Robert Gates’s attack on UK military is vague and opportunistic
The real question is not whether the UK is spending enough on defence, but whether it is spending too much
During a high-profile visit to Nato headquarters in Brussels in 2011, Robert Gates rebuked America’s allies for failing to spend enough on defence and letting the burden fall on the US. He excepted the UK, a loyal US ally in Iraq and Afghanistan, from his biting criticism that day.
But no longer. Gates, touting his memoirs, told the BBC on Thursday that the Conservative government’s cuts in defence meant Britain’s military capability had been seriously diminished, putting in doubt the UK’s long-running role as America’s closest defence partner.
Gates, who served as defence secretary under both George W Bush and Barack Obama, told Radio 4’s Today programme: “With the fairly substantial reductions in defence spending in Great Britain, what we’re finding is that it won’t have full-spectrum capabilities and the ability to be a full partner as they have been in the past.”
He words had an impact because they echoed a speech by the British chief of defence staff, General Sir Nicholas Houghton, last month when he warned that Britain could be left with a hollowed-out force.
Under government plans, the UK is to cut the total number of military personnel by around 17,000 by 2015: the navy by 5,000 to about 30,000, the army by around 7,000 to 95,000 and the air force by around 5,000 to 33,000.
A major problem with Gates’s critique is that “full-spectrum” defies definition. It is a vague, informal phrase roughly meaning the ability to fight on land, in the air and at sea. But what does it mean beyond that?
David Cameron, responding to concerns from the military, claimed that the UK had a “pretty full-spectrum capability”.
In reality, the UK ceased to have such capability long ago. It could not have fought in Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya on its own or in partnership with European partners. US air power and strategic command were essential in all cases. The only fully British intervention in recent history was an extremely limited, though effective one, the UK despatch of forces in 2000 to stop Sierra Leone’s capital falling into rebel hands.
Gates failed to mention in his BBC interview that defence cuts are also happening elsewhere in Europe. In 2009, while US defence secretary, Gates presided over some of the biggest military cuts in recent US history, slashing big prestige projects. The budget had doubled under Bush but a war-weary, recession-hit American public was no longer prepared to back it. Gates dressed it up as a switch away from big projects to smaller counter-insurgency ones, but it was still a major cut in defence.
Peter Quentin, a research fellow at the London-based defence thinktank the Royal United Services Institute, cautioned that Gates’s remarks should be seen in the context of his book launch. “This is the next leg in Mr Gates’s book tour, so it is no surprise he is pushing the buttons that will get media …read more
