Are we wasting money on defence?

Backing the Americans in Iraq has not served the national interest, says Paul Robinson; we’d be more secure if we adopted a less interventionist foreign policy and reduced our military capacity

Soldiers are not social workers. They fight and they kill — that is what they are trained to do. They are not trained to ‘do good’. Yet turn to the Ministry of Defence website and you will see that the very first words on the ‘Army Jobs: Army Life’ recruiting page are, ‘The British Army is a force for good.’ The site then goes on to stress the army’s activities ‘around the world’. Defending the UK barely gets a mention. Similarly, the Labour party’s defence website, under the heading ‘Our Approach’, states immediately that ‘Labour believes that Britain should act as a force for good in the world.’ (One wonders whether they think that Conservatives believe that Britain should act as a force for evil.)

The ‘goodness’ concept seems to have evolved over the past seven years from being something of an afterthought to being the central plank of the UK’s defence policy. In the 1998 Strategic Defence Review (SDR) the phrase ‘force for good’ did appear, but at the very end of the document, without any great emphasis. Kosovo, however, seems to have convinced Tony Blair that military force was an appropriate means of reshaping the world for the better. The 1999 Defence White Paper elevated the concept to its first chapter under the heading ‘Our Security Priorities’. Even then, being a ‘force for good’ was the last of the defence priorities listed. Four years later, however, the idea had been promoted again, and was now one of the defence ‘visions’.

The 2003 Defence White Paper identified three ‘visions’ for Britain’s armed forces. These were: defending the United Kingdom and its interests; strengthening international peace and security; [being] a force for good in the world.