Military options: sense about defence | Editorial

Question posed by Robert Gates – whether the UK now has the ability to act alongside the US in the Middle East or Asia – is not the only or even the main one that needs to be answered

The former US defence secretary Robert Gates, a man with a newly published memoir to sell, set off a grade one political alert in London on Thursday.

He did so by saying that British military capability has been dangerously eroded because of government defence cuts, with the result that the UK was no longer in a position to be a full-spectrum defence partner of the United States.

Mr Gates’s publishers will have been delighted by the response he provoked. David Cameron quickly scrambled to insist that Mr Gates had got it wrong, that Britain has the fourth largest defence budget in the world and that the UK remained a first-class player in defence.

Sensing a government embarrassment, Labour weighed in by questioning Mr Cameron’s commitment to defence and charging that Britain’s ability to play a world role was being jeopardised.

The trouble with Thursday’s defence alert is that it was about the wrong question.

It is high time that Britain, and Europe, had a serious, effective and public strategic examination of defence needs and affordable options for the mid-21st century.

But the question posed by Mr Gates – whether the UK now possesses the ability to act alongside the United States in the Middle East or Asia – is not the only or even the main one that needs to be answered, let alone answered in a way so redolent of the cold war.

The question that needs answering is how Europe and Britain can best defend ourselves against the threats of today and tomorrow, and how we can play an appropriate military role in the world.

Our problem, as Thursday showed, is that we struggle as a nation to have that debate in a sustained and sensible way.

To do him justice, Mr Gates has tried to get a serious debate going in the past. Three years ago, when he was still at the Pentagon, he chided Europe for cutting its defence spending and allowing the Nato defence burden to fall disproportionately on the US.

That wasn’t quite the right question either, but it certainly opened up the big issues affecting our part of the globe. How will 21st-century Europe defend itself? What should the defence relationship with the US be?

What is the best way of sharing defence responsibilities and acting in alliances?

And how can the necessary spending be justified and best managed when public service budgets are everywhere under threat, and likely to remain so for many years, and when the public is war-weary from the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan?

All these issues remain unresolved in Britain, as they do in many other Nato member states that spend far less of their GDP on defence – and even in the US too.

But a sensible debate must start by recognising some …read more