Defence digest: SDR round-up, Finland and nuclear weapons
A compendium of views on the Strategic Defence Review, and two other, related items of defence news which should not be swamped by the main event
Launched in a shipyard
It has been very much a “defence” week, even—I assume—for most normal people who don’t follow the subject avidly and, understandably, know little and care less about the differences between an F-35A and an F-35B (unfortunately, this week, it’s important). The government’s long-awaited Strategic Defence Review was published on Monday, though there was little to surprise, as ministers had disgracefully plastered the highlights of the review across media events rather than announce its contents to Parliament first.
I am old enough and world-weary enough to know that this is not new, nor the habits of only one government or party. Ministers have been “pre-briefing” policy announcements, especially to secure coverage in the Sunday papers, for years, decades. I understand why they do it. On the other hand, it is wrong. It is a gross discourtesy to the House of Commons, and the Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, was right to make his dissatisfaction explicit to ministers on Monday. The response of the Leader of the House, Lucy Powell, was unacceptable: the government either thinks it has done nothing wrong, or, more likely, doesn’t care.
The Shadow Leader of the House, Jesse Norman, did the right thing in submitting an Urgent Question and forcing Powell to defend the government’s actions. Of course there was an element of seeking partisan advantage: these are party politicians, for goodness’s sake. I very much doubt that ministers will mend their ways, but the criticisms needed to be made and Norman made them. I wrote an essay here on parliamentary control of the armed forces, and suggested that the government should remember that it is only with the annual consent of Parliament that it is even allowed to maintain a standing army, and the money it spends on defence is authorised by Parliament.
(Powell is said to be ambitious. God help us. She replaced the able and friendly Thangham Debbonaire as Shadow Leader of the House in September 2023 and was very much a retrograde step. Some readers may recall that I attended a speech she gave at the Institute for Government in May 2024 and wrote about it, concluding that “the thinness of Powell’s offering and the scarcity of concrete proposals is disappointing”. Ironically, she complained with righteous indignation about the government making policy announcements to the media rather than to Parliament. Imagine that. As Leader of the House she chairs the cabinet committee on Parliamentary Business and Legislation; I will let you judge whether you think that is going well or badly.)
The actual launch of the review, performed by Sir Keir Starmer, took place in a shipyard, at BAE Systems in Govan, which builds the Type 26 or City-class frigates for the Royal Navy. The first ship in this class, HMS Glasgow, was recently formally named by the Princess of Wales. The shipyard traces its roots back to 1864 when marine engineers Randolph, Elder & Co. purchased the site: the company became John Elder & Co., then Fairfield Shipbuilding & Engineering Co. and briefly Fairfield (Glasgow) Ltd before being merged in 1968 into Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, home of the famous “work-in” led by Jimmy Reid in 1971; it became Govan Shipbuilders, was subsumed into British Shipbuilders, bought by Norwegian group Kværner and finally acquired by the newly constituted BAE Systems Marine Limited in 1999.
I know that Govan will have been chosen for the launch to emphasise the economic benefits of the SDR and the Labour government more broadly to Glasgow and Scotland. The next election for the Scottish Parliament is now less than a year away, and Scottish Labour is struggling, around 14 per cent behind the SNP in the opinion polls, despite the fact that Labour won 35 per cent of the vote to the SNP’s 30 per cent at last July’s general election and gave the Nationalists a drubbing in terms of MPs returned. That does not require intense political acuity. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help thinking it was somehow symbolic of the Prime Minister’s leaden, zest-free literalism that he chose to launch a report literally in a shipyard. He is a man of heavy-handed metaphor.
Covering the Strategic Defence Review
It has therefore been a busy week. On Sunday, my colleagues from Defence On The Brink and I discussed what we knew about the SDR at that point, which turned out to be most of it, on our regular Sunday morning podcast. I then wrote articles for The Spectator on the row over whether the government was committed to spending three per cent of GDP on defence, the lack of actual strategy in the soi disant Strategic Defence Review and the overall sense of a thin document with few concrete commitments and a lot of wishful thinking. In CapX, I pointed out that the Prime Minister’s much-heralded increase in defence spending announced in February was now being overtaken by events as NATO looks likely to agree a new target of five per cent of GDP at this month’s summit in The Hague; I had argued last month that transforming the armed forces would need more than just additional resources, but that 2.5 per cent of GDP was inadequate. My colleague Philip Ingram also addressed the confusion over defence spending in The Daily Mail.
Other issues
If the SDR were not enough, I was pleased to be able to contribute an article to The Spectator on the role and accountability, or lack of it, of the National Security Adviser, Jonathan Powell. The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Pat McFadden, as the senior minister in the Cabinet Office is currently preventing Powell from giving evidence to the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy. This is a very harmful decision which I hope McFadden will reverse, and procedurally it is unsupportable. I had criticised the government’s attitude in an essay in March, and as I said then, I had a small role in the team in Parliament which set up the Joint Committee. Expectations were low, for various reasons, but it has far exceeded them and performed some very useful scrutiny work. Ultimately, if it cannot scrutinise the government’s senior national security official, that diminishes its effectiveness and the degree to which the public can feel that matters of national security, often secretive and shadowy, are being overseen by someone. I explored the danger of this in a piece for the British Foreign Policy Group.
I also wrote an article for The Hill about the planned rearmament of the Bundeswehr, which will be enormously challenging even with the huge new resources unlocked. There were two good items in The Spectator on the same subject, one by Katja Hoyer on the absence and even rejection of a martial culture within the Bundeswehr, and the other by Lisa Haseldine examining the inevitability of conscription.
As if this was not enough excitement, it emerged, though there has been no official confirmation yet, that Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, Chief of the Air Staff, will succeed Admiral Sir Tony Radakin as Chief of the Defence Staff later this year. I had looked at the possible candidates, and Knighton’s appointment is not a surprise. There will be more consideration of the new professional head of the armed forces in an article I’ve written for The Spectator which will appear at the weekend. Suffice to say, it must have been a difficult choice, Knighton has some very good qualities, but there are some issues at least to be considered as context.
Finns ain’t what they seem
It was announced this week, in what was inevitably a minor issue given the publication of the SDR, that the UK would send military liaison officers to assist the development of NATO’s Forward Land Forces Finland. NATO ministers agreed the establishment of this force in July last year, and in September Sweden agreed to become the framework nation for the enhanced presence. The two countries are, of course, the alliance’s newest member states, Finland acceding in April 2023 and Sweden in March 2024.
The Forward Land Forces are military units based in a number of the alliance’s eastern member states to increase the host nations’ capabilities. Apart from the new deployment to Finland, there are eight multinational battlegroups serving in this capacity, based in Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Slovakia. Participation is entirely voluntary and on a rotational basis, and the battlegroups are, as NATO describes it, “not identical; their sizes and compositions are tailored to specific geographic factors and threats”.
Finland has come into focus because of the positioning of Russian forces near the 833-mile border between the two countries. There are currently 30,000 Russian personnel along the border, a figure which Finnish military intelligence expects to increase to 50,000. Major-General Sami Nurmi, Deputy Chief of Staff, Strategy, at Defence Command, the joint headquarters of the Finnish Defence Forces, said:
They are changing structures and we are seeing moderate preparations when it comes to building infrastructure close to our borders, meaning that they will, once the war in Ukraine hopefully ends, start to bring back the forces that have been fighting in Ukraine, especially land forces… they are doing it in phases. I would say it is still moderate numbers. It’s not big construction, but in certain places building new infrastructure and preparing, bringing new equipment in. You also have to evaluate whether they are preparing to send more troops to Ukraine or preparing to build up their forces close to our border. But I guess they are doing both.
Finland’s military leadership does not claim Russian aggression is imminent. The Finns have long experience of co-existing tensely with its powerful and expansionist neighbour. However, the Finnish Defence Forces are taking precautionary action, given that Vladimir Putin has a track record of military incursions into and invasions of neighbouring countries.
The SDR describes its “NATO First” stance as involving “the UK leading within NATO and taking on more responsibility for European security”. The UK is the framework nation for Forward Land Forces in Estonia, which, combined with a contribution to the deployment in Poland, the Ministry of Defence dubs Operation Cabrit. The Ministry of Defence describes the presence of UK liaison officers in Finland as “part of our commitment to NATO”, and it is obviously intended to be taken as part of a whole.
We should exercise some caution here. The mission to Finland consists of three officers. It would perhaps be unfair to describe it as a token gesture, as the officers will no doubt make a contribution to Finland and Sweden’s development of the Forward Land Forces, but it is as much symbolic as practical. Given the fact that NATO is not formally at war with Russian but is engaged in a long bout of shadow boxing, symbolism matters.
However, “our commitment to NATO” depends on much more than three officers in Finland. As I pointed out in The Spectator in March, the United Kingdom is already struggling to fulfil its commitments to the alliance. Two years ago, the British component of the battlegroup in Estonia was 1,600 personnel, and at the NATO summit in Madrid, then-Defence Secretary Ben Wallace promised another 1,000 troops. This would have added up to a force which was the size of a small brigade, and it was to be led by a one-star headquarters. In fact, the UK presence has been reduced to around 900, the level it was at before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and most of its heavy armour has been withdrawn; one report suggested the battlegroup may now only have 10 Challenger 2 main battle tanks, and the last rotation saw the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards, an armoured reconnaissance regiment, hand over to the infantry of 1st Battalion, the Mercian Regiment.
Although the British Army was able to field more than 3,000 soldiers for May’s Exercise Hedgehog in Estonia, deploying the 4th Light Brigade Combat Team from the UK in less than 48 hours, the force elements from 1 Mercian were only 500 strong. The battalion’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Grant Brown, tried to put a brave face on it:
When you add this to the roughly 230 French troops, we’ve got a sizeable force package out here. This includes 19 Regiment Royal Artillery, the King’s Royal Hussars, 2 Medical Regiment and 26 Engineer Regiment. There’s a number of people that all come together and that’s essentially what a Battlegroup is. While 1 MERCIAN is the name, we simply form the core that brings a whole raft of capabilities around it.
The fundamental truth remains, however, that our combat forces in Estonia are smaller than they were two years ago, and the promised brigade-sized commitment is largely based in the UK. It may be able to deploy its combat forces to Estonia in 48 hours as part of a peacetime exercise; in a real crisis, 48 hours is a very long time.
The Strategic Defence Review talked a great deal about the UK’s commitment to NATO, which the Prime Minister and the Defence Secretary have described as nauseam as “ironclad”. The terminology is irrelevant. What matters is our strength on the ground where it matters. That has diminished in Estonia, and it is under question more broadly. Last September, the House of Lords International Relations and Defence Committee’s report, Ukraine: A wake-up call, concluded:
The evidence we heard points to the current size of the British Army being inadequate. While size is not the only measure of capability, we are concerned that the Army cannot, as currently constituted, make the expected troop contribution to NATO.
The core of the UK’s contribution to NATO in time of conflict is 3rd (UK) Division, with its headquarters at Picton Barracks, Salisbury. Yet Dr Jack Watling, Senior Research Fellow for Land Warfare at RUSI, made the case earlier this year that the division is, in terms of its claimed capacity, a fiction, and “in reality it would be doing well to put just one of the division’s three brigades onto the battlefield equipped and ready to fight”.
The SDR acknowledges many shortcomings in the armed forces’ current strength and capabilities. But that the Defence Secretary should flag the deployment of three officers to Finland and talk boldly of commitment and leadership within NATO cannot distract us from a number of hard truths: the armed forces cannot currently meet its commitments to the alliance, there are no plans in the SDR significantly to expand the size of the armed forces, and the guaranteed increase in expenditure is relatively modest, rapidly being left behind by events and already seems to have been split an alarming number of ways.
Nae nukes
As I mentioned above, the Prime Minister launched the Strategic Defence Review in Govan. Not only did this allow him to emphasise the economic benefits for Scotland, it also opened the door for an attack on the Scottish National Party. Starmer accused the SNP, which opposes nuclear weapons, of endangering national security.
At this time, of renewed threat and instability across Europe, the SNP’s position is to get rid of our nuclear deterrent, the single most important part of our capability, that has kept Scotland and the United Kingdom safe for many many, years. And at this moment, they renew their pledge to get rid of our nuclear deterrent. Imagine the effect that will have on the safety and security of the United Kingdom and of Scotland.
I have absolutely no brief for the SNP or the Scottish Government. I acknowledge an honourable and defensible stance in principle in the party’s long-standing opposition to nuclear weapons, and it is a simple if inconvenient fact that the United Kingdom’s nuclear deterrent is based solely in Scotland, at HM Naval Base Clyde. The SNP also opposed membership of NATO until its party conference in October 2012, when members voted 426-332 to follow the leadership of then-First Minister Alex Salmond in supporting a resolution in favour of an independent Scotland remaining a member, or seeking membership of, NATO.
However, as I proposed in The Spectator in March 2024, the SNP maintains a fundamentally dishonest stance on these two matters. It now embraces NATO membership and claims that Scotland would be “a good global citizen”, while at least in public expecting that the UK’s ballistic missile submarines could be removed from Scotland in the “most expeditious manner possible” without any negative consequences. That is simply not realistic (apart from anything else, the Vanguard-class submarines do not have anywhere else to go, as neither HMNB Portsmouth nor HMNB Devonport have the facilities and location to accommodate the submarines and their nuclear warheads). Like many separatist movements, the SNP relies on the unchallengeable but improbable assumption that everything will be better after independence and every situation will be resolved to the maximum advantage of the fledgling state.
Starmer was right to skewer the SNP on a recent absurdity: Scottish Enterprise, the state economic development agency, has reportedly indicated it will not deliver an expected £2.5 million grant to help create a specialist submarine welding facility on the River Clyde planned by Rolls-Royce Submarines, in partnership with the University of Strathclyde and the Malin Group. The reason is a long-standing policy of the SNP not to use public money for the “manufacture of weapons or munitions”, and Scottish Enterprise has concluded that the new facility, because it would contribute eventually to the production of submarines, falls within this definition. Equally, the Scottish National Investment Bank does not invest in companies which “are primarily engaged in the manufacture of munitions or weapons”. Rolls-Royce, which intended to provide £11 million worth of equipment for the new facility, has stated that without the public investment, the project is unsustainable.
There are two points here. The first is that Rolls-Royce claims, with some justification, that it is not a manufacturer of “weapons or munitions” but rather is involved in the production of nuclear-powered submarines; further, although the Trident nuclear deterrent is carried by Vanguard-class submarines powered by Rolls-Royce nuclear reactors, that is not intrinsic to their status as ballistic missile submarines, and the Astute-class attack submarines, which carries conventional weapons in the form of Spearfish torpedoes and Tomahawk cruise missiles, are also nuclear-powered.
I don’t think Rolls-Royce is being Jesuitical or splitting hairs on this point. It is a company which produces a range of critical products for the defence market, but that does not make it a manufacturer of weapons or munitions. Is Supacat a munitions manufacturer because the British Army uses the Jackal and the All Terrain Mobile Platform? Is MAN Truck and Bus also in that category because of its partnership with Rheinmetall in Rheinmetall MAN Military Vehicles? Are Airbus and Zodiac Milpro?
More broadly, however, how on earth can the SNP pose as a potential party of government in an independent state while refusing to fund the manufacture of weapons and munitions? It is taken as read that the armed forces of an independent Scotland would be much smaller than those of the UK and would have very different and probably more limited ambitions and priorities; but it would still (presumably) have some kind of defence force which would be equipped with weapons and munitions. I was Clerk of the Scottish Affairs Committee in the period leading up to the 2014 referendum on independence and we produced a series of reports exploring the potential practicalities of independence; one of these, A Defence Force for Scotland—A Conspiracy of Optimism? (November 2013), looked at the possible shape and size of such a force.
Unless an independent Scotland were to adopt the morally dubious stance of buying arms from other countries but refusing on principle to manufacture any such items domestically, the SNP’s current position is deeply misleading and falsely pious, taking advantage of the union it seeks to dissolve as cover for its spotless conscience.
This was all a deep well of party political knockabout for the Prime Minister and I don’t blame him for a moment for using it. I do, however, become somewhat uneasy as his straightforward equivalence between opposition to nuclear weapons and cavalier disregard for national security. Economic benefits—Starmer said the outcomes of the SDR would protect 25,000 jobs in Scotland—are not in themselves an overwhelming justification for the possession of nuclear weapons, and the First Minister, John Swinney, is perfectly entitled to adhere to his current view that nuclear weapons are immoral and ineffective in deterrent terms, and that the enormous cost of Trident could be better spent on conventional forces and weapons (though not, presumably, by the SNP…).
I don’t share Swinney’s views. I disagree that nuclear weapons are inherently and especially immoral (Lord Biggar has written a very lucid and thoughtful exposition of the case against their ‘immorality’ this week), I am not in favour of unilateral nuclear disarmament and I am not convinced that the deterrent effect of our possession of nuclear weapons is illusory, though I have for some time harboured a degree of scepticism. But his views are valid and he is entitled to hold them, something which the Prime Minister does not seem to accept.
No leading politician since the 1980s, and perhaps no Labour politician ever, has attached himself or herself to the totemic power of nuclear weapons in the way that Sir Keir Starmer has. There are times when he seems a positive enthusiast for the deterrent rather than simply accepting it as an unfortunate, expensive but unavoidable fact of life. Perhaps, as someone who reached maturity in the late 1970s and early 1980s, he still feels the sting of left-wing politicians being attacked for a lack of patriotism—at the first general election in which he was entitled to vote, in June 1983, the Labour Party was, let us remember, in favour of the immediate cancellation of Trident, a refusal to host American cruise missiles and rapid negotations for the removal of all nuclear bases in the UK, as well as withdrawal from the European Economic Community, active dialogue with the Soviet Union and China and the maintenance of NATO only as an instrument of détente, anticipating its eventual dissolution. (This was the manifesto which Gerald Kaufman is alleged to have described as “the longest suicide note in history”.)
I am uneasy about the black-and-white vehemence of the Prime Minister’s messaging, as I am deeply uneasy about his seeming acceptance, and that of many European leaders, that we should build up a substantial tactical nuclear capability. His tone on Monday was unsettling, and it did not fit the magnitude or nuance of the issue. Anyone who suggests that theirs is the only sensible, practical or moral view on any subject should give us pause. Hominem unius libri timeo, as St Thomas Aquinas is reputed to have said.