Old soldiers never die, in the words of the barrack ballad, but increasingly they do not fade away either. With an unusually intense public focus on defence issues thanks to the insistence of Donald Trump that Europe up its military spending pronto, platoons of former senior officers are now popping out of the woodwork to weigh in with analysis and advice on what needs to be done.
Last week, General Sir Richard Shirreff, former deputy supreme allied commander Europe for Nato, told the i that defence spending would need to rise to 3 per cent of GDP as a minimum. The government, he also said, should consider limited conscription of 30,000 a year to increase the size of the army. Perhaps now that Keir Starmer has said that defence spending will rise to 3 per cent of GDP in the next parliament, the General will be happy.
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