Britain's Royal Navy flagship, the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal, in the dockyard at Portsmouth, England, on Tuesday Oct. 19. Cut to the U.K. defence budget could see the ship sent to the scrapyard.Chris Ison
Only a perceived slight to the Armed Forces could get British newspapers so indignant. The prime minister, David Cameron, is expected to tell Parliament on Tuesday the scale of the cuts in UK defence spending and spell out some of the victims, but leaks were spouting everywhere in Whitehall last night and on Tuesday morning the headlines were full of shame and disgrace. "HMS Ignominious" shouted The Times as news emerged that HMS Ark Royal, the navy's flagship aircraft carrier was to be sent the wrecker's yard. "Is Britain resigning as a major power?" asked the Financial Times. "Will the US now give up on us?" wondered The Guardian.
Defence policy in Britain is a mess. There is a need to replace Trident, the ageing submarine which launches Britiain's nuclear deterrent but building four new boats would cost £20-billion and instead of making a decision whether the deterrent is still useful or necessary, the decision has been delayed for five years. The navy is being hit the hardest with four vessels to go and so will the entire fleet of Harrier jump jets. As a result there will be no British planes to fly from British ships until 2020 when the newJoint Strike Fighter comes into service. Until then American or French aircraft might use British carriers.
Ignominious, but hardly surprising given the scale of Britain's financial problems. The interesting stuff came out on Monday with the publication of the Strategic Defence Review, an attempt to figure out what threats Britain might face in the future and how to combat them. Top of the list was cybercrime and terrorism, both of the Islamic and Irish variety, of the latter there is recent evidence of new activity. Also at the top were an undefined international military crisis involving joint action with allies and a natural disaster, such as severe flooding or a flu pandemic. Physical attacks on Britain or its overseas territories by invading armies are seen as much lower risk than cybercrime or flu, which begs the question what is all this fuss about aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines and fancy jets that take off like a jack-in-the-box.
If that is true, what we need is more spooks, more electronic wizardry and unmanned spy planes and possibly more nurses. More money is going into electronic spying. Still, you get a feeling that behind all the breast-beating about loss of status in the world and "poor little Britain", there is a niggling anxiety that the policy wonks could be getting it wrong.
Is it really just terrorist splinter groups, mad mullahs, teenage computer geeks and that megalomaniac in Teheran that we need to worry about? My guess is that we will again be confounded, the wheel will turn circle and old-fashioned threats of war will emerge.
Who might be the aggressors? To find answers, we need to look at what is happening in the conventional military sphere and the answer is that China is arming itself. China will spend $78-billion this year on its military, an 8 per cent increase on 2009, and that is a slowdown after 10 years of double-digit increases in spending on the People's Army. China is spending more in East Asia than its neighbours and its navy is moving further afield, for legitimate reasons, to defend sea trade routes. China has agreements for its navy to use ports in Sri Lanka and its vessels have patrolled the coast of Somalia, to protect Chinese ships from pirates. Then, there are territorial disputes between China and its neighbours over the Spratly and Paracel Islands, not to mention the never-ending row with Taiwan.
China is not yet acting aggressively and it may never do so. But it is asserting itself as the dominant regional power as it must do because the U.S. is no longer capable of policing this region. We should be wary.