Justin

The Facts of Life ✳️ Britain has not invested properly in defence for almost 40 years. ✳️ While our nuclear deterrent is still the ultimate guarantor of UK security, the cost of it consumes a significant proportion of the total defence budget, leaving too little for other priorities. ✳️ If we don’t invest in conventional capabilities, we risk nuclear weapons being our first and only response to unprovoked aggression. ✳️ Nobody wins a nuclear war. Let me repeat that: nobody wins a nuclear war. So neither we nor Putin dare risk using them. ✳️ The prospect of Armageddon is what makes nuclear weapons such an effective deterrent. ✳️ We must continue to invest in them for the sake of parity with potential adversaries. ✳️ But something new has happened. Those who possess significant conventional weapons have realised that they can use them with impunity. This is what Putin has done. ✳️ He realises that we won’t start WW3 over Ukraine. So he can use his conventional forces to seize territory bit by bit. ✳️ If we want to deter further Putin land grabs in Europe, we must stand up to him by boosting our conventional forces. ✳️ We don’t need to go crazy, but right now we are unwilling to make-up for decades of atrophy. The roof of our home has gaping holes in it. We must fix them. ✳️ What makes this an urgent priority is that It’s unclear what direction American foreign policy is headed and whether we can rely on US support in Europe. ✳️ Meanwhile, any peace deal in Ukraine that ends the war on Putin’s terms will allow him to re-group and re-arm. ✳️ Therefore, we must prepare ourselves for this and for the possibility that we may need to defend ourselves alone.

Quite a few "experts" are saying that regenerating the British Army in line with what our allies' and partners' are doing to restore combat power is unaffordable and therefore unnecessary. This is like deciding not to repair a gaping hole in your roof - bloody stupid. What we need to do is to understand why modernisation has become so expensive. It's actually very easy to explain. There are three universal elements related to the production of anything and everything. Quality, Speed, and Cost. You can only ever have two of these variables. In other words, if you want high quality delivered quickly, it will be expensive. If you want it cheap and fast, it will be rubbish. But, If you want high quality delivered cheaply, it will take a long time to arrive. The European members of NATO have adopted a different approach. They have been buying gold-plated kit at a top dollar price delivered at snail’s pace for the last 30 years. It’s part of a strategy through which they have adopted exquisite capabilities to compensate for reduced mass. So we have ended end-up with very expensive armies that have no staying power. New MBTs are costing between $20 and $30 million each. But even if they cost half this, it would still be too much. Such pricing is the result of a defence industry that has been allowed to decay. We need tanks that cost as near to $1 million as possible. This is why Ukrainians are cutting about in MRAPs and using them to operate FPV drones and loitering munitions. If we want to reduce the cost of regeneration, then we need industry to scale-up production dramatically. Not just for tanks, but for everything. This means multiple countries need to order several thousand units between them. We need multi-national programmes. We need to build Sherman tanks not Tigers. With or without cheaper MBTs and IFVs, low cost MRAPs will become much more common on future battlefields. But I think there’s a much bigger problem than affordability and this the reluctance of successive government’s to fund any kind of increase in defence spending despite the growing seriousness of the threats we face. With Trump’s re-election, Putin will likely get a peace deal on his terms. This will allow him to re-group, re-arm and have another crack in 4 or 5 years time. China and North Korea will most likely help to re-equip him. Putin will attempt to re-create the Army he had at the beginning of the Ukraine war. I don’t think he could do more within this timeframe. And I don’t think he would be successful with less. This time, most of the effort will go into resilience, which means logistics, industrial alignment and producing missiles, munitions, and drones in massive quantities. And he will have learnt from the many mistakes his Army has made in 2022. Between Poland, Germany, France, the UK, and Italy, we could potentially assemble enough mass to offer a significant deterrent effect to Putin. But doing this requires each of us to step-up and invest in defence. At the moment, only Poland is doing its bit. Putin will not attack if we rapidly scale our land forces. But if we do nothing, we will convince him that it’s worth trying again.