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 a Spectator debate sponsored by Brewin Dolphin.
The novelist and military historian Brigadier Allan Mallinson proposed the motion — ‘The army, navy and air force are so 20th-century. Scrap them and have a massive British Marine Corps’ — with a heavy heart. ‘I love the armed forces,’ he said. ‘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. As Admiral Jackie Fisher once remarked, ‘the army should be a projectile fired by the navy’; but, Mallinson added, ‘the projectile does the killing’.
Adam Holloway MP, a former Grenadier Guardsman, imagined an army colonel salivating at the prospect of commanding a 2,200-strong unit equipped with artillery, fast jets, helicopters, amphibious landing trucks and other gleaming kit.
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