Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The cost of saving the Army

We have led the magazine this week on coming Tory defence cuts, with a brilliant piece by Max Hastings. Look closely at the cover image (our second by Christian Adams) and you can see the guillotine blade will hit he RAF and Navy guys before the Army. This, Hastings argues, will be the effect of the Tory Strategic Defence Review. And even this will leave cuts of up to 20 per cent across the defence budget under the Tories. How could Cameron justify that, in this dangerous world of ours? David Cameron prepares the ground today with an important speech in Chatham House promising “one of the most radical departures in security policy we’ve seen in decades”. He goes on to say that “We need to do much better at stopping wars from ever starting. That means really focussing on the causes of conflicts and then joining all that together to make sure that DfID and the Foreign Office deliver a really tight, tied-up, progressive approach.”

One should not waste too much time wondering how DFiD could have stopped the Rwandan genoide, the Yugoslavian ethnic cleansing, the terror state of Afghanistan – and the other areas where our military has intervened, or ought to have. Cameron’s speech is the logic which a government has to embrace if it has decided to decimate its defence spending (as the Tories will, due to the pressures created by their NHS pledge). The financial pressure for disarmament comes first, the diplomatic logic second. We’ve seen the military chiefs fighting with each other recently, which cannot but weaken  their hand ahead of next year’s Strategic Defence Review. It gets worse, as the MoD is being landed with huge bills – for Eurofighters, too expensive to cancel. And other bills, which Brown has cynically earmarked for payment after the election.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in