Great Britain No Longer Rules the Waves  Edward Lucas

Think about whether you can afford planned purchases and how you will use them. Common sense? Not on defence policy. Britain faces a £20 billion budget gap between what we want and what we can pay for. Worse, we do not know what our armed forces are for.

For decades, we tried to match America across the military spectrum in quality, if not in quantity. Anything our ally wants to do we aim to help with, from special forces to nuclear weapons.

That approach may be good for morale in Downing Street, where politicians enjoy looking like a superpower or at least strutting in the shadow of one. But it does not lead to sensible decisions. Our armed forces are expected to do everything but increasingly fail to do it properly. Bad luck and incompetence are partly to blame: spiralling costs on defence contracts, and a weaker pound. But the result is embarrassing, stressful, risky — and unsustainable.

As Justin Bronk, a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute think tank, argues, we have broadly two options. One is to stay global and retain the ability to fight expeditionary wars, albeit mostly alongside the Americans and against weaker, poorer countries. We will devote the Royal Navy to protecting the two new aircraft carriers. We may maintain our token deployment in Estonia (where our force lacks air defences, naval backup or logistical support). But we will no longer be able to fight land wars against Russia. If things go wrong, we will hope, along with the rest of Europe, that the Americans can deter a military attack or, failing that, that they turn up in time to prevent defeat.

This chimes with talk of “Global Britain”, and the country’s new direction after Brexit. We shun continental entanglements, and return to our 19th-century role as a global power.

France or Germany as Europe’s top military power is alarming

The opposite choice is to shed our global ambitions and concentrate on properly defending ourselves and our allies from Russia. That will mean a smaller but more heavily equipped army, most likely based in Poland (otherwise our troops will arrive too late for any likely conflict). It requires scrapping our amphibious warfare capability, which cannot operate against an advanced threat like Russia. The Royal Marines will be repurposed and probably slimmed down. The navy’s main task will be dealing with Russian submarines, meaning that the aircraft carriers will be white elephants. They can be lent to the Americans (who will be grateful, and have the fleet to protect them). Or they can fill some glorified trade-promotion and disaster-relief role.

Some will see that as a national humiliation and a trap. It ends 200 years of British imperial history and links us irrevocably to continental neighbours whose interests may differ from ours. The danger from the Kremlin may already have peaked. Some day we may want to be friends with Russia. Meanwhile, the cuts will be painful. Once we lose the Americans’ confidence, we will never regain it.

On the other hand, focusing our defence thinking on Europe balances the damage done by Brexit. We may no longer be part of the European Union’s bureaucracy, but we will have a much more important role in defence and security. The east European allies will be thrilled. So will non-Nato Finland and Sweden. None of these countries relishes being dependent on France. None views with equanimity a Europe in which Germany might eventually become the military as well as the economic hegemon. Moreover, the Trump administration has cast a grave shadow over the Atlantic alliance, and the Americans yearn in private for us to do one job properly rather than lots of them badly.

My preference is for the second option. The Continent is our neighbour whether we like it or not, so we had better be involved as much as possible. Defending our own shores (not least against Russia’s nosy, quiet, modern submarines) is the top priority. Better ties with European allies could help.

But any clear choice would be better than the current shambles. Postponing the already overdue defence review, as the government is set to do, is costly and risky. Fudging the eventual decision, which seems likely, will be even worse.

An even harder question concerns the future role that military defence should play in national security. Tanks don’t protect us, or our allies, from the Kremlin’s use of money, propaganda and subversion to stoke divisions in society and muddle decision-making. Nor do they prevent the danger we face from politically connected gangsters, as depicted in Misha Glenny’s McMafia. Nor do they do anything to prevent state-sponsored hackers from crippling our infrastructure or economy with cyberattacks.

Defending ourselves against these next-generation threats demands a thorough reassessment of resilience and deterrence. It should include some hard scrutiny of the weaknesses that Russia so ably exploits, such as the City’s addiction to dirty money. It requires new skills that we lack, and old ones we have forgotten. It means coordinating our domestic and foreign efforts, both inside and outside government, on a scale we have not done since the height of the Cold War. It will be costly, but perhaps better value for money than expensive pieces of military hardware, or a full-sized army whose ranks we are struggling to fill.

From my own experience of Whitehall, I doubt we will make the right choices. History suggests that this country is rather bad at national security until disaster strikes, when we hurl resources at the problem, bankrupting ourselves and winning only thanks to our allies. Will next time be any different?