Anti-terrorism strategies: the case for thinking differently | Editorial

The response to 9/11 and jihadist terrorism has been massive, expensive and of debatable effectiveness

It is often said that generals always prepare to fight the last war, not the one that they will actually face. A collective shrugging of shoulders in the Ministry of Defence about the public’s appetite for foreign conflict, reported by the Guardian, would seem to bear that out. The public mood is clearly that the Iraq war was a failure and that the Afghanistan campaign is going nowhere. That jaundiced view boiled over in the rejection of military intervention in Syria last summer. It hardly seems likely to be reversed by the Chilcot report on Iraq. So it is not surprising that senior sources in the MoD should therefore conclude that the public lacks enthusiasm for, and would perhaps not tolerate, British soldiers joining with the Americans in a similar intervention any time soon. The real surprise would be if they had formed any other view.

There is no doubting that the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan help to make life difficult for the generals in other ways, too. The public’s mood coincides with a long period of public spending cuts. The Treasury sniffs the doubting political breeze, and therefore sees the chance to make savings in a department with a relatively large budget – £40bn this year – and relatively little prospect of new large spending. On Thursday the defence secretary announced another 1,505 armed forces redundancies, mainly in the army, the fourth such announcement since the coalition took office. For all that, few would bet against further cuts after the general election.

But it won’t do for the politicians and service chiefs simply to blame the public for the fact that they must operate in reduced circumstances. A significant part of the problem the MoD faces is of its own devising. It is not the public that has decided to press ahead with the Trident nuclear weapons replacement programme – official cost £15-20bn. Nor is it the voters who are responsible for the fact that the UK is building two new aircraft carriers – official cost currently £6.2bn. These are choices made at the top, and they inevitably constrain other defence spending options. Add in the ministry’s unenviable but justified reputation for wasteful spending and there can be little dispute that the MoD is the author of its own fate, whether for good or ill. If the public shares some responsibility for these questionable priorities, that is ascribable to the lack of serious political debate about UK defence options rather than to anything else.

One of the threads that winds through this unsatisfactory story is Britain’s often blundering response to the genuine external and internal security challenge posed to this country, among others, by the 9/11 and other terror attacks. But it was not just the military response that miscued. It was the domestic security response, too. On Thursday a report by …read more