WEB EXCLUSIVE: Review of Spectator defence debate

‘The army, navy and air force are so 20th century. Scrap them and have a massive British Marine Corps.’

Just a few hours after the publication of the Strategic Defence and Security Review, two crack teams of speakers clashed over the future of the armed forces at the Spectator debate.

Brigadier Allan Mallinson, the novelist and military historian, proposed the motion with a heavy heart. ‘I love the armed forces,’ he confessed. ‘I watch the “Battle of Britain” with tears in my eyes.’ But the trinitarian approach had failed. He imagined a new combined force under the command of an army general. Admiral Jackie Fisher once remarked, ‘the army should be a projectile fired by the navy’, and it was crucial to remember that ‘it’s the projectile that does the killing.’ During WWII the forces had allowed one service, the RAF, to break out of a co-ordinated strategy and to pursue ‘the false doctrine that aerial bombardment could win the war’. Since then Britain has built up ‘massive capabilities’ by sea and air – forces that can prevent defeat but not deliver victory. The army alone can do that. So the new combined force must be led by a soldier.

Adam Holloway MP, a former Grenadier Guardsman, imagined an army colonel salivating at the prospect of commanding a 2,200-strong marine expeditionary unit equipped with artillery, fast jets, helicopters, amphibious landing trucks and a host of other gleaming kit. But the financial savings of a merged force would be far smaller than was claimed. The outlay on procurement, training, food and accommodation would be unchanged while the cost to morale, and the blurring of services’ individual identities, would be damaging. It was wrong to regard the US Marine Corps as a model because the USMC has only a tactical capability.