Britain cannot fight a serious war. And deep down, everyone in government knows it. The problem is not professionalism. It is scale, and, more importantly, time.
If a major conflict broke out in Europe tomorrow, the British Army would run out of men and materiel within weeks. Every serious assessment of our military production reaches the same conclusion.
It’s a warning that the Royal United Services Institute, the former General Sir Richard Barrons, and former Nato Chief Lord George Robertson have all given.
Even the government’s own Strategic Defence Review recognised the disastrous shortfall in the case of war with a near-peer rival.
Stockpiles would vanish, and equipment losses could not be replaced. The idea that we could “ramp up” production mid-war belongs to another era.
And yet Keir Starmer carries on, bunkered in Number 10, as if none of this is urgent. A little more spending here, a bit more cooperation with Europe there, and somehow Britain will rebuild deployable military capabilities.
It is a fantasy that neither the Iran war, nor Russian ships flagrantly sailing through the Channel can shake him. You cannot rebuild a warfighting state at peacetime speed when the threat is accelerating.
There is, however, a second core problem: even if Britain had the leadership to start effective rearmament today, it would take a decade before our forces were combat effective. Britain would be trying to solve a short-term danger with only long-term solutions.
New factories, new supply chains, new training pipelines – none of it happens quickly in modern Britain. Even if the money appeared tomorrow, the capability would not.
The country has spent thirty years stripping out the depth (maintenance, munitions, manpower and equipment) that makes sustained warfare possible.
Britain, therefore, sits in an exposed position: too weak to fight a prolonged conventional war, but too slow to fix it. We do, of course, have strategic nuclear weapons.
But they are designed for one scenario only – existential threats. They deter total destruction. They do not deter everything short of it because our enemies rightly calculate that we will not use them unless we are truly out of options. Russia has spent years preparing for precisely this space between conventional war and all-out nuclear exchange.
Its doctrine includes the use of smaller, battlefield nuclear weapons designed to destroy military targets and inflict dread upon the West, without intolerable risks of nuclear escalation.
Our deterrent, by contrast, is all or nothing. And our enemies will never back us into such a corner that we have to use it. To invest more in conventional forces is correct, and yet, for our present threat, too late.
Our enemies will not wait for the government to fix procurement, lower energy prices, or make a military career viable again before they threaten us.
Britain is facing a tactical nuke-sized nightmare entirely of its own making | Reuters
Britain could develop a limited, tactical nuclear capability – smaller, more usable weapons designed for exactly the kind of threats we are now facing.
Air-delivered systems (which would require our jets to enter enemy airspace) could be integrated relatively quickly.
Submarine-launched cruise missiles could provide a more survivable option using platforms Britain already operates. Indeed, I have argued before that Tomahawk missiles are capable of delivering tactical nuclear weapons, and have been approved for such use by the Americans.
This would not resolve all risks. The growing desire to develop capability separate from the United States means that a more advanced sovereign system could follow later, one that would allow tactical weapons to be deployed from stealth jets.
While that system would take more than a decade to develop, it would be fully sovereign and usable without approval from Washington.
In the meantime, using the Tomahawk platform will promote the expertise and supply chains domestically that would bring such an advanced sovereign platform within technical reach, and create the political space for a future Prime Minister to go for it.
Even a gravity-delivered system would change the calculation immediately. An adversary considering limited nuclear use would no longer be able to assume that Britain has no credible response.
The ambiguity would work in our favour for once. None of this is comfortable. It is politically difficult, strategically contentious, and morally serious.
But so is drifting into a position where our weaknesses are obvious and we cannot respond effectively to Russian or Iranian aggression.
Much of our power and prosperity as a nation depends upon the credibility of our armed forces. Military ineffectiveness has invited criticism from Trump and restored life to Argentinian provocation over the Falklands.
Strategic and moral weakness has done the same over the Chagos Islands and in the protection of our veterans. Committing to tactical nuclear weapons and starting a conversation about an independent sovereign deterrence answers our detractors.
Britain is willing to do what it takes to defend its interests as soon as possible and will invest to make sure we never find our security compromised again.
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