This article is taken from the October 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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When asked what he wanted, the veteran American trade union leader Samuel Gompers replied, “More.” The authors of this timely book on Britain’s defence strategy, or lack of one, also want “more … more of everything”. They want more money, for more men, more tanks, more aircraft and more ships. Above all, they want more understanding of what Britain’s strategic aims are and how they can be realised.

Both authors are well qualified to write this book. David Richards is a former Chief of the Defence Staff with a long and distinguished military record. He is well known for his intellectual curiosity; I served (full disclosure) on the strategic advisory panel he set up in 2010. Julian Lindley-French is a well respected professor of defence strategy at the Netherlands Defence Academy.

The book is explicitly written for “the new government” and appears shortly after Labour’s resounding election victory in July. It draws on the authors’ experiences as well as a range of materials, including questionnaires filled in by service personnel and senior politicians such as former prime minister Tony Blair.

Richards and Lindley-French bookend their argument with two scenarios, the first of which sees unprepared UK and allied forces vanquished by a Sino-Russian coalition in the “High North” near the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, in seven years’ time. The second offers an alternative in which a well-resourced British-led NATO task force sees off these two enemies. Unless we change course fast, the authors argue, the former outcome is much more likely than the latter.

The “retreat from strategy” bemoaned by the book is driven by both financial and conceptual factors. UK defence expenditure has steadily fallen in relative terms since the end of the Cold War as the nation cashed in on the “peace dividend”. Aggravating the situation is the fact that the hugely expensive nuclear deterrent, once budgeted for separately, is now paid for out of the general defence pot. In consequence, the army is now the smallest it has been since the end of the Napoleonic Wars, whilst the navy has shrunk beyond recognition, as has the RAF.

To make matters worse, the authors argue, government no longer thinks strategically, and it hasn’t for some time. In their view, the rot set in at the end of the 1990s with the “overreach” of Blair’s demand that Britain should act as a “force for good” in the world. This led to a conflation of “interests and values”, and ultimately — via the interventions in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq — to the disastrous scramble from Kabul airport in August 2021.

Today, Richards and French suggest, the strategic failure lies in not prioritising the defence of Europe in the face of Russian aggression. Instead of investing in the army and land warfare, Britain has spent scarce resources on aircraft carriers in support of the “Global Britain” vision, which they dub “a political fantasy”.

As if all this weren’t bad enough, the authors go on, London has not thought through its policy towards Ukraine: not only has it stripped bare the equipment cupboard to support Kiev, but it is not thinking realistically about the need for a negotiated settlement. The possible election of Donald Trump, and the likely reduction of US defence commitments to Europe, should further concentrate the mind.

The culprits are clearly named and shamed. The authors take aim at the Treasury, which “recognises only as much threat as it believes Britain can afford”. They are sceptical about the Integrated Review of 2021, which they feel was too focused on “Global Britain” and are not impressed by the “refresh” of that document two years later, saying that its authors should not have been allowed “to mark their own homework”.

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office “and their fellow travellers” also get a good kicking, not least for their shaky commitment to Britain’s overseas territories, such as the valuable Indian Ocean base of Diego Garcia (currently used by the Americans).

Much of this is persuasive. The invasion of Iraq, which this reviewer wrongly supported, was a costly mistake. It is also true that the main enemy today is Russia, not China, and that Europe rather than the Indo-Pacific should be our main focus. The proposed solutions make a lot of sense: restoring the national defence industrial base at pace, buying “off the shelf” in the meantime, and seeking closer military ties with European allies such as France and Germany.

Yet this thought-provoking book has some weaknesses. Its tone is sometimes dyspeptic. The rush to publication has resulted in repetition, and some chapters are too wonkish for their own good. It is also the case that some things lambasted here, such as the reduction in defence expenditure, happened on Richards’ watch. It would have helped the argument of this book if he had been generally a bit more self-critical.

The main problem, though, lies in the strategic vision. First, it is not as easy to separate values and interests as the authors suggest. Forcing the Ukrainians to accept partition is not only unfair but will not make us any safer. When Putin was appeased after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, he simply came back for more. Unless the Russian president loses, and is seen to lose, in Ukraine today, he will pose an even bigger threat to us later. The defence of democracy in Ukraine is not simply virtue signalling; it really does help defend our democratic systems.

Secondly, the separation between the European and Indo-Pacific spheres, and between land and sea warfare, is not as straightforward as it sometimes appears in this account. Our Baltic and East Asian friends believe Xi Jinping to be deterred over Ukraine, and Vladimir Putin to be deterred over Taiwan. The two battle spaces are increasingly interconnected.

Besides, in the two scenarios offered by the authors, not only is the enemy a Sino-Russian coalition, rather than just Russia, but they are dealt with by an allied force in which the new Royal Navy carriers play an important role. Of course, all this goes to prove the authors’ central point that we simply need more of everything.

Regardless of whether you agree with everything in this book, Richards and Lindley-French are to be congratulated on laying out the problem so clearly. The government has just announced a “root and branch” defence review. No doubt the themes addressed in The Retreat from Strategy will feature strongly in it.

One can only hope that when it is complete, and preferably before then, Keir Starmer will do what no government, Conservative or Labour, has done for decades, which is to pay for the armed services this country needs rather than the ones he thinks we can afford.