The Wrong Stuff

Don't even think about rebuilding western militaries.

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Thanks to those who continue to provide translations. Versions in Spanish are available here, and some Italian versions of my essays are available here. Marco Zeloni is also posting some Italian translations, and has written to me to say that he has set up a dedicated website for them at https://trying2understandw.blogspot.com/. Thanks, Marco. I’m pleased to say that another translation into French by Philippe Lerch is ready, and I will be posting it soon. Now then:

So deluded and out of touch are western political leaderships and their sycophants these days, that politicians and pundits are still talking about rebuilding western military forces, and doing something, not quite sure what, with them after that. I’ve pointed out at possibly excessive length that industrially, organisationally and financially this is all fantasy. For severely practical reasons, the mass armies of the twentieth century are now gone, and cannot be recreated, absent some train of events better confined to a science fiction film.

But at least, you would think, the wealth, technological sophistication and democratic systems of the West would mean that the much smaller forces that are left would be properly funded, equipped and trained, and would be operationally effective. You would be wrong, and it’s not just me saying that. The media has been full of stories recently about the problems western militaries are facing, and no doubt by the time you read this, there will have been more. Some of them are, at least on the surface, purely technical, like the much publicised misadventures of the US F-35 aircraft, or the British Type 45 air defence destroyer. Some are technical and managerial, like the discovery that the sixty year-old Minuteman nuclear missiles operated by the United States can no longer be maintained, and will be too expensive to replace. Some are of stupefying banality, like the discovery that German plans to send a Brigade to Latvia will have to await the increased availability of boots and socks, never mind personal weapons. Some verge on outright farce, with stories about the Royal Navy advertising on LinkedIn for a commander of its submarine force.

And then there are recruitment problems, which may seem surprising given the endemic economic recession in the West which can only get worse, and the relatively good pay and prospects in the military. Several navies, including the British and the Americans, have had to put ships on standby and reduce crew numbers. Most European militaries have higher-level combat formations that are way below their notional strength, and would be effectively useless on operations. Obesity, other health problems, lack of technical qualifications, drug use, criminal convictions and similar impediments mean that a large proportion of the target population (in the US it’s up to 75%) are simply ineligible for service anyway.

It shouldn’t be like this. Major Western countries are now spending as much on defence, if not more, than they did forty years ago, and yet their front-line forces continue to shrink in size. It’s reasonable to ask, where is all this money actually going?  And why does the actual defence output seem to go down from year to year? Why is it so hard to recruit enough personnel in a harsh economic climate, when stable careers are difficult to find elsewhere? After all, women and sexual minorities are now welcomed with open arms, so the overall recruitment pool has obviously increased.

I believe, to put it simply, that the West (with some few exceptions) no longer knows how to “do” defence and the military. There are a number of reasons for this, which I’ll go through, but the consequences are potentially frightening. Already, western militaries would be largely dysfunctional in any serious conflict. Within a decade, they may be completely dysfunctional for all except ceremonial purposes. Let’s look at why.

The first requirement is to distinguish between potentially-soluble and non-soluble problems. Things like criminal convictions and drug use can be provisionally put to one side. Some health problems - diabetes, for example, which is increasingly common— are hard to reconcile with a military career, but others can be managed. Up to a certain point, a generally low level of health and excess weight are things that can be dealt with, if you are prepared to put a great deal of time and effort into tackling them with new recruits. After all, there’s nothing unusual about soldiers being in poor physical condition: when Britain introduced conscription in 1916, the authorities were horrified at the poor physical state of many of the recruits. Anecdotally, many of the private soldiers who fought were barely 1,50 metres in height, and officers often stood at least a head taller than the men they were commanding.

So, at least at the margins, there are a few things that could be done. But quite obviously, the larger problem lies elsewhere, and to understand it, we need to go back a little in history. In early societies, remember, there was effectively no distinction between adult males and warriors. In some societies, indeed, access to adulthood status was dependent on taking part in “warlike” activities, such as cattle-raiding. In epics from the Iliad to Beowulf to the Norse Sagas, fighting is just something that men and communities do, and poor communities rob and pillage wealthier ones. (If you’ve seen the 2022 film The Northman you’ll have some idea of what such a society must have been like, as well as the deliberately frightening and dangerous rituals inflicted to mark the passage into manhood.)

As societies became more complex and developed an agricultural surplus, it became possible for groups to become in effect, professional soldiers. In Europe (since this essay is limited to the West) this generally went in hand with ownership of land in return for the obligation of military service and the requirement to raise troops locally. A typical  example is the composition of the English Army at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, which was essentially an army of contractors and sub-contractors, all supported by a surprisingly professional service for pay and rations. There were also plenty of independent groups of soldiers who fought for anyone, and lived mainly by plunder.

As wars increasingly became formalised struggles between princes for the control of land and resources, a more professional officer class developed, generally from the aristocracy, often acting as contractors and raising regiments for service in a particular war or campaign. Regiments could, and did, move from the service of one ruler to another as the market developed. With the exception of the mass of volunteers and later levies of the French Revolution, the role of the common man was limited to enlisting for pay, loot and a bit of adventure, or to escape poverty and perhaps prison on the one hand, and simply being picked up and “pressed” into service on the other. It would have been strange to talk of being “qualified” for a “military career.”

This changed at the end of the nineteenth century, when economic growth and state development meant it was possible to recruit and train large standing armies, made up for the most part of conscripts: no longer was there a “campaigning season” after which wars had to stop for the harvest to be brought in, and because logistics and movement were impossibly difficult. The development of railways transformed the ability to move troops to where they were wanted. Young men would, with few exceptions, be conscripted to serve at least a year, often two, in units to which they would return in times of war. Considerable effort went into the organisation of mobilisation and the transport of forces to where they ere needed: it was famously said that the most brilliant Prussia staff officers were sent to the Railway Staff.

Because the British and Americans chose the path of professional armies, except for periods of tension and war, we tend to forget how deeply ingrained the idea of “service to the nation” actually was, and how universal were assumptions about military service, both as an ethical duty and a coming-of-age ritual. All that disappeared in the decade or so after the end of the Cold War, as European nations struggled to adapt to a completely new concept of the military, and its relationship to society. New armies were radically smaller, not necessarily better equipped, and had to compete for professional recruits against all other prospective employers. The massive infrastructure that had supported the training of conscripts, and the large number of officers and NCOs that existed to train them, pretty much all disappeared. For reasons discussed in earlier essays, it would take a generation to reconstruct these arrangements, even if it were physically possible. But more importantly, there was really no idea what these remaining forces were actually for. In the old days, most European nations had small professional components who would be deployed on active operations overseas, There were political, and often legal, obstacles to deploying conscripts outside the country except in times of general war.

All this changed, but in a rather haphazard fashion, driven by events that were not really foreseeable. Quite quickly, armies in the middle of such transformations found themselves part of UN Peacekeeping Missions in Bosnia, where there was no peace to keep, deployed in the same country subsequently as part of a NATO force that effectively had nothing to do, deployed into Kosovo for reasons that were never clear, and then suddenly arriving in Afghanistan to support fantastical nation-building schemes while dodging attacks from Improvised Explosive Devices and suicide bombers. And then overnight, these same armies, including the British and Americans, after a generation of low intensity operations by small units, are suddenly expected to train Ukrainian soldiers in high-intensity, large-scale, high-technology warfare, of a kind that none of them have ever experienced, and few have ever even studied. So when you see videos of Ukrainian soldiers attacking in platoon-size units and even below, what you’re really seeing is a vision of warfare learned in Afghanistan, passed on to young officers and NCOs who were not actually there, and now taught to Ukrainian soldiers as the Truth about War.

Now of course militaries are demand-led, and can retool and reorient themselves when required, as they did after the Cold War. In the First World War, after all, the British Army, which had not operated seriously above battalion level for generations (the Boer War being a bit different) did eventually learn how to conduct large-scale operations quite well, under the stress of absolute war. But if we assume that the future of western armies is somehow to act as a counterweight to large, sophisticated high-tech Russian forces commanded by officers whose entire careers have been spent learning about and practising large-scale high-intensity warfare, then, well, it’s not even clear where you would begin, still less that you would ever succeed.

Leaving aside the fact that for industrial, technical and infrastructure reasons it’s unlikely that western armies will ever be able to deploy again above Brigade level, you also have to have to consider the professional orientation and experience of the commanders. Armies tend to be run at the top by officers in their 50s. Very well, assume an officer born in 1970, and so at University or undergoing officer training at the end of the Cold War. The summit of his command experience might be as a battalion commander in Iraq, or more probably in Afghanistan, dodging IEDs and taking part in small-scale skirmishes.

Simply to understand what the Russians are doing now in Ukraine and how they fight, therefore, requires an intellectual leap in size and complexity that not all such officers will be capable of, and helps to explain a number of, let’s say, curious statements that have come from senior western officers since the start of the war, as well as the way in which Ukrainians have been trained. But even if western armies could once again study effectively the type of operations the Russians are conducting, they do not have the forces available to reciprocate, and almost certainly never will. Western armies are now effectively out of the game the Russians are playing. This would not matter if relations with Russia were good (and if relations with Russia had been good, the Russians would not have built up their forces to such a degree) but it seems particularly obtuse to make an enemy of a nation that has much greater military potential than you have.

So how did we get here? Well, I’ve explained the political and strategic side of it. But what about the resource side? Where did all this money go? Why, for example, can the Lebanese Armed Forces, not the wealthiest military in the world, have a dozen Brigades deployed on operations, as well as numerous independent regiments, whereas the British, with their massively greater resources and a larger Army, would be pushed to deploy two? And in this, the British are the norm, rather than the exception.

The paradox has no one single cause, but is probably due more than anything else to the move since the 1980s towards managing defence as budgets, rather than programmes. Let me expand on that slightly gnomic statement. In the private sector, it is accepted that companies can and will manipulate their financial statements to inflate their profits and minimise their losses where possible. It’s also accepted that there is a distinction between the financial picture (a company makes increased profits by selling off assets) and the reality (it is doing so in a desperate attempt to avoid going out of business.) In a world where only profits and the share price matter, it is at least a coherent strategy for the short term. If you think about it, it’s also a ridiculous strategy for the public sector, since what matters, and what the voters want, is output for the long term. But from the 1980s onwards, beginning in Britain and spreading rapidly, the idea of managing the defence programme in terms of budgets, and the “efficient” spending of money took over. This meant, in effect, abandoning the previous pattern of managing programmes for capability output, and managing them instead according to budgetary limits. And as time passed, the poisonous theories of management consultants about “efficiency” began to seep into the public sectors of a number of countries.

What this may mean in practical terms is that, for example, if the Air Force of your country has a flying training budget and the price of oil goes up sharply, flying training will have to be reduced, even if other parts of defence cannot spend all the money they are given. Likewise, if the delivery of a new aircraft is delayed by a few weeks, and falls into the next financial year, you will have to cut or delay other items in your programme for the following year to make up for it, even if there are large underspends elsewhere. Now this blight has affected different countries in different ways, and some more than others, but the overall result is to stress financial outcomes in preference to real ones. Among other things, this is because financial outcomes are (relatively) easy to measure, whereas defence output is much more subjective. The mentality is summed up by a story, much told in Whitehall and that I had from an extremely reliable source. Mrs Thatcher’s determination to introduce a new generation strategic nuclear missile system, the Trident, to replace the existing Polaris, was not accompanied by extra money for the defence budget to make this possible. The result was massive cuts and delays in the conventional equipment programme throughout the 1980s and 1990s, which had knock-on effects whose consequences still persist in some cases. It is said that when an extremely senior official went to tell the Minister of the day that this was so, the response was, “then use creative accounting.” But of course all the creative accounting in the world can’t help when your requirements are greater than your resources.

The net effect of managing by budgets is that you lose sight of what you were trying to do in the first place. So for example, as equipment deliveries are delayed to stay within budgets, and as numbers are reduced, the price goes up, and existing equipment has to be expensively refurbished. This puts further pressure on the equipment budget, resulting in further cuts and delays, which in turn increase budgetary pressures … und so weiter. And when you are in a financial crisis, you cut what you can cut, whether it makes sense or not. You cut spares, you cut ammunition, you cut activity levels, thus ultimately leading to todays’s situation where the military units the West retains are fragile structures that can only operate for a few days or a week before running out of resources.

It didn’t have to be like this, and at one point both the French and the Germans had better systems. The French system, with ruthless Gallic logic, was organised by priorities. The first priority was the strategic nuclear force, which got everything it needed. The next priority was Africa, and the remains were for other programmes, including French forces in Germany. (The contrast between the level of resources allocated to the French and British nuclear forces in the 1980s and 90s was extraordinary to behold.) The Germans, meanwhile, with their traditional Prussian model of “centralised decision and decentralised execution”, and their deliberate concentration on a small number of roles, managed to last throughout the Cold War without major budgetary problems. Alas, those two countries, like so many others, now have defence programmes run by those who want financial outcomes rather than real ones. Which is fine until you have to start shooting people and find you have no ammunition.

It’s hard to see this changing, and the return to a system based on outputs rather than money. But it’s worth stressing also that the the factors described above—sudden and violent changes in missions, massive cuts in force structures, uncertainty about the future—make construction of an evenly remotely rational programme extremely difficult anyway . Equipment that takes ten years to design and prototype, which suffers changes along the way as new missions are added, which will have then to remain in service for a generation irrespective of how the world changes, has never been easy to manage, but one can reasonably ask whether anyone is left now of a generation that knew how to manage such programmes effectively anyway. And whereas in the Cold War much of European defence industry was state-owned, what remains now is as hungry for quarterly profits increases as any other sector, and is quite capable of telling lies about timescales, costs and progress if they think it is in their interests to do so. Meanwhile the Russians have the advantage that they know exactly what their military forces are for, and design and produce accordingly.

And then, of course, there are the human beings. The overall quality and worth of military forces is about more than just their lethality in combat. Morale, leadership, organisation, discipline, career prospects, integrity, even the small details of personnel management, matter a lot in keeping together a force which might just as easily be ordered to restore calm to a town where rival militias have clashed through patrolling without using force, as to engage in deliberate combat. But you have to give them the training to enable them to carry out operations at all points along the spectrum. After the end of the Cold War, it did seem briefly to some nations that the future lay in gendarmerie-style peacekeeping forces, operating by consent among friendly populations. In reality, such forces turned out to be useless when somebody shot at them: not simply did they not know how to react, but in some cases, like the disastrous Canadian deployment to Somalia, they panicked and carried out atrocities against the local population.

So a country that wants a capable military has to train and equip them to do the difficult things, not just the easy ones. As was frequently said (but insufficiently understood) in the 1990s, “peacekeeping is war-fighting minus, not the other way round.” But years of budget cuts and peacekeeping operations, and deployments to places like Afghanistan, have dulled this perception, and it’s an open question whether many western militaries would even be capable of fighting a war of the type that is under way in Ukraine without coming to pieces.

All of the above has caused something of an existential crisis in military recruitment, albeit one that governments themselves have difficulty in recognising through the fog of management speak that infests their brains. Put simply, what is it that you want your military to do? Oh, generalities about peace and stability, NATO membership, international security and so forth come easily, but few countries are actually able to answer a simple question from a prospective recruit: yes, but what will I actually be doing and why? After all, consider a young man joining the military in 1985, expecting to fight the Soviet Union. His first operational deployment might actually have been Gulf War 1,0, followed by Bosnia, followed by Kosovo, followed by Gulf War 2,0, followed by Afghanistan. In retirement, he sees a younger generation obliged to treat Russia as the enemy again.

For the military, the question, What will I be doing and why? is more significant than it would be for most civilian jobs, because the actual content of the job, and the way it’s carried out, are very different. Potential danger is the most obvious difference of course, and not just on operations. Training itself can be dangerous, not to mention flying inherently unstable jet aircraft that will fall out of the sky if you lose power, or helicopters that might go down in bad weather. But there are other differences as well: operating in all weathers and temperatures for long periods, perhaps without sleep or food. Being away on deployments or on a ship for months at a time, living in close proximity to others with little privacy. Being stationed in remote areas with few amenities, obliged to limit your social activities. Living a literally regimented life. Accepting discipline and obeying orders, and a code of military law generally more constraining than anything civilians have to respect.

So how do you sell someone a job like that? And how do you keep them, once they have families to worry about, and skills they could take elsewhere? It’s clear that western governments in general have no idea. Recruitment is essentially an accounting exercise, all about numbers (It’s not surprising that in Britain contracts have been given to the private sector.) There is no convincing narrative to tell prospective military personnel why they should enlist or stay: rather, advertising stresses issues such as diversity, tolerance for difference and so forth, which can certainly increase interest in the military in certain areas, but by definition can’t guarantee anything about the quality of the applicants.

It’s worth mentioning one European country that has had fewer problems than others recruiting and retaining personnel since it moved to a professional military twenty years ago. The French have had, and largely retain, a positive image of their military. National military service was, in fact, historically a political cause of the Left, since they feared the political power of a professional army. It was accepted as an obligation for over a century, not joyfully, perhaps, but willingly enough, as a rite of passage towards full citizenship, and a way of mixing classes and ethnic and social groups together. France had no real anti-nuclear movement, even in the 1980s, and the Left has never been pacifist, reflecting the Jacobin traditions of the Revolution.

The explanation is simple enough: the French military is about national defence. Politicians of all stripes have used the vocabulary of national interest without embarrassment, and throughout the Cold War, the semi-detached relationship with NATO, and the independence of the French nuclear force and intelligence services were seen as helping to safeguard French national security and territorial integrity in a very direct fashion. To a large extent this is still true, though it’s something that Mr Macron clearly finds embarrassing to contemplate.

Anglo-Saxon countries do not have this discourse available to them. The lack of land frontiers, and the squeamishness about making direct appeals to national interest mean that they tie themselves in rhetorical knots trying to explain what their military is actually supposed to do. (I never did find out what the single Regiment of tanks in the Australian Army was actually for, for example.) The result of this has been a series of cosmetic initiatives designed to blur the difference between the military and other professions, and make a military career seem less demanding than it really is. Now it’s fair enough to stress positive aspects of military life (a point I’ll come back to) but much of the recruiting publicity in Anglo-Saxon countries (and increasingly elsewhere) presents a fundamentally misleading impression of military life and operations, which of course means that retaining people recruited under false pretences is extremely difficult. Much of this misdirection is by simple omission, and it will be interesting to see how such video coverage of the war in Ukraine as is accessible in the West affects the willingness of young people to join up. It wasn’t so long ago that think-tanks and even governments confidently predicted that the “next war” (against someone or other) would be fought mainly in cyberspace, by teenage hackers in uniform, and would substantially resemble a video game mixed with “information operations” to demoralise the enemy. Now to some extent that’s true of Ukraine, but of course there’s the other little bit as well: trenches, mud, rain, mines and ice, hand-to-hand combat, long-range slaughter by missiles and artillery and terrifying weapons like the TOS-1A Heavy Flamethrower system. Who’s going to join an Army which has no equivalent or counter to the weapons the Russians are now deploying?

Military service (which, let us recall, also existed in Britain and the US for some years after 1945), was in many ways the paradigm of the transition from adolescence to manhood (women in combat roles is such a different issue that I’ll leave it to one side here.) As an adolescent, broadly, you are protected, you live with the family and you receive education and care. Military service was one way of “putting away childish things” as St Paul put it, leaving home for the first time, taking responsibility, and assuming a protecting role for the rest of the population. But that was also in an era when the distinction between adolescence and maturity was relatively formalised, when boys “grew up,” “settled down,” “took responsibility” and usually married and started a family. And military service, just like marriage, was a rite of passage from individual freedom towards responsibility for yourself and others.

Now, whatever you think of such past social dynamics, they clearly bear no relationship to the world in which young people grow up today. The keynote objective of modern Liberal societies is ego gratification, and the greatest harm one can inflict on another is to stop them doing or being what they want. In place of the marked divide in the past between adolescence and adulthood, the objective now is a permanently extended childhood, in which we demand that universities, employers and government play the role of protecting parents, and that we are preserved from anything that might upset or offend us. Now, this is not a complaint about Young People Today, who in my experience are actually less happy and less secure than previous generations brought up differently.

But it is a consequence of the triumph of liberal attitudes since the late 1960s, although not in ways that might be obvious. (I’ve been accused of bad-mouthing the sixties which is quite wrong: it was the happiest decade of my life.) The generational revolt against parental authority which characterised 1968 and the years that followed, itself produced a yearning for perpetual adolescence, with its love-hate relationship with parents against whom we rebelled in principle, but who in the last analysis we knew would always protect us. Emblematic of the period was the book Playpower by Richard Neville, editor of the alternative magazine Oz, whose title is drawn from that “land I heard of, once in a lullaby.” It’s not unreasonable to see the intellectual developments that followed, from critical sociology to post-modernism to identity politics, as attempts to shift responsibility for ourselves and our conduct, and that of others, onto quasi-parental abstractions like “society” and “patriarchy” whose addresses are unknown and who therefore cannot be interrogated.

Which is fine as far as it goes. It produced a certain type of society which many people value very highly. But like any model of society, it has its advantages and disadvantages. One of the disadvantages, to which I am not the only one to draw attention, is that a society based on ruthless individualism and ego gratification not only finds it hard to act collectively against any problem, but finds it impossible to create a discourse to explain why others should make sacrifices, or behave altruistically towards society as a whole. Indeed, the very concept of society “as a whole” now has little meaning in our identity-obsessed world. This is a bad enough problem with our society’s attitude to teachers, nurses, police officers, or anyone else who works for the public good. But our society is, and has shown itself to be, completely incapable of finding a discourse to persuade young people to join the military, and to accept hardship, discipline, lack of freedom and occasional risk or outright danger in the interests of others. All it can do is fall back on clever advertising campaigns. As with much of what remains of the public sector, the military has become a Lego kit to arrange in a morally pleasing configuration, not a tool to actually use.

This would matter much less if our society had retained the anti-militarism that began in the 1960s, superficial as most of that was. But from the 1990s onwards, the Notional Left began to veer increasingly towards a kind of humanitarian militarism (less politely, humanitarian fascism) which saw the use of violence as a perfectly acceptable tool to overthrow recalcitrant states and rulers, and to remake them in our Liberal image. The current hysteria on that part of the political spectrum about Russia suggests that, if anything, this tendency will become more marked over the next few years. But there’s no point in willing the ends if you are not going to provide the means. To my knowledge, none of the numerous politicians across the political spectrum who want to make war on Russia has given any thought to how the military personnel required will be recruited, or what narrative will be given to them to join and stay in the military.

I was never attracted by a military career, and what I have seen of the military over some decades now, in many countries, confirms my belief that it was not for me. But it is, and remains, a career for certain types of people, who value collective effort, comradeship and a structured existence, who don’t mind personal hardship and even danger, and who want to do exciting and difficult things. The trouble is that our society has spent fifty years moving its norms in the opposite direction, and making do with a smaller and smaller proportion of the population who retain these atavistic sentiments. Now that politicians across the spectrum have decided they need these people, they have lost the ability to speak to them.

So I repeat, even if the immense organisational, technical and industrial challenges of rebuilding defence could be overcome, you still need large numbers of Mk 1 human beings ready to embrace the military life. As things stand, far from enlarging our armed forces over the next decade, I suspect that most western countries will do well to avoid losing them all together. I’m not sure the Russians have quite the same problem.