Sir Keir Starmer must invest billions more in the military after decades of “over-reliance” on the United States allowed Britain to “neglect” its Armed Forces, an ex-Nato chief has warned.
Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, a former Nato secretary general, said Downing Street must “reassess” its “outdated and unhelpful” special relationship with the US.
He’s right, but I doubt it will happen. The thing the Americans really provide is lift and logistics. The actually important things in a full on war. And they’re expensive, really, really, expensive. No British government – I propose – would be willing to spend enough to provide lift and l;ogistics at the scale required. Nor would any other European govt.
Wish it were not so but feeding the lanyards is far more electorally important.
Quite true what you say, but it has always been a problem for Britain. In the past if large numbers needed transporting, then the military would requisition British flagged merchant vessels : ferries in the Great War, liners in the Second. Those ships now are registered in Panama or Nauru and can only be taken by force.
The army of 1918 was a formidable logistical behemoth, that had built up over the course of the war. I believe that the war effort had become an end in itself and that fighting was of secondary importance. The Central Powers would have been starved to submission in 1919. Allenby’s campaign and the Salonika front need have been the only active combat zones, both of which are also remarkable logistical efforts.
I think, though Britain today starts at such a degraded position after 30 years of misrule that we can barely count the batallions let alone brigades and divisions.
The military still lives cocooned in its Cold War role of protecting the Northern and Western flanks. It cannot extend into blue water. The RN’s ships can’t even operate in moderately warm water !
It wasn’t just the world wars, around 50 ships were requisitioned for the Falklands War, most notably QE2, Canberra and the ill fated Atlantic Conveyor.
About twenty for Op TELIC, too.
Having spent a fair bit of trouble-free time in the Gulf (including a cruise or two through Hormuz) on HM’s big grey war canoes, they can indeed operate in warm water.
The specific issue with the 45s was classic Treasury: impose a solution because it was politically expedient, ignore the technical advice, then blame the military for the consequences.
The designers and the Navy wanted simple gas turbines, the WR-21s were imposed because they’d be The Future Of Maritime Propulsion and would dominate worldwide sales for half a century… now they’re six orphan ship sets that nobody else uses.
Oh, and did I mention taking out all the shore-based testing because “the technology is already mature” (it wasn’t) and limiting the operating temperatures because “Gulf operations are out of scope for future planning” (they weren’t and aren’t)? The Navy fought those, the Navy were told that the Secretary of State had decided what was best. (That was “Buff” Hoon…)
This is what you get when you let PPE graduates in Whitehall meddle with detailed hardware design…
Private Eye was very anti Falklands War, but it was prescient about the future when it said the flagship was HMS Hermeseta, because it dissolved in hot water.
ha yes …..RN required fuel specs notoriously a minefield for the bunker suppliers.
We should probably invest more in defence – but first we need to work out why in absolute terms Israel spends less than us (more as a percentage of GDP) and has a superior military to us.
The threat of being nuked by insane towelheads concentrates the mind wonderfully.
Because it only has one job, no overseas commitments, limited ceremonial commitments and doesn’t need to buy-out civil disaster preparedness. It also has interior lines of supply and logistics, and very limited distances to travel to front lines. It’s a very poor comparitor.
Fair point, although I’m still not convinced that we are getting what we pay for.
No, you certainly aren’t.
The pool of trained people from conscription may also help.
Also – the “front” is right there, in the pizza shop across the road last week, not a thousand miles away across the sea.
But I’ll bet that its equivalent of the MOD doesn’t have more chair-polishers than active military personnel.
I know a Captain in the RN. Good bloke, but he’s a career naval lawyer FFS.
All sound points.
Plus, we’d have interior lines of supply if our armed forces were defending our borders from, er, boarders.
Because they have been attacked numerous times by their neighbours and every generation has served, including their women.
When I was you there were lots of old and not very old men who had been visibly scared by war and we had fathers and grand fathers who had served. Apart from my Falklands, service which was before he was born, I don’t think my son has any connection to military service. To his generation wars are in history books.
Hence luxury beliefs.
I don’t think it’s about luxury beliefs, at least on his and his friends behalf, its just that WW1 means as much to them as Agincourt. Maybe they know more about WW1 but that’s because there’s more emphasis on teaching it.
I think the answer to this is that government will absolutely piss money away when something isn’t really that necessary. Because if it’s necessary, the public will get real mad about it failing. There’s also drive within that the people doing necessary things care.
When you’ve got the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe breathing down your neck, you can’t do wanky job creation projects that barely work like the F-35. You don’t make sure there’s a 3rd bathroom for trannies on the ship. You don’t make sure that there’s vegan food, or that there’s been an environmental assessment on the paperclips. You cut the crap and bomb the bastards.
If you narrow down the military to defending Britain from a proper fucking war, most of it is just fannying around, wars we can lose like Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine and Sierra Leone. Why are we any more involved in those wars than Switzerland? Because Sierra Leone used to be British? Yeah, that was 1961. You fucked off. Wanted out. Why are we still paying for the ex-wife’s car to be repaired?
So because it’s fannying around stuff, you can have a lot of waste like sending Jocastas out to Afghanistan to talk to women about Marcel Duchamp. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdrvpSfJM1w
It’s why I don’t support more military spending. Our huge military was about nicking Aquitaine and defending the Empire. Which is gone. It’s purpose should be defending the mainland, defending trade, and the overseas territories like Tristan de Cuhna. Although, is anyone particularly bothered about expending blood and treasure to get penguins?
When you’ve got the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe breathing down your neck
Luftwaffe is part of Wehrmacht.
/pendandtry
Good points, personally I’d bankrupt Putin via fracking rather that have more weapons, but sadly that’s not an option.
Well yes. Why do you think he gave Gerhard Schroeder a nice job at Gazprom?
I will never understand why Trump is accused of being a Russian agent but not Merkel nor Schroeder.
Because the average anti-Trumper has never even heard of Schroeder. It’s all just vibes and signalling. Most people talking politics are pretty shallow about it. Trump is just Palpatine. All the stuff about detaining people, Obama did that too, but he was the cool dude.
It’s like people who on the one hand object to Thatch closing the pits, but also want green energy. Both are just “look what a nice person I am”.
I thought Merkel was more about political pressure? I’ve not seen anything suggesting the sort of corruption of Schroeder.
I don’t know if she were corrupt – but she did increase Europe’s dependency on Russian gas -after the invasion of Crimea.
Mandatory military service….. Including the females…
And Real Life™ giving plenty of opportunity to keep those skills at the surface because of rather unfriendly neighbours bent on eradicating you.
You *still* need professional specialists, but say…15-20% of your population able to actually use military toys means that you can have a *lot* of toys.. And use them pretty effectively.
As opposed to most of Europe nowadays where you basically need to put *everyone* through basic firearm safety and maintenance first before you even *start* thinking about giving someone an actual working gun.
Let alone work one of the mothballed pieces of older real equipment, which require this thing called “teamwork”.
I think you spend on defense, not invest. You buy a missile. Maybe you use it, in which case it’s a puff of smoke. Or you don’t. In which case it was a waste of money. There is a slight chance you might flog it. But not a big market for s/h missiles.
I disagree – there’s a huge market for second hand missiles.
Sadly its mostly people who want to buy the missile to shoot you with it;)
True. The Oz military sent most of our helicopters to SE Asia to assist after the Boxing Day tsunami in 2004. In the immediate aftermath, the key needs were transport that didn’t rely on roads and clean water. The US sent a carrier group which got ridiculed by the usual crowd (what are they going to do, bomb it? Idiots. )
A nuclear powered desalinisation plant and a floating nearby airbase turned out to be very helpful.
Point being, if it hadn’t been for the US pitching in, we couldn’t have done it. We don’t have the transport capacity either.
What we need is a virus cooked up in a lab that will wipe out a load of pensioners.
Er.
Thank you, Interested!!
And immediately skew the electorate to the left! Duh!
That was precisely my point. I am not part of the ‘we’ in my comment.
From 1951…..
Americans simultaneously resent the expenditure but love being top dog. If there were ever a competent European force of a size to rival the US a rival is what it would be. If not an active opponent. The world they imagine when ‘NATO steps up’ would turn out be a three player show, pretty much on the lines of 1984.
Well, there are also a lot of American military who see being posted in Europe as much more desirable than a lot of other places. So I suspect they’re not fighting very hard to close the bases there.
From my personal experience, Europe is a great place to live on an American salary.
Amen. 50+ years ago, on finishing US Air Force basic training, one of my squadron mates was handed orders to report to an air base in Alaska. He was a black man from Georgia. He was devasted. I remember it because he was a good guy; I hated seeing it done to him.
You used to need bodies in the Armed Forces. I’m not sure how many of our Uniparty settlers would want to fight for the UK. Kill us all, impoverish us and humiliate us, probably, but fight for us? I don’t think so…
I want my SLR back.
These days, “THAT Rifle” would be classified as a Weapon of Mass Destruction.
A little litmus test, for those folk advocating “conscript all the young folk, we must be ready for war!”. Would they support revoking the parts of the 1987 Firearms Act that make it impossible to do “Service Rifle” shooting? If not, why not?
After all, a major supporting factor – in both world wars – was that rifle shooting was a popular hobby (it was originally a core skill for Boy Scouts).
The notion of “if you want to shoot guns join the Army” falls down hard when you discover that most units – even including infantry! – may only manage one or two range events a year, to get everyone a bare pass on their ACMT.
Things have certainly changed… I fired my first machine gun (a Bren) at the age of 14 in the school CCF. Extra bonus was to ‘have a go’ with the newly-introduced GPMG when we were at camp in Pirbright with the Scots Guards. 🙂
Well, the peacetime army used to be known more for marching in formation than shooting skill.
These days, the troops are likely to be exquisitely trained in pronoun usage.
Much cheaper than spending out on ammunition and cleaning kits.
Almost certainly not in this case – that same Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, when an MP, “led the campaign to ban handguns” after Dunblane.
My mate shot a lion in Namibia with the Belgian version. Good enough for elephant and rhino too.
Fucker. I hope the lion shot back.
The lion was about four feet from him and about to eat him, having been part of a pride which was killing all the cattle of his dad’s farm. Don’t be a silly twat all your life Steve.
Steve prefers the lion suffer months of agony – starving after it loses its teeth.
Everything dies. Nature has no pity. Wild creatures don’t die in hospice, surrounded by family. Vultures will be eating their eyes before they are dead.
There’s a justly celebrated line in the Italian Job that covers just such a scenario …
If that’s how your mate gets his kicks, he’s a wanker.
You have no fucking idea what you’re talking about.
My mate grew up in a farm in Namibia, where they made (and his father still does make) a living, just about, raising cattle and sheep.
Lions have a big reserve about 150km from the farm but periodically they come out, and when they come out they slaughter all livestock they can find like a fox with chickens.
The farmers band together – because the alternative is penury and starvation. – and drive the lions back to the reserve – literally 10m apart, walking.
The lions just leg it but eventually, sometimes, you get a lion or two who says Fuck it, you want some?
My mate was 16 and part of a drive when a big lioness decided to turn.
He put one round in her, his older brother to the left out one in her, and the bloke to the right, who was ex SASF, put two in her, and she died four feet from him.
I am all ears as to what the site’s biggest mememonger would have done in his shoes, but I can assure you that my mate is not the wanker in this exchange.
Had you bothered to mention this in your original posting (which makes your mate’s son out to be a ‘big game hunting wanker’) I think the general response would have been “Fuck! That was a close shave, good thinking under pressure!”
No such thing was implied, no matter how strongly it was inferred.
(about his mate, not his mate’s son)
For balance in the use of logic, Theophrastus did qualify the “wanker” description with a potential characteristic. If the characteristic isn’t there the description doesn’t apply.
No. Ignorance of wildlife and hunting will always burst through.
Shooting a mature lion before it loses its teeth does it a big favor. Hyenas eating its rump while still alive is no way to go.
The financial gain to the local people for an organized lion hunt is a big favor to them.
Organized hunting gives value to wildlife to the local people. Otherwise, they are just pests.
But y’all keep on fighting it . . . .
I want mine with the .22 Heckler & Koch converter. We disposed of 3,000 rounds single shot through a pair of them one afternoon. The chap with all the gold braid on his hat, who lived in the nearby fancy house came over to see what was going on. He thought war had broken out.
Did he ask to join in once he knew what was actually going on?
Or was he the other sort?
Regrettably still being a teenager I didn’t have the gumption to ask him if he would have liked to empty a magazine or two. I think “Spam” probably would have if asked. He was OK. His successor however tried, and failed, to court martial me.
SLR…. oh… a FAL… Oh yes… those are *noice* ….
Learned to use it when I was doing my mandatory marching around the compound..
The other big gap, not mentioned loudly (though, a quarter-century ago, I raised it with John Redwood where he was promoting his book “Stars and Strife” – this isn’t a new problem) is intelligence: the US has most of the collection capability.
They’ve got the satellites, we don’t (commercial is not bad but has obvious limitations). They’ve got the strategic recce like the U-2s and Global Hawks. We used to have a good capability with EW Nimrods, now we rely on a couple of US-supplied Rivet Joints.
We provide a lot because we’re good at analysing what comes in… but without the US feed of the raw data we’d suffer badly.
Ironically, the UK is better off than most of Europe for heavy lift, with enough C-17s to be useful for air bridges and still more shipping (including the Point-class RO-ROs) than many. Doesn’t mean we’re great but if anything kicked off out of area, we’d be the second choice for “can you find enough LIMS for our units too please?”
What about the A400Ms? As unreliable as made out?
Tactical. C-130 replacement. But capable of backing up the C-17 if required. And yes, it does have a bit of a bad rap.
On Rivet Joint, we used to see them operating out of Waddington but not much lately. I surmise they are in Eastern Europe in suppor of Ukraine. In the early dayys of that war they may have been locating Russian HQs and logistic bases before universal drone coverage. The RAF has a considerable intelligence presence around here. But why does it have surveillance-equipped King Airs? They can’t go in harm’s way so are they spying on us?
That’s largely done by the BN Defenders based at Northolt. I hear one most days; they’re hard to see, flying their slow, lazy flightpaths over London at about 10,000ft. I’ve occasionally heard and seen other aircraft doing the same: Cessna Caravan IIs and the occasional large Piper twin. Police forces also operate similar stuff now.
The sort of weaponry you need is stuff capable of taking down those bastards. Or are we talking about arming His Majesty’s military here? Why would you want to arm your enemy?
He warned America’s time as a “steward of international rules-based order… has come to an end” and that the UK must look to forge closer ties with European allies.
Not sure I speak Cunt as fluently as Lord Robertson, but who is it that’s taking action against the Iranian terror regime and who is refusing to lift a finger to keep open sea lanes?
Does “the international rules-based order” just mean “whatever delusional nonsense those fart-huffing fannies who banned plastic straws are talking now?” Feels like it. If their “rules” brought them here, of what use were the “rules”? They couldn’t stop Iran enriching uranium to weapons grade.
The Prime Minister vowed to raise defence investment to 3.5 per cent of GDP from just over 2 per cent – but not until 2035 despite citing a Nato warning that Russia could be ready to invade the alliance within three years. He has also failed to say how the UK will hit its target.
Yes, it was just a bluff to get Trump to leave him alone. But is Russia really “ready” to invade NATO in 3 years? Do we no longer think the atomic deterrent deters? Russia has taken 1,000,000 casualties in Ukraine according to NATO, and are still bogged down fighting for inches of now-worthless, bombed-out, mine-infested mud. Better luck next time?
The US president has been scathing about the Prime Minister, branding him “no Winston Churchill”. He has also shared disparaging videos mocking Sir Keir, including one Saturday Night Live sketch which depicted him as being terrified to speak to Trump.
At the same time, the American leader has threatened to pull the US out of Nato and invade Greenland, which belongs to the Kingdom of Denmark, an alliance member
10 years in, and they’re still taking him literally, when they should take him seriously. They absolutely refuse to learn. (It’s all so tiresome)
Trump hasn’t threatened NATO, he reminded NATO allies that they need to be useful allies in fact, and not free riders.
He told them the simple truth that the United States has little use for, and fears for the future of, a Europe that’s busily extinguishing European culture and replacing itself with Muslims whilst kowtowing to Communist China. But these people are offended by the truth. Like sunlight to Dracula.
“Threatened to invade Greenland” – i.e. internet shitposting and bombastic rhetoric. But again, they refused to take him seriously on the underlying source of tension – which is Europe’s unreliability (now helpfully demonstrated in the Strait), not the United States trying to do something bad to you. Never made any sense that we had to urgently “decolonise” Chagos and pay £40Bn for the privilege – but 19th century Scandinavian colonialism on the North American continent is sacrosanct?
Britain and France are convening a defence summit this week to advance a multinational mission to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, following Mr Trump’s war against Iran.
Iran has attacked British territory, attacked our allies, and is illegally (ha ha) attempting to close vital international sea lanes. So these mewling milksops are having meetings about meetings about possibly, conceivably, potentially doing something – but only after the Americans win. Trump was right.
Yes. These people are delusional and think their rules matter. I’ve said before that they share an alarming amount with ‘sovereign citizen’ types. SC’s think that by saying magic words (‘I’m not driving, I am traveling’ or ‘all caps is a corporate name’) they can free themselves from law.
The rules-based order types believe that by speaking certain phrases (‘international law’) they can bind you to their law. These are the people who think pushing paper is an end in and of itself. That international organizations are useful and not parasites.
Both are delusional.
But is Russia really “ready” to invade NATO in 3 years? Do we no longer think the atomic deterrent deters? Russia has taken 1,000,000 casualties in Ukraine according to NATO, and are still bogged down fighting for inches of now-worthless, bombed-out, mine-infested mud. Better luck next time?
You forget that all he has to do is beat Europe. How hard could that be?
Perpetual military budget cuts means Europe has probably lost many millions of soldiers. Without Misha firing a shot.
Well, the USA certainly isn’t taking action right now. After an initial burst of action, they’ve pretty much given up as they don’t seem to have meaningful goals nor decicive course of action. The strais are not open, despite the USA demanding so, yet the USA claims to be running a blockade but it;s not very effective. Israel might have started this with a clear understanding of what goal they had and how to achieve it, but I have seen no evidence that the USA have much of a clue at all. And with Trump spouting nonsense, why should anyone step up to help? One day he’ll demand help, but the next he’ll say the USA nees no help.
This rhymes with the interwar years’ sentiment.
The 30’s was tragedy, this is high farce
Do we think this other story from today’s Telegraph might be related?
New poll also finds only 36pc expect their lives to be better than their parents’ – down by half in one year
Half of young people say they would never take up arms for the UK, a poll has found.
Asked whether they would be willing to go to war for Britain, 50 per cent of those aged 16 to 29 said that “under no circumstances” would they go to war.
If that’s anywhere close to accurate, it means serious trouble if we ever end up in another major shooting match. Not just for lack of bodies, but for what the 50% of “under no circumstances” people will do to undermine the war effort.
Just 38 per cent said they would do so “under some circumstances”, while the rest did not know.
It is the latest survey to suggest that Gen Z is much less patriotic than older generations, and exposes the generational divide over questions of identity and national pride.
The poll of 2,000 16- to 29-year-olds, commissioned by the John Smith Centre at Glasgow University, found that the number expecting their lives to be better than their parents’ has halved in a year – from 63 per cent to just 36 per cent.
Just 25 per cent said they felt the political system treated them fairly.
Young people have had their future stolen from them by decades of massive scale Third World immigration, which is why:
“A growing sentiment among me and peers is why should we even try to uphold a social contract that will never work for us in the future? We will never be able to own homes or even retire at this rate.”
But if we were thinking that being dribbling fuckwits who shouldn’t be entrusted with shoelaces, never mind voting, was just an older people thing, think again:
More than half (51 per cent) believe immigration has improved their communities.
Womp womp! Never mind tho – it’s the most intolerant minority that wins, not the soggy median. We just have to make sure that’s us and not Mohammed.
More than half (51 per cent) believe immigration has improved their communities
Or “More than half have learned what happens if you tell the truth”?
As BBC et al destroy the culture, fewer people are entrained by it. A feature of One World.
…
Fuckin ell Timmy what did your “Pops” and “Grand Pops” do in any wars apart from being lanyards?
Dunno about Timmy, but one of mine had a Mention in Dispatches signed by Churchill hisself.
Having said that, I, personally, am a coward.
And what do you do?
There’s a certain irony to my Grandfathers
On my mother’s side, he volunteered. As he was born in Ulster, he was exempt but did it. Which we were all proud of. But, he was a baker by trade, so, they put him in the catering corp. Probably safer making food in France than living in Coventry.
On my father’s side, he was too old to sign up. He was one of those people who were just too young for WW1, just too old for WW2. But, he volunteered for the Home Guard and as he was useful with electrics, helped out with searchlights. Had a Home Guard medal, but working at the searchlights was pretty dangerous work.
My wife’s great uncle landed at Sword Beach. I was told not to talk about that.
Grandpops Worstall was in that first class of artificers – working class lads who played with tappets and valves on the new-fangled flying machines – they allowed to go through Cranwell to become officers along with Frank Whittle. Worked on Seafire and Spitfire, by 1945 was head of engineering Fighter Command. OBE (Mil). He’s in the archives of The Times after an air crash in 1928, a Virginia (?? – from memory) went down. His eighth crash by that point from memory.
https://www.rafweb.org/Biographies/Worstall_WR.htm
Grandpops Turnbull was a GP in Birmingham. I want to say Smallheath for some reason. Major in Home Guard, George Medal for his personal actions with his patients.
Pops was RN, mostly Polaris and Trident appointments down the years. Weapons electrical engineering. Also, Commodore of Naples.
I’m sure there was some lanyardry in there for all of them.
“Grandpops Worstall was in that first class of artificers – working class lads who played with tappets and valves on the new-fangled flying machines – they allowed to go through Cranwell to become officers along with Frank Whittle. Worked on Seafire and Spitfire, by 1945 was head of engineering Fighter Command. OBE (Mil).”
All this stuff these days would be done by Civil Servants. Or in your terms of life “lanyards”.
Tough crowd.
Not quite… If the “solids hit the air-conditioning” the artificers et al would be expected immediately to take up arms and get stuck in… Not an expectation made of the civilian lanyard class.
My maternal grandfather (who was also my stand-in dad) spent a lot of WW1 looking after General (Baron) Freyberg’s horses. At the end of the war the General presented grandad with a set of seven open razors in a polished wooden box, each one engraved with a day of the week. It was supposed to have been inherited by yours truly, but my grandmother and aunt got rid of all his stuff when he died.
Gamecock’s father was a B-24 pilot, 467th Bomb Group (H), RAF Rackheath. Does that get me anything?
Didn’t think so.
He gets a tip of the hat from me.
My grandfather came over with the ANZACS to attend a beach party has been organised in their honour at the Gallipoli holiday resort. Later a bit of tourism round Ypres. My father was in the REME & always told me he landed in France on D-Day. He certainly had Beach REME uniform patch & Bayard 7.65mm war trophy. However, after he died I went through his paperwork. That showed him on leave in London in July ’44, in Cherbourg in Jan ’45 & embarked for Palestine from Toulon. Don’t believe my father & the truth ever actually met.
Other grandfather was a seamen on convoys in both wars. Managed to get himself torpedoed twice in the same crossing in second one. His son was a FTR in a Wellington probably bombing Tunisia.
Why would leave in London in July ’44 necessarily prevent your father having been in Normandy in June ’44?
*If* the British government were to confine its own ambitions to being a ‘regional power’ the need for lift and logistics on the part of the UK military is greatly reduced to within a reasonable cost for Britain.
By ‘regional power’ I mean credibly able to defend itself against an invasion by a peer and able to send support to the continent to help their neighbors. Being able to credibly fight another war against the Argentinians would be a good start to aim for.
Then when it comes to major global stuff, they can piggyback on the US, which is probably the one pushing for the big fight anyway.
My take on this is that every country has their foundation myths, the events that a people look back on as a sort of year zero. They aren’t created by the people who were alive at the time who understood them but by the people after them. In Britain we have two, the founding of the NHS and WW2.
Which means when politicians want to do something sexy, they push NHS or WW2 buttons. We should be involved in Kosovo, Ukraine, because it’s what we do, right? We defeated Hitler, we should do this guy. And people blindly nod along. It’s why we’re always one of the big countries involved in these wars. Bigger than France or Italy. But, France and Italy don’t have the same view on WW2. Their “year zero” is something else.
I think Britain could basically be a minor military power today. The biggest reason for us to have a military, is to defend trade as we’re a global trading nation. Somali pirates start attacking ships, we deal with them.
And it might change, we might get a new Hitler, but I don’t think the incentives are there right now, and it won’t happen overnight.
I suggest that if we don’t maintain an expeditionary capability we’ll find we don’t suffer the temptation or find the need to send forces to conflicts we are not part of.
We do need the naval and air capability to control the North Atlantic and Arctic ocean. And a lot more anti-air on UK land. And above all, ammunition enough to last. I’m sure minds immeasurably superior to mine are looking at the impact of drones in all aspects of warfare. Personally I think big grey boats will need to be reconsidered. They are just targets now.(again)
The thing is, the potential of drones has been there for over 20 years now. We’ve seen the effect in Ukraine and Iran, but it didn’t take a genius back in 2010 to see how they would change warfare. I knew what civilian drones could do then, and presumably we have people looking at things like Bayraktars that were being made then, right?
But government is slow and bureaucratic. It’s why insurgents with not much in the way of resources can often beat large governments because they try things, use new technology, fail fast. Take a Toyota Hilux and stick a 50 cal machine gun on the back. What does that cost compared to the alternative from Lockheed Martin?
We’ve had drones in the army since (from memory) 1959. The Northrop SD-1. For artillery observation. The RAF has had the big long-range ones for decades. But they were not at a low or even medium level. They have/had a high priesthood keeping them away from and above the people who are fighting the battle. The RAF used to have pilots operating them. Because pilots run the RAF in their own interests. Nobody else can do that pilot magic.
What Ukraine does differently is to devolve drone use to the lowest sensible level. And distribute the intelligence product right down to the trenches. That is what we must do. And of course recruitment for drone operators doesn’t require fitness.Or even the ability to march and shoot.
I don’t know what our forces should look like but it will be a lot different if it plans to win any wars. Which plan itself would be a big change.
I have a lot of admiration for the way Ukraine has fought and innovated but we also need to be wary of over learning from them. Soon it will be the last war and as we know generals like fighting the last war.
The Russian army has been uniquely inept and corrupt and we can’t expect all opponents to just keep throwing low grade, barely trained, grunts in to a meat grinder. That scenario is perfect for killing with drones.
I fancy our generals always wanted to fight the Russians on the north German plain. Give Ivan a bloody nose. Show our NATO cobelligerents we were the best. Punch above our weight. Nobody wants to have a bunch of AI buzzing (or crawling) machines fighting each other. But that’s what we’ll get. Of course there will still be the pendulum between attack and defence. I think what we need to learn from Ukraine is that drones are important at every level. I can imagine drones down to the platoon level so you never have to walk round a corner without knowing what’s there. The other thing we need to adapt to is the tempo of development. Some interesting things are coming from small firms in the UK using the stimulus of this war. We need to find a way to encourage that in peacetime..
I can imagine drones down to the platoon level so you never have to walk round a corner without knowing what’s there.
AIUI that’s how the Israelis used them in Gaza. Good for clearing buildings as well.
It’s that thing about armies with purpose. They’ll try and do good things, work harder, put up with crap. A lot of the people fighting for Russia are from the stans and North Korea. They are going to put in minimum effort to stay alive and get paid.
The Ukraine drones are a lot like the Hilux with a machine gun philosophy. They use DJI Mavic drones for reconnaisance. Which cost £2000 from Amazon. The Turkish Bayraktar drones that they use are built from off-the-shelf parts. They have microlite engines in them, civil cameras in them. So the engine costs $20K. Which means Turkey makes them for about $5m each. US drones are probably better, but they cost $30m. The US military probably specify it to the nth degree so every bit of it has to be custom made.
You’re tapping into production line manufacturing. And then maybe you take a Mavic and tweak it. Those drones have an SDK so you can write code to control them so if you’ve got a nerd in Ukraine, he can set it up to do things, even if it goes out of range, or a signal jammer is used.
A buddy of mine – in fact we’re still, officially, in business with each other I think – has been working on this in Ukraine for a number of years now. I’ve not had a beer and chat for a few years but when it happens I’m sure the stories will be fun to hear.
Thinking about it, I might have set up his software development system for him. In fact, I think I did…..
A lot of the people fighting for Russia are from the stans and North Korea. They are going to put in minimum effort to stay alive and get paid.
There was a big song a dance about the Chechens going to Ukraine because of their reputation hoe hard fighting and brutality. Last time I saw something about them it was a complaint they’d never even engaged with Ukraine.
This part is not true.
The way the Ukrainians are using drones is to send out fireteams (4 people) to deploy a drone or two offensively. They are in effect an anti-armor missile team, are on the front line, moving through terrain carrying heavy loads, and in danger of being shot at.
There are certainly higher-level ISR drone units sitting in connex boxes and staring at screens but the average Yookie drone team is in the shit.
The Ukrainians launch thousands of frontline fpv drones every day (busy days, tens of thousands) across the fronts in order to wipe out the Russian attacks. These tactics require many decentralised mini control hubs operating out of basements and the like, operating close to but not on the contact line, launching multiple drones, multiple times in coordinated waves.
What you’re describing is more specialist, possibly for fibre optic drones which obviously can’t all be launched from one zone without literally leaving a trail to that location. But there’s no way fireteams out in the open can launch sufficient drones to counter constant Russian convoys and meatwave attacks.
Due to better and more tech along with better communications, the Ukes have now deepened the fpv kill zone to over 50km. They are taking out Russian formations before they get to the front, as well as causing major disruptions to supply routes.
The scale of the Ukrainian drone operation is truly vast. They’re able to keep road isolated forces such as at Lyman supplied via flying transport drones, and are able to defend areas and even take out Russian positions just with ground drones.
Add in the bigger, longer range stuff like FP1, FP2 and upwards ravaging the occupied territories and Russia itself almost unopposed, Russia’s operation is very probably doomed. Unfortunately, from Putin down, there are too many people whose positions and lives rely on the failure not being noticed. So the slaughter will continue.