in particular, which have proved so nimble and deadly above the steppes of Ukraine.

So, while there is much to welcome and applaud in this review, there is also much more to be done. Elsewhere, reports have emerged that the Government is in highly sensitive talks to buy F35A fighter jets, which can carry nuclear bombs.

This would broaden our nuclear deterrent beyond our four Vanguard-class submarines but would also tie us to yet more US technology. The warplane can use only the B61-12 bomb – stocks of which are strictly controlled by the Pentagon.

Nor would the jet, which needs a longer runway to take off, be compatible with the Royal Navy’s two aircraft carriers – so the flight decks of HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales will remain embarrassingly bare. And we are still shamefully unable to train our own pilots. The current Hawk T2 training aircraft is so unreliable that the RAF is sending new pilots overseas to earn their wings. A replacement is urgently needed.

On the ground, our armoured personnel carriers lack anti-tank systems, making them little more than battlefield taxis. The troops they carry will also be dangerously exposed on any future frontline because they have virtually no air cover, due to so few aircraft, pilots and drones.

The latest hi-tech kit and equipment is always welcome but it’s useless without the personnel to put it to use in action. One critical thing the Ukraine war has taught us is that troop numbers are important – and we seriously need more recruits in every branch of the Armed Forces.

Healey is expected to set a long-term target for increasing the size of the Army, but some suspect that increase will largely come from a mooted “Home Guard” force, which will be established to protect domestic infrastructure, such as nuclear power plants.

If the review fails to commit us to expand the Army to at least 100,000 full-time soldiers (up from just 73,000), we will remain incapable of prosecuting a land offensive in eastern Europe were Russia to invade a NATO ally, at a time when the US is retreating from the European theatre.

Given the current budgetary constraints, it is unlikely the SDR will get the UK anywhere close to being “war ready”. The financial resources just aren’t available.

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Britain, China, Defence, Government, Military, National Security, Politics, United Nations, United States

Chagos deal risks the UK’s nuclear deterrent

CHAGOS ISLANDS

BRITAIN’S nuclear deterrent would be at risk from Chinese interference if the Prime Minister capitulates over the Chagos Islands.

A covert satellite system used to direct British and US nuclear missiles would be compromised if Keir Starmer signs off a deal with China-friendly Mauritius, it is feared.

The UK is currently locked in negotiations, led by Attorney General Lord Hermer and National Security Adviser Jonathan Powell, over handing over the strategically important islands in the Indian Ocean following a UN ruling.

The archipelago, controlled by the UK for more than two centuries, is home to the joint UK-US Diego Garcia military base. Britain is set to pay billions to Mauritius to lease the base back for 99 years under the terms of the deal.

But concerns have been raised that the UK’s system for coordinating nuclear missiles relies on connection points on the Diego Garcia base. To function properly, these “nodes” require physical protection and British control of the island’s electromagnetic spectrum.

However, the deal includes a clause saying other countries could also use the spectrum, from which Mauritius could profit.

This could offer Beijing a gateway to jamming the highly classified Automated Digital Network System 3 (ADNS 3), which is shared by the Royal Navy and the US Navy, and, which crucially, is part of the “Nuclear Firing Chain” (NFC). The deal would enhance UK national security, but without it, Britain would lose access to the spectrum. The future operation of the base without a deal would clearly be at risk.

Nonetheless, critics suggest that the government’s arguments are totally fabricated. They say that the islands are far more important than just this and the potential threat to our operations from a no deal is a total fiction from the pen of the Cabinet Office – and, by extension, the human rights law firm, Leigh Day.

Lord Hermer was a go-to barrister for Leigh Day before his appointment as Attorney General last year and he has been accused of a deference to international law over domestic needs.

Leigh Day is currently representing asylum seekers who claim they were trapped on the Chagos Islands after being rescued at sea by the Royal Navy. In 2019, the International Court of Justice ruled that Britain’s continued administration of the islands was unlawful.

Despite the UK ignoring the ruling, it was subsequently ratified by the UN General Assembly, which found the islands rightfully belonged to Mauritius. Sir Ben Wallace, a former defence secretary, said: “Many of the UN judges who made the flawed ruling come from totalitarian states including China.

“Is the PM really going to put their opinions before that of Britain’s security? Diego Garcia is British and must remain so.”

And, MP Tom Tugendhat said that in his former role of security minister, he had seen the advice on the implications of the deal, but the version being presented to the public was “nonsense”.

The settlement could also mean that the Royal Navy could be prevented from entering a buffer zone which Mauritius intends to set up around the islands.

Without any protection from Western navies, there is heightened fear that China could get close enough to the sensitive military facilities.

It is known that ADNS 3 provides assured tactical wide area networking between ships and shore around the world to support full battlespace connectivity.

Britain’s nuclear threat is carried by the Royal Navy’s bomber submarines. Any breakdown of communications or hostile interception of messages which are part of the NFC, or any other breach, would mean Britain losing its nuclear deterrent.

This is a highly technical matter, involving a lot of classified systems, which, according to critics, is being overlooked by government lawyers.

This part of the world is key to China’s expansionist agenda, and any deal with the UK would appear to facilitate that. These systems rely on guarantees around the security of Diego Garcia.

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