A nice roundup from The Economist talks about how budgets and policy interact with each other, along with some English soul-searching.
Should Britain still aspire to be a global military power? The gap between its ambition to be a “force for good” around the world and its ability to fight messy wars in distant lands has been exposed by eight years of fighting. The war in Iraq has been less than glorious; the one in Afghanistan may yet end in failure, and sees Gordon Brown accused of failing to support Britain’s fighting men.
The government admits that it can no longer afford to fight today’s wars while insisting on its full shopping list of top-end aircraft carriers, jets and other equipment. The cost of weapons and pay for servicemen is rising faster than inflation. And the financial crisis means that Britain cannot buy its way out of its difficulties.
A Strategic Defence Review (SDR) to be held, much too late, after the general election, will seek to address such dilemmas. In the meantime a government green paper on defence released on February 3rd, rousingly entitled “Adaptability and Partnership”, tries to frame the questions for it and build cross-party consensus. But with the service chiefs openly vying to influence the review, and parties in pre-election fever, a sober debate will not be easy.
Pre-publication leaks tried to cast Mr Brown as the champion of defence: he would fund fully two new aircraft carriers, as well as the Typhoon fighter and the Joint Strike Fighter, all the while maintaining the army at about 100,000 men and remaining committed to the war in Afghanistan. This is implausible. The green paper itself states that “we cannot proceed with all the activities and programmes we currently aspire to, while simultaneously supporting our current operations and investing in the new capabilities we need.”
By: Brant
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