Controversial stuff from Mr Page.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/20 ... ar-russia/.
Wasteful Britain needs to buy a new arsenal for war with Russia…..Doubts over Nato and threats on multiple fronts leave UK with no choice but to rearm
Britain Military Spending
The world is changing fast and not for the better. Russia is transitioning back into a Soviet-style war economy, and its military power will increase enormously. At the moment we are kept safe, at very little cost to ourselves, by the heroic sacrifices of the Ukrainians. That can’t go on forever.
One way or another the fighting in Ukraine will stop, quite possibly due to a ceasefire imposed on the Ukrainians by the next US president. The Russian armed forces will then be able to reorganise, rearm, conscript, and build.
The ceasefire will end at a time and place of Vladimir Putin’s choosing. One notes that he has just visited Kaliningrad, the Russian exclave in the Baltics, long seen as a potential flashpoint in a future Russia/Nato war.
German planners have constructed a scenario in which Putin might provoke a war by moving into the Suwalki Gap, the territory along the Poland/Lithuania border between Kaliningrad and Belarus.
It’s important not to be defeatist about this. If the poorly equipped, poorly funded Ukrainians could not only stop the Russians cold but push them back almost everywhere – as they did – it’s clear that the relatively well-equipped Nato nations could inflict disaster on the Russians.
Foolish optimism and then equally foolish disappointment over last year’s Ukrainian counter-offensive has obscured the reality that Russia’s invasion has indeed been a colossal failure.
The entire Russian army, reinforced by hundreds of thousands of new conscripts and munitions from North Korea and Iran, has barely managed to take and hold a few Ukrainian provinces: and this against the Ukrainian army alone, armed with only a limited selection of Western weapons.
Fighting the many nations of Nato and the full crushing weight of Western military technology, the Russian army could expect a much bloodier nose still.
But that was the Russian army of 2022. The Russian army of the near future, disengaged from the Ukrainian meat grinder and with hugely increased funding, will become a lot bigger.
Worse still, that was the Nato of 2022. It’s perfectly believable that the next president of the United States will be Donald Trump. Trump has repeatedly threatened to pull America out of Nato, and has reportedly said “Nato is dead” and “I don’t give a s--- about Nato”.
If the US pulls out of Nato, it takes with it 70pc of all the alliance’s defence spending. Of course, not all US defence spending goes on supporting Nato, but anyone who has worked as part of Nato forces will confirm that America does indeed account for the great majority of the alliance’s military power.
So not only will future Russia be stronger: future Nato may be a lot, lot weaker.
Then there’s China, nowadays the second largest military spender in the world. The Chinese are constantly probing at the defences of democratic Taiwan, and are also engaged in a long-running campaign to simply snatch most of the South China Sea in outright defiance of international law.
Meanwhile an international naval taskforce, as ever mostly from America, is engaged in serious fighting north and south of the Bab-el-Mandeb strait in an attempt to keep one of the world’s major trade routes open.
If Putin manages to snatch Ukraine or part of it, he will not stop there. If China manages to snatch Taiwan and the South China Sea, it will not stop there. If the Houthis are permitted to shut down the Red Sea, others will be emboldened and the Strait of Hormuz or the Malacca Strait may be next.
If we decide these things are not our business and let our enemies expand and dominate – and profit from these activities, as they choke our trade and conquer our allies – we will none the less wind up fighting them in the end, when they get round to us.
It’s better to fight the Chinese navy in the Taiwan Strait than in the Torres Strait just north of Australia. It’s better to fight Russia in Poland or the Baltics than in France or – God forbid – on this sceptred isle. It’s better to fight while we still have free and democratic allies to fight alongside, rather than let them fall and find ourselves alone when our turn comes.
And it’s so much better and cheaper if our enemies see us there on the other side of whatever line they are thinking of crossing, and decide that they can’t win. Deterrence is so much better and cheaper than fighting.
Truly, if you want peace, prepare for war.
All this means that the time for Britain to start rearming is now. The peace dividend is over: finished. We are in several new Cold Wars now. For those who prefer a 1930s analogy, we need not just a 1930s-style rearmament but one considerably bigger, one sufficiently impressive that the Blitzkrieg would never have been launched and the Japanese would never have begun their Pacific war. That would have been expensive but much, much cheaper than the Second World War turned out.
As a baseline, in the 1980s with the Cold War at its height, British defence spending was between 4pc to 5pc of GDP. Today, it is barely above 2pc. Defence minister Grant Shapps has stated an ambition for 2.5pc, but declines to give a timetable. Most of our political establishment thinks this is ambitious or even extreme.
This shows the blindness of the British political class on military matters. Nobody reasonable could deny that the threat level is at least as high as it was in the Cold War. The discussion should not be about if or when we might boost defence spending by 10pc to 15pc: it should be about increasing it right now by 100pc.
It’s not even as though we’re talking about large amounts of money here. Annual defence spending is running at about £46bn. Total government spending is – unbelievably, almost – approaching £1.2 trillion.
Doubling the defence budget would involve just a 4pc haircut for the other departments. Alternatively you could find most of the money by reassigning the international aid budget and closing down much of the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, leaving a few useful bits. I’m probably being a bit old-fashioned here, in fact, by suggesting that spending more on one thing should mean spending less on others.
So we can easily afford to rearm: and we should spend that money. It is absolutely critical, however, that we spend it on rapidly making our armed forces more powerful, not on other things.
That sounds obvious, but unfortunately it isn’t what we normally do. The Ministry of Defence (MoD) is routinely expected to do the work of the Department for Business, the Department of Work and Pensions and so on.
In particular the MoD is expected to create and sustain large numbers of well-paid British civilian jobs apart from its own substantial body of civil servants. These jobs are often expected to revive rundown cities and regions, reducing unemployment and delivering social benefit.
The MoD is also expected to provide finance on very generous terms to nominally UK-based companies so that they can develop profitable products which, it is hoped, may bring in export business. Defence money is even expected to preserve the Union.
What all this means is that it’s possible to shovel large amounts of cash into the MoD and see very little come out in terms of actual improved military capability.
Worse still, by trying to make defence spending do many things at once, we wind up achieving none of them. The civilian jobs appear in tiny numbers given the money spent, and then require constant new spending or they disappear again. Over time they disappear anyway.
We don’t get the saleable products and export industries, either. And, rather than the people of Scotland feeling pleased that so much MoD work is placed there, there is a persistent myth among them that they get less than their share.
Experience has shown that some readers may not believe these things, so here are some examples.
A large amount of our defence industry nowadays belongs to just one company, BAE Systems plc. People still tend to refer to it as British Aerospace or BAe for all that the company changed its name 25 years ago. That made sense, as it is no longer British nor particularly focused on aerospace.
Long ago in the 1990s, not long after its creation by the government, BAe – as it then still was – had 127,000 British employees. It later absorbed other large British workforces such as that of Marconi.
Today, despite constant and enormous revenues from the British taxpayer throughout its existence, BAE has 93,000 employees worldwide. Barely 30,000 of them are in Britain.
Giving defence money to British companies does not even preserve British jobs, let alone create them. In this case, it has resulted in a British company using its UK revenues to move offshore.
Another popular way to spend defence money is on attempts to revive the British shipbuilding industry. There are often foolish dreams that dead shipyards, restarted by MoD contracts to build warships and fleet auxiliaries, could then go on to compete in building merchant shipping. Well-paid jobs in the yards would bring new life to post-industrial towns.
You would think people might have learned from the attempt in the early noughties to build two fleet auxiliary amphibious ships on Tyneside in the moribund Swan Hunter yard, which had built no ships since the 1980s.
The project was a disaster. It was planned to cost £148m with the ships delivered in 2004. By 2006, one ship had been delivered in terrible condition and one was launched but not fitted out. The government had been compelled to hand over no less than £309m.
Nobody on Tyneside had built a new ship from scratch for a long time: the yard was learning on the job, and the government had to keep giving it money just so it could pay its workers.
In the end, even the Labour government of the time realised that this was not sustainable and Swan Hunter closed down again. The ships were finished in Scotland.
This sort of thing illustrates the madness of trying to run military procurement as a social benefit scheme. And it shows us just why we get so little defence – such small amounts of military power – for our money.
But the lesson of Tyneside has not been learned. Another yard that has not built a ship for decades, Harland & Wolff in Belfast, is currently being reanimated with £1.6bn of defence money. Maybe one day the Royal Fleet Auxiliary will get the promised new fleet of solid support ships.
That would be nice as it only has one such vessel at the moment, RFA Fort Victoria – often, as now, broken down and without a crew – and a naval task force without a solid support ship is a sorry thing. But even Harland & Wolff don’t think they’ll have the job done until well into the 2030s, long after the coming crisis with Russia.
If the Swan Hunter project is any guide it will cost double, take much longer, and still not deliver usable ships in the end.
There are many other examples showing the folly of paying British industry to build things it does not know how to build. It is a longstanding problem which is now becoming very urgent.
We must shift to buying existing products off the shelf, very often from overseas makers. Creating civilian jobs, subsidising industries and bribing devolved regions should not be Ministry of Defence priorities: there are other budgets and departments for those things.
The Poles, understandably, have realised the urgency and are simply buying tanks from South Korea and weapons from the US: we should be doing similar things.
Specifically we should just buy some support ships from yards which can do the job now. We should just buy combat aircraft from America, rather than embarking on a foolish attempt to reinvent American wheels under the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP, aka “Tempest”).
This shows every sign of turning into another disastrous money pit like Typhoon/Eurofighter before it and Tornado F3 before that. Again, even its backers admit that GCAP will not produce any usable equipment before 2035.
If Typhoon is any guide it will be many years after that before any aircraft appear and the cost will be titanic – enough to eat up any amount of extra funding for very little in the way of military effect. We spent £23bn to acquire our current fleet of 90-odd usable Typhoons, making them the most expensive fighter jets ever built anywhere.
They were also ridiculously late – an entire generation late, in fact. The first Typhoons went operational with the RAF in 2007. These aircraft have recently been described as “early fourth generation” by the MoD. Embarrassingly, the US air force had by then had the fifth-generation F-22 Raptor for two years.
Oh, and a note for the “let’s not be dependent on America” people: all advanced Western military equipment contains controlled US technology. The Typhoon cannot even be sold to anyone without US consent – and it’s pretty hard to sell anyway. It hasn’t been an export success.
We need more airpower a hell of a lot sooner than 2045 or so, and we need it to be reasonably up to date and effective. It’s time to take the GCAP money, double it at least, and start buying the only fifth-generation fighter which is available in the near term: the F-35 from America (partly British made, though).
We also need to buy the weapons and equipment which enabled the US to defeat three significant Soviet-equipped tank armies almost without loss in 1991, 2003 and 2011. We do not want to be forced to fight the horrifying meat-grinder war that the Ukrainians are fighting now: we want to fight the way “we” (actually the USA) fought against the Iraqis and the Libyans.
So no, it should not be a priority for us to build huge stockpiles of 155mm artillery shells and masses of guns to fire them from. That is First World War technology and it leads to a First World War situation, as we see now in Ukraine.
Nor should it be a priority – for us Britons at least – to build a massive armoured force centred on main battle tanks. We have seen a massive, heavily equipped tank army invade Ukraine, and we have seen that army stopped cold and mostly forced to withdraw by opponents who had few tanks, and old-fashioned ones at that.
Western tank enthusiasts – the great majority of serving and former Army officers among them – said that this failure was because Russian tanks aren’t very good and Russian commanders don’t know how to use them. Some doubt was cast on this when the Ukrainian counter-offensive, equipped with Western tanks, also failed.
Tanks and armour are not the war-winners that their advocates claim they are, and in any case our European allies have lots of them. But Iraqi and Libyan T-72s were not defeated by Western tanks, they were smashed from the air. This could be done because America had suppressed opposing air defences and ruled the skies: this is what we need to be able to do to Russia.
This is Suppression or Destruction of Enemy Air Defences, SEAD/DEAD. As Professor Justin Bronk of RUSI writes: “The Russian air force appears unable to do this, but, aside from the US, all other Nato air forces also lack this capacity … if the US was committed to a major war elsewhere or otherwise politically unwilling to shoulder the primary SEAD/DEAD responsibilities, Nato air forces would face similar problems establishing air superiority over territory contested by Russia.”
SEAD/DEAD is what we need: the capability that will let us smash Russian ground forces from the air, and avoid the bloody stalemate of Ukraine. It involves lots more F-35s, certainly, but also a lot of other new weapons and equipment.
It would be simpler and cheaper to just buy the stuff the Americans use, as it costs money and takes years to integrate non-American weapons and equipment onto the F-35.
We will also need more drones, more electronic warfare planes, more radar planes and more air refuelling tankers. We need a massive arsenal of long-ranging precision strike weapons, both air and surface launched: we should stuff our warships full of Tomahawk cruise missiles and arm our soldiers with the new US Precision Strike Missile.
We should make sure we can do SEAD/DEAD from our aircraft carriers as well as land bases: there are other enemies than Russia. That means equipping the ships with catapults and arrester wires, so that they can carry E-2 Hawkeye radar planes and EA-18G Growler electronic warfare birds – and probably some ordinary F-18s too.
That would also mean that we can switch from F-35B jump jets, which can’t carry as much fuel and weapons as other warplanes, to fully capable F-35C tailhook planes. Equipped in this way, our carrier air wings would also acquire the vital ability to conduct their own air-to-air refuelling.
And no, it would not cost huge sums to fit “cats and traps”: that idea was exposed as fiction some time ago. We would actually save a lot of money with the switch to tailhook jets.
There are many other things that our doubled defence budget will need to be spent on: speeding up the arrival of our new nuclear deterrent submarines so that the current occasional need for six-month patrols can be abandoned, for instance.
But the headline capability that today only the US has is SEAD/DEAD: that is what, in British hands, will not only be capable of defeating Russia – but better still, will deter Putin from making his move in the first place.
There is no time to mess about trying to have a pork-barrel industrial subsidy scheme as well. We need to prepare for war now.
