The war against the nation

Niall Ferguson says that demilitarisation threatens our culture and security

THE news that the British army was being sent in to shoot free-range animals suspected of carrying foot-and-mouth raised an admittedly facetious question in my mind. Does the MoD have an exit strategy if things go wrong?

All right, only kidding: we can probably rely on the army to deal with a few roaming bovines without much trouble. But from what one hears and reads about the present state of our armed forces, any slightly better-armed opposition might pose more of a problem.

The trouble is not, of course, the quality of British servicemen. They remain. I have no doubt, the best soldiers, sailors and airmen in the world. The real problem is essentially financial. For more than 15 years there has been a sustained squeeze on the defence budget. This has, of course, been easy to justify in the aftermath of the Cold War: a peace dividend was widely expected, and was duly delivered by votehungry politicians in the form of substantial real transfers of cash from the armed services to the social services.

But the extent and implications of these cuts are not widely understood. Whether you look at the size of our armed forces or the quality of their equipment, Britain is well on the way to becoming a demilitarised state. This has profound — and far from positive — implications, not only for our national security but also for our national culture. The tragedy is that our society is now so demilitarised that almost no one cares. This indifference is itself the most telling sign of our demilitarisation, For centuries the armed forces have played an understated but crucial role in our society. We were never Prussia, thankfully; but there has always been a British militarism nonetheless. I grew up imbued with it: proudly wearing my grandfather's Seaforth Highlanders' kilt; revering my other grandfather's RAF cap badge; passing the school war memorial every day; playing 'Brits and Jerries' in the playground; building Airfix models of second world war bombers; dressing my Action Man as a Para; painting my Desert Rat toy soldiers.

Despite my best efforts to indoctrinate them, my sons are growing up without all this. Their Action Men arrive dressed as ninjas or bungee-jumpers. Their natural violent impulses find their primary outlet in a nasty burbling little box called a 'Game Boy'. In vain have I visited toyshops in an effort to equip them with some serious plastic weaponry. It is a great deal easier to buy merchandise inspired by Star Wars than by any real wars.

These are just the more trivial symptoms of a profound social change. War, or at least the possibility of war, has been a fact of male existence since the dawn of time, just as childbirth has been a fact of female existence. That was the basic biological division of labour: he bears the arms, she bears the kids — quite fair, really, since the dangers of both activities are roughly comparable. Any man who has ever witnessed a woman in labour has an inkling of what it would be like to be a battlefield casualty.

True. Western women today have far fewer pregnancies than the historical average, but on average they still pay one or two visits to the maternity unit. By contrast, the typical British man now has every chance of avoiding war altogether. Indeed, the most violent experience he is ever likely to have is a drunken brawl on a Saturday night.

Britain's demilitarisation has its roots in more than 15 years of government policy. Consider the figures. The combined personnel of our regular armed forces currently stands at 208,600. This is almost half the number that we had back in 1968. In the case of both the navy and the air force the reduction has actually been more than half.

Now set those figures in demographic perspective. Our total regular forces currently amount to roughly 0.35 per cent of the population: a third of 1 per cent. It's also the lowest figure since — well, to be honest, I don't know when. All the reliable figures I have, which go back to 1710, are bigger: substantially so. The average for the century 1886-1985 was 1.7 per cent, two and a half times higher.

Or look at it, as the Treasury does, in budgetary terms. Back in 1985, defence accounted for about 11 per cent of total managed government expenditure. Today that figure is down to less than 7 per cent. I can find no year since the time of the Wars of the Roses when defence has accounted for such a low proportion of total government.

Of course, this is largely because the state's functions have greatly multiplied in the past century: since the time of Lloyd George the warfare state has been evolving slowly into the welfare state. So, for a more precise measure of demilitarisation, try relating the defence budget to the economy as a whole. Today, the total defence budget is about 2.5 per cent of gross domestic product. That is the lowest figure since 1934, and much of the decline has been since 1984, when the figure was still more than 5 per cent. To take a longer view, the defence burden is now approximately a quarter of its 20th-century average.

Finally, just consider the differentials in terms of military hardware between us and our closest ally. The United States has approximately five times as many submarines, ten times as many combat aircraft, 17 times as many tanks and 28 times as many nuclear warheads, The gap is so wide that our contributions to recent US operations in Iraq and Kosovo could probably have been done without.

There is only one consolation, and it is a meagre one. That is the fact that our European neighbours have been disarming even more rapidly — the German defence budget is now about 1.5 per cent of GDP — giving the lie to all that fatuous talk about a European army and defence policy.

The consequences of Britain's demilitarisation are not far to seek. Think of the complaints about basic equipment during the Kosovo campaign: inferior rifles, defunct radios which forced soldiers to rely on mobile phones. Think of the difficulties experienced by the force sent to Sierra Leone, which was pitted against a mere rabble of youths with AK-47s. And think of the cancellation of the Royal Tournament. or the scaling down of the royal review to mark the Queen's golden jubilee.

Then there are the shortfalls in recruitment in the traditional squaddie seedbeds like central Scotland. Even in darkest Lanarkshire they read the papers, and the urge to take the Queen's shilling has hardly been boosted by recent tales of Gulf War syndrome and uranium-tipped shells.

As if to add insult to these injuries, this government seems to delight in calculated affronts to the culture of the services. The Ministry of Defence directive that women should be allowed to serve on the front line was a typical piece of sub-Clintonian political correctness, made doubly preposterous by the revelation that the army's most photogenic girl soldier had gone AWOL with one of her comrades.

Even more surreal was the announcement that instead of being invalided out of the army, from now on it would be possible to be invalided in. I yield to no one in my aversion to discrimination against the physically handicapped. But there are some things you just cannot do in a wheelchair, and one of them is to yomp.

If our senior officers are currently feeling demoralised, it is hardly surprising. I recently dined with some and, congenial though the company was, I am afraid the word that sprang to mind was déclassé. Academics like to lament that they have been socially demoted by the dreaded 'cuts' of the last 20 years, and their salaries have indeed lagged well behind those in the professions and business. But academics are mostly middle class, and genteel poverty comes quite naturally to them. There is something far more poignant about the immiseration of army officers, whose culture (whatever their social origins) is that of the upper class.

True, there is nothing new about the British electorate losing interest in the military in time of peace. As so often, Kipling summed it up nicely:

0, it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' 'Tommy, go away.;

But it's 'Thank you, Mister Atkins,' when the band begins to play

But he was talking about a temporary forgetfulness of the soldier's value. What we are experiencing today is a more profound and less easily reversed process. And what is most worrying is that it is happening at a time of exceedingly rapid change in the military sphere.

It is not just the so-called 'Revolution in Military Affairs', the application of computer, laser and other technology to warfare, though it is alarming how far behind the Americans we now lag in this respect. The point is that the very notion of a post-1989 peace dividend was bogus. Precisely because it dramatically altered the problems our armed forces are expected to deal with, the collapse of the Warsaw Pact has actually necessitated increased military spending. For it costs money to turn an anti-Soviet nuclear defence force into a rapid-reaction force capable of intervening in low-intensity conflicts here (Ulster), there (Kosovo) and everywhere (Sierra Leone). Nor should we forget the fact that terrorist organisations have never had access to such affordable devices of mass destruction.

Yet the MoD has not been restructuring. It has been asset-stripping. And that could one day prove to be as costly a mistake as even the disarmament of the interwar years.

A few more years of demilitarisation, and heaven help us if we are suddenly confronted by an enemy better-armed than the foot-and-mouth virus, Niall Ferguson's new book The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World has just been published by Penguin. An 'e-lecture' based on the book can currently be viewed at www.boxmind.com.