WAR GAMES

Correlli Barnett says we need an army to

defend the realm, not to further the PM's pious ambition to spread peace and love

THE unfolding mess in Afghanistan, a faraway country of which we wished we knew even less, poses a fundamental question: what in the year 2001 are the British armed forces for? Do they have any role in directly promoting either the security or the prosperity of the British people? Or do they now exist primarily to enable the Reverend President Blair to posture as a world leader, especially in Washington?

From 1934 (when the double threat from Germany and Japan was first formally identified by Whitehall) until 1991 (when the collapse of the Soviet Union ended the Cold War) Britain faced clear military menaces from other states. The primary role of the British armed forces during that 57-year period was therefore plain enough: to preserve the independence of the United Kingdom in the face of such menaces; and to do so in collaboration with allies.

Throughout this period the strategic key to Britain's own security lay in Western Europe. The loss of that key in June 1940 with the collapse of the Western Front exposed Britain to mortal danger, narrowly averted by the victory of Fighter Command over the Luftwaffe. Only with the victorious advance of Anglo-American armies in 1944-45 from Normandy to the Elbe was the key regained.

When relations between Stalin's Soviet Union and the West deteriorated into 'Cold War', the strategic focus of the North Atlantic Treaty of 1949 and then of Nato in 1950 also lay in Western Europe. The security of the United Kingdom was henceforth melded into Nato's collective defence structure. the Schwerpunkt of common effort being to prepare to resist a possible grand offensive across the Iron Curtain by Soviet forces in Eastern Germany.

Over nearly six decades, then, the primary role of the British armed forces was clear: to secure the United Kingdom and its outer bailey, Western Europe, against attack by a contiguous state.

This role disappeared with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Since that time there has been no direct threat to the territory or independence of either the United Kingdom or Western Europe as a whole from any outside state. As for terrorism, the only direct threat to the United Kingdom has come from the IRA, the attack on the World Trade Center on 11 September being clearly targeted at the USA.

What, then, is, or should be, the role of the British armed forces today?

It is hard at the present time to envisage any future menace from another state comparable to that from Germany and Japan before the second world war or from Soviet Russia after it. Nevertheless, such a menace might still materialise out of a clear sky, just as between 1929 and 1933 Germany mutated from a peaceful democracy into an expansionist Nazi dictatorship. It must therefore always remain the chief task of the British armed forces to collaborate with other members of Nato in guarding the security of the North Atlantic Treaty area — and by war if need be. This role requires land, sea and air forces trained, organised and equipped to conduct a hi-tech conflict against a first-class enemy. A mere gendarmerie good at 'peace-keeping' and dispersed in penny packets will not do.

Yet here is the core of the British politico-strategic problem today — just as in the imperial past. Before 1914, and again before 1939, the British army was indeed an imperial gendarmerie, scattered in garrisons across the Middle East, Africa, India and the Far East. In both world wars Britain therefore faced the gigantic task of creating from scratch an army for Europe comparable in scale and firepower to the Continental armies. In the second world war the task comprised the creation from scratch of strategic and tactical air forces as well.

Yet, despite these harsh lessons, British grand strategy after the second world war continued to be pulled in opposite directions by the Continental commitment (now through Nato) and the worldwide politicomilitary involvements bequeathed by the imperial past. Indeed, there was for postwar Cabinets — Labour or Conservative a fresh justification for these involvements. They were now seen as essential to maintaining Britain's international 'prestige', 'status' and 'influence' — all Whitehall buzzwords of the time. Thanks to this rickety but costly facade of global power, the prime ministers and foreign secretaries of a debt-ridden and economically struggling postwar Britain could kid themselves that Britain was still playing in the same league as America; that the 'special relationship' was one between friendly equals, and, moreover, equally valued. This illusion even survived in the American torpedoing of Eden's expedition to Suez in 1956, and it still survives today in the Reverend Blair's toadying to his new chum Dubya.

There were, however, two other elements in Britain's postwar world outlook which also continue to inspire foreign policy and military deployments today. The first lies in a patronising sense of responsibility reminiscent of a public-school prefect or a middleclass social worker, and directed towards backward countries (in the 1940s and 1950s British colonies, but today the Third World in general). The second and related element lies in a Woodrow-Wilsonian small '1' liberal internationalism, with its belief in a 'world order' to be run — in effect — by the Western powers on the UN Security Council. In the postwar era this helped to justify Britain's expensive strategic cowpat of bases and sea, land and air forces in the Middle East and Persian Gulf: we were there to maintain 'stability' in the region.

It is thus no wonder that in the first two postwar decades Britain spent a percentage of GDP on defence twice the European Nato average — and more than twice that of West Germany, our most formidable trade competitor. But by the early 1970s virtually all that inherited imperial lumber had finally been pitched overboard, not least because of repeated sterling crises and consequent squeezes on the defence budget. Britain could at last adjust to a new politico-strategic role consonant with her actual economic weight: the role of regional European power.

It is therefore all the more regrettable that in the 1990s, the post-Cold-War decade, she began gratuitously to shoulder a new kind of 'white man's burden' by taking a leading part in UN interventions in other peoples' civil wars (as in Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor) or in the employment of military force against states whose conduct of their internal affairs was reckoned to be immoral (such as Serbia/Yugoslavia and Iraq). The justification for this new 'white man's burden' is, curiously enough, much the same as the 19th-century justification for imperialistic expansion in Africa: to bring peace, order and civilisation to regions blighted by intertribal savagery and oppression. There is even in Downing Street an academic escapee from the white coats theorising away to the Prime Minister in favour of an ambitious programme to create a global 'New Jerusalem' by means of just such neo-imperialist do-goodery.

The price of assuming this new burden, like that of the old, has already been the scattering of the British armed forces in 'peace-keeping' roles in the Balkans, in the Middle East and Far East, and now in Afghanistan, with all the consequent overstretch that bears so hard on servicemen and their families. Yet the benefit to the British people at home has been nil. With a single exception, none of the areas concerned is of much value as a source of energy or raw materials, as a market for exports, or as a field for investment. The exception lies in Iraq, a major oil producer and (as the realistic French perceive) potentially a rich market. Yet we are actually denying ourselves access to both the oil and the market opportunities by rigorously supporting UN sanctions on Iraq and enforcing the 'no-fly zone'.

Whereas in the present Afghan war a hard-minded Washington is focused on smashing al-Qa'eda and killing bin Laden, London, in contrast, seems overmuch concerned with militarily securing the inflow of humanitarian aid, with future peacekeeping, and with the reconstruction of the country, — We will not walk away from you', and all that.

The government's penchant for neo-imperialist interventionism is the more fraught with danger because the Reverend Blair is

himself a fresh incarnation of the self-righteous Christian zeal that inspired some of the great Victorian proconsuls in their time. In his emotional sermons to the Labour party conference and last month's Guildhall banquet, he proclaimed a mission to lead the world in rescuing the continent of Africa (and other backward regions of the world) from poverty, tyranny, chaos and violence. As General de Gaulle might have said, projet arnbitieux. But, if it proves more than the usual Blairite tele-evangelism, the British armed forces can look forward to many future Sierra Leones or, worse still, largescale African Bosnias and Kosovos.

Now we learn from Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary. that the British forces are to be reshaped in order to provide elite rapid-reaction units capable of 'a degree of invasive military response' inside foreign states that are asking for help against indigenous terrorists — no doubt at our own cost. Since the only remaining direct terrorist threat to us lies in the Real IRA, how will these revamped forces promote the security or wealth of the United Kingdom?

The Prime Minister's ambition to lead the West along a neo-imperialist path renders British participation in the European Rapid Reaction Force even more dangerous. Whitehall surely recognises that our own armed forces, however restructured, are not strong enough on their own to serve as the effective instrument of Blair's ballooning ambition. After all, in the present case of

Afghanistan, while he has done the posturing, the Americans have provided virtually all the striking power. It is perfectly plain that tough realists in Washington such as Donald Rumsfeld do not buy the Blair or Short vision of armed forces as a branch of Oxfam or the Salvation Army, globally doing social good and combating political sin. So Blair and his fellow visionaries need another surrogate military instrument, another platform on which the Prime Minister of a second-rank state can play the political star. And here to hand is the European Rapid Reaction Force, the already proclaimed purpose of which is to enable the European Union to intervene in crises where the USA is not interested. Can one think of anything less desirable than that British forces should be involved in some future Bosnia or Kosovo or Afghanistan anywhere in the world without the Americans?

If the British armed forces are ever to revert to the core business of the defence of the realm and of British overseas territories and economic assets, we can only look to a future Conservative government. But do we really see lain Duncan Smith emulating Castlereagh or Salisbury — or even the Quai d'Orsay at the present time — in the singleminded pursuit of national self-interest?

Correlli Barnett's new book. The Verdict of Peace: Britain Between Her Yesterday and the Future, published by Macmillan at £20, is now in its second printing.