Can Britain, will Britain, fight another war?

• UK government deeply sensitive to suggestion country not the military power it once was
• Devastating critique of UK approach to war
• Debate badly needed before next year’s new defence review

After my return following a three-week break, the first item in the diary was the latest Military Balance report from the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, the IISS.

It was, as expected, a measured tome. It pointed to the continuing cuts in western defence budgets, including Britain’s, and rising military expenditure in the Asia-Pacific region, notably China.

IISS experts stressed that while Chinese military spending might equal that of the US in the mid-2030s, it would take much longer for China to have anything like the military capabilities the US currently possesses.

However, the IISS report also suggested that Saudi Arabia had overtaken the UK on the defence spending stakes, leaving the Britain fifth in the world league table.

It touched a raw nerve.

The trouble is that in response to any suggestion that Britain is not the power it once was, David Cameron insists that the UK is a “first class player” – and has the fourth largest defence budget.

So anxious was the Ministry of Defence when it heard about the IISS report that it put out a statement questioning the accuracy of the figures saying they were merely estimates and were “heavily influenced” by exchange rate fluctuations.

“The reality”, insisted the MoD, was that the UK had “some of the finest, best-equipped and most deployable armed forces in the world,”, and a £160bn equipment plan would ensure they would remain “one of the most formidable fighting forces.”

Another reality, was expressed by Professor Malcolm Chalmers in the latest Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) Newsbrief. The UK “remains dependent on US support for all but the most limited expeditionary operations”, he says. And once combat troops leave Afghanistan, in the space of a couple of years “the UK will have gone from being one of the most operationally active of Nato’s major powers to being one of the least active”.

And this against the background of declining political appetite for military intervention as the recent Commons vote on Syria so dramatically demonstrated.

At least, General Sir Nick Houghton, the chief of defence staff, showed he very much got the point in his end of year lecture to RUSI.

The failure of British political leaders to develop clear policies based on a realistic assessment of the country’s role, and coherent strategies to back it up, is exposed in The Direction of War, by Hew Strachan, Chichele professor of the history of war at Oxford University.

Published by Cambridge University Press, the book is a timely and devastating critique. It describes how the west used war as an instrument of policy, and how Tony Blair (and George Bush) did not understand the nature of war.

“The rhetoric of the war on terror stepped in to the black hole created by the bankruptcy of strategic thought at the end of the cold war”, writes Strachan.

He adds: “By presenting terrorism …read more