Trident and stealth bombers, however powerful, no use against Isis
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Version 0 of 1. Let us pose three questions: what are the serious threats to Britain’s security, what are the most effective ways in dealing with them, and what are the most expensive weapons eating up an increasing proportion of the defence equipment budget? The biggest threat, according to ministers and security and intelligence chiefs, is violent Islamist extremism, manifest in its most horrific form by Isis, a group attracting many young Muslims from Britain and other west European countries. The other, linked, threat is from failed states or authoritarian regimes, prey to militant groups and the driver behind the rise of migrants and human traffickers in north Africa, notably Libya. The threats posed to Britain’s national security are exaggerated by ministers, spook chiefs, and the counter terrorism industry, for their own ends. But they do exist. Take Isis. “Bin Laden took great pains to deterritorialise jihad, as an important part of al-Qaida’s bid for universality”, says Alia Brahimi, in an essay in the first Armed Conflict Survey published this week by the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Bin Laden’s continued obsession with attacking the US is reflected in the documents discovered at his Abbottabad refuge and released this week by the American Director of National Intelligence. By contrast, Isis treated jihadism as a “state-building enterprise”, geared to capturing territory in Iraq and Syria, adds Brahimi. However, she adds, “the thrust of Isis is not exclusively inward. In important ways, Isis has brought different jihadist preoccupations under one umbrella, thus posing a combined threat to Middle Eastern society and state, and to the West”. Since there is no appetite in western capitals to send combat troops to fight Isis, and air strikes are having only a very limited impact, the only help the west can provide Iraqi forces, and Syrian “moderate” opposition forces are weapons and training. “Events in the Middle East matter to the UK. Jihadist-inspired terrorist threats within the UK have grown as a direct result of the war in Syria”, says Malcolm Chalmers in A Force for Order, title of his recent paper for the Royal United Services Institute. “Not least”, he continues, “the spread of conflict is leading to human suffering on a massive scale, and the UK has a moral responsibility to do what it can to help”. Chalmers adds that if the UK is serious about its military having a role in shaping local conflicts “it needs to be willing to take the calculated risk that the deployment of small numbers of personnel into dangerous countries can involve. It also needs to invest in the development of the new skill sets required - including linguistic, cultural and historical understanding”. Britain has offered ships and drones to help counter migration from Africa and human trafficking. But as an internal EU document warns, “militias present a robust threat to EU ships and aircraft operasting in the vicinity...” Moreover, “kinetic action along Libyan coasts might oblige smugglers to shift their tactics and change their departure sites, eventually relocating them in neighbouring countries”. The threat must be attacked at the root cause, UK defence officials and EU policy makers, agree. That is, the dire political and economic situations in the home countries of the refugees and migrants. (The EU document says that according to Frontex, the union’s border agency, since the start of the year, 1401 Gambians, 1208 Senegalese, and 1107 Somalis, accounted for the largest number of “illegal” crossings to Italy and Malta.) As for the threat posed by Putin’s Russia, Chalmers, like other commentators, refer to “hybrid warfare”, something Max Boot, in an essay in the IISS Armed Conflict Survey, points out, has been going on at least since the Peloponnesian War. Putin’s Russia, Chalmers notes, has devoted considerable resources to developing “sub-conventional” capabilities - “special forces for political subversion and sabotage in neighbouring states, offensive cyber-capabilities designed to acquire industrial secrets and take down military and civilian infrastructure, and large intelligence operations in foreign capitals”. Chalmers stresses: “Countering these efforts, often through the further development of the UK’s own sub-conventional capabilities, is one of the most important tasks of security planners”. So, against this background, what is the use of the new fleet of Trident submarines equipped with nuclear-armed ballistic missiles, a project that will take up an increasing share of Britain’s defence budget over the next decade at the expense of surface ships and other more relevant, usable, military capabilities and more credible deterrents. The two large aircraft carriers being built in Scotland for the Royal Navy are more likely to serve as expensive platforms for drones, helicopters, special forces, and commandos, than scores of F-35 Joint Strike Aircraft, still dogged by technical problems and whose cost has been soaring, that the carriers were intended for. “Neither Putin’s Russia nor any of the competing jihadists of the Middle East”, Chalmers wisely concludes in his essay, “have anything like the ability that the Soviet Union had to threaten the security of the West”. And whether David Cameron and his Euro-sceptics like it or not, Britain’s armed forces, and diplomats, are likely to find themselves more not less, engaged with their EU partners. |