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Successive British governments have long
bought into the idea that we have a significant, if not
quite great, military power. The reality is different,
though. The UK has been involved in four wars in the last
two decades – and has a track record that is little short
of disastrous.
The war in Afghanistan, where the UK was a
close ally of the United States, began in 2001 and lasted
two decades – killing an estimated 70,000 Afghan and
Pakistani civilians, according to Brown University and The
Watson Institute’s Costs of War project. The
Taliban is now in control, with the human rights position
being grim, especially for women and girls.
Yet that war is hardly mentioned in
discussions on UK military policy, with the endeavours of
Russian president Vladimir Putin serving as a useful
distraction. This is also true of the 2003-2011 Iraq war –
another conflict where the UK was Washington’s closest
supporter and that went on for many years despite
expectations that it would be over in months.
The death toll for that war is unclear,
though the Costs of War project states that we know that
between 280,00 and 315,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed
by direct war-related violence since the US invasion –
although it says the real figure is likely to be much
higher due to deaths not being recorded.
Then came the disastrous intervention, along
with the French, in Libya in 2011, which left the country
wrecked and bitterly divided conduit for paramilitaries and
armaments transiting south to the multiple zones of
instability across the Sahel and on to eastern Africa.
Finally, the UK was closely involved in the
four-year air war against ISIS in northern Iraq and Syria
after the group staged its astonishing come-back in 2014,
controlling large areas of both countries and even
threatening to take Iraq’s capital, Baghdad. Some
commentators argued that this war was successful, but ISIS is still waging a resilient
insurgency throughout central and north-eastern Syria and
is active – as are al-Qaida and other Islamist paramilitary
movements – across northern and eastern Africa.
And now, the UK is supporting Israel’s
increasingly controversial war on Gaza – which the Gazan
health ministry reports has killed more than 28,000 people,
many of them children, since October – and the US’s air war
against the Houthis in Yemen.
Another problem for those calling for an
expansion of the British military is its current state. is
the state of the British military – which has made a vain and costly attempt to be a
global power in
recent years but faced multiple problems.
Two huge aircraft carriers, which are the
Royal Navy’s largest ever warships and cost more than £3bn
each, entered active service in 2017 and 2019 and their
maintenance cost a reported £39m in 2020 alone. Both have
been plagued with faults and in any case, there are not
sufficient frigates, destroyers, support ships or crew for
even one of them to be deployed globally except for short
tours.
Meanwhile, the Trident replacement is beset
by delays and cost overruns and is taking more than £200bn
out of the military budget.
But perhaps the biggest argument against
spending more money on expanding the British military is
that doing so would be entirely irrelevant to the security
problems ahead.
Accelerating climate breakdown is by far the
greatest challenge facing the UK, along with every other
country in the world – although you wouldn’t know it from
all the debates over defence budgets.
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