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In the past, Mushroom
has lamented the incessant cutting of defence expenditure and derided the clichéd
excuses such as punching above our weight and pivoting towards cyber warfare. He
has sat, with former colleagues, and listened to senior serving officers emphasising
the importance equality and diversity at, apparently, the expense of fighting
effectiveness and esprit de corps. He
has become exasperated with the naïve party line that if only we should spend
2% of GDP on our armed forces, all will be well with our defence posture. A stupidity that appears to afflict almost
the entire political establishment.
Well, this
week, the cosy complacency has been punctured as several respected authorities
warn of the deteriorating security situation and our lack of preparedness for
major conflict.
The historian,
Robert Tombs, weighed in, in the Sunday telegraph today:
“History
shows that we have blundered into disaster by not seeing it coming. In the
1930s, public opinion moved faster than the politicians in realising the threat
from the Nazis, but it was still desperately late in doing so. War is so
terrible – modern war unimaginably so – that we cannot neglect any way of
making it less likely. Retreating into neutrality does not seem an option in
the modern world, as Sweden, long a proud neutral, has realised. We need
politicians who are able to look without flinching at the dangers facing us,
and explain to the country what needs to be done and what it will cost.”
To which our Government
spokesman, apparently, “looking without flinching,” reassures us that “these kinds of
hypothetical scenarios, talking about a conflict, are not helpful and I don’t
think it’s right to engage with them,” adding that the Government had invested
“significant sums into our Armed Forces”. Quite so and, as an old colleague in
Northumberland reflects on a quote from Sir John Harvey-Jones on planning:
“Planning is an unnatural process;
it is much more fun to do something. And the nicest thing about not planning is that
failure comes as a complete surprise rather than being preceded by a period of
worry and depression."
Just the political ticket?
