On Tuesday, Admiral Tony Radakin finished his term as Chief of the Defence Staff much as he started it – dealing with the immediate and long-term consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. There is an irony that Radakin, appointed by Boris Johnson to ‘restore Britain’s position as the foremost naval power in Europe’ as part of a global, maritime strategy, has been defined by his response to a major land war in Europe.
During a flying visit to Kyiv, the Ukrainian commander-in-chief praised Radakin for his ‘personal contribution’ to stiffening Ukraine’s defences, and for being the ‘leading advocate’ for providing it with lethal weapons when others wobbled. Radakin was leading negotiations on potential security guarantees until his last day.
Beyond Ukraine, his tenure has been characterised by the setting of a coherent vision for the future of defence, the rejection of fatalism about a war between Nato and Russia, securing cross-party agreement for substantially increased defence spending, and a commitment to strengthening the bonds between Britain’s armed forces and its allies. This has earned him both plaudits and brickbats. It will only be possible to judge his true legacy in a decade.
Even the optimistic Radakin himself admitted the military was ‘not as strong as we could be’
He has certainly been busy. Radakin has served two monarchs, worked for four prime ministers and three UK defence secretaries, and with two US defense secretaries, and four US equivalents. During his time, the UK military trained 60,000 Ukrainian troops and provided £18 billion in bilateral military support to Kyiv. It struck Houthi targets in Yemen and the Red Sea, helped defend Israel from Iranian missile attack, and evacuated thousands by air from Sudan. The MoD committed ships, aircraft and troops to Nato while also conducting two large aircraft carrier deployments to the Far East and supporting major national events such as the late Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, her funeral, the Coronation, and VE Day.
Despite this operational activity, there can be no sugar-coating of the current fragility of UK defence. Even the optimistic Radakin himself admitted the military was ‘not as strong as we could be’. This is the result of an illusory peace dividend, the legacy of land wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, dysfunctional procurement, inter-service squabbling, and funding decisions taken well over a decade ago; real-term defence spending fell by 22 per cent between 2009 and 2017. The UK has an ageing nuclear deterrent, personnel shortages, reduced stockpiles, a much-diminished fleet, fewer combat aircraft, and an army in desperate need of recapitalisation. Although defence spending has recovered since 2017, turning around years of disarmament is going to be hard.
When becoming CDS, Radakin was clear about the implications of the return of the state as the ‘central, indispensable’ feature of the international system. This required a move beyond ‘competing’ with our adversaries in some imaginary grey zone to ‘confronting’ them head on. As John Bew, the foreign policy adviser to four recent prime ministers, including Starmer, wrote: ‘we are not in a rule-of-law era today. Instead, raw power is being asserted everywhere we look’.
Radakin also warned that the UK was entering a ‘third nuclear age’, characterised by ‘multiple and concurrent dilemmas, proliferating nuclear and disruptive technologies, and the almost total absence of the security architectures that went before’. In this era of instability, he deduced that the armed forces required modernisation, strengthening and integrating both nuclear and conventional deterrence, and bolstering the UK’s collective security via Nato and key partners, in particular the US.
His thinking cascaded into this year’s National Security Strategy and Strategic Defence Review with their sharpened, realist approach to defence and security, emphasis on sovereign capabilities, and harnessing of industry as an instrument of national power. Despite voices urging a focus exclusively on European defence and a continental strategy, Radakin resisted retrenchment to a fortress Britain, shook the dust of constabulary operations from the MoD’s boots, re-centred on Britain’s Atlantic flank, and restored the connecting nature of the sea at the heart of a traditional maritime strategy to contain Russia.
Huge investments are planned in both the nuclear and conventional deterrent (7,000 long-range missiles are promised), and next generation nuclear submarines and stealth aircraft. These, our ‘biggest’ capabilities, ‘cannot be improvised’, in the words of William Howard Taft, the 27th American president. ‘[They] must be built and in existence when the emergency arises’. The army will get £40 billion of investment. New digital, autonomous and unmanned technologies are promised to restore military mass at a lower cost. Labour hope that this will translate into more British jobs, skills, exports, and a stronger and more resilient defence industrial base. This will all take time.
Having charted the strategic course for defence, delivery will be left to Radakin’s successors. There are many risks. Funding will remain tight until 2030 when a ‘generational’ increase in defence and security spending to 5 per cent of GDP is promised. The country’s current financial travails could easily blow this off track, and some of the technological enthusiasm in the SDR is probably too good to be true. Experts worry that increased nuclear spending will hollow out our conventional forces.
It remains to be seen whether Radakin’s outward-looking vision of Britain at the heart of a grand, global coalition of like-minded nations survives insular temptation to revert to nativist navel-gazing. Retired generals still complain the army is too small. The MoD itself is again embarking on reform to increase accountability, reduce hierarchies, and remove layers of process which have traditionally acted as a brake on getting things done; previous reform efforts have stalled.
After a very busy and consequential time, Radakin deserves a brief rest. One influential US defence podcast said that ‘he steered the United Kingdom through turbulent strategic waters and never lost sight of the human beings who wear the uniform’. He is likely to be the last CDS from the Royal Navy for a while. Judging by his time in office, in retirement he will be a firm, loyal and discreet voice. He is unlikely to be, as Gladstone warned about former prime ministers, an untethered raft ‘drifting around harbours – a menace to shipping’. He still has much to offer.
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