Defence

Philip Hammond, the defence secretary, has a battle on his hands. 20 or so Tory MPs have signed John Baron’s amendment to the Defence Reform Bill. The bill aims to increase the strength of the Army Reserve (what you and I know affectionately as the Territorial Army) from 19,000 to 30,000 by 2018 in order to make up for personnel cuts to the regular army, the strength of which is to fall to 82,000. The Tory rebels worry that missed recruitment targets and rising costs prove that the plan is in trouble. As one of them puts it to Coffee House, ‘Recruiting is in chaos. CAPITA has failed in the out-sourcing

listen to ‘Hammond: ‘A Conservative government will never send our forces in to battle without the right kit’’ on Audioboo Philip Hammond’s speech to the Conservative conference was accompanied by the set of circumstances that most ministers have bad dreams about after eating too much cheese. First he was interrupted by two men in military clothing, shouting about defence cuts and fusiliers. ‘I’ll come and talk to you later, let me finish my speech,’ the Defence Secretary said, hopefully. The man didn’t stop, and was escorted from the floor, followed by a cloud of journalists scribbling away and enthusiastic photographers. Then the giant screens behind Hammond that were beaming two

When Ed Miliband dropped his support for the government’s motion on military intervention in Syria, it was seen as a convenient way of the Labour leader avoiding the thorny question of what his party really thinks about the principle of intervention. He and his team were astonished when David Cameron said ‘I get that’ and took the option off the table entirely, but privately they admitted that it wasn’t the most inconvenient thing that could happen. But today, Miliband’s Shadow Defence Secretary Jim Murphy delivered another one of his measured, impressive speeches on the party’s defence policy in which he reminded party activists that in spite of the ghosts of

Defence Questions this afternoon was, as you might expect, a rather chippy affair. It seemed that whenever Philip Hammond rose to answer a question, he answered it by reminding the Labour MP asking it of their party’s decision to oppose the government’s motion on Syria. Nowhere was this more the case than in the Defence Secretary’s exchange with Jim Murphy, where both men set out some interesting wriggle room in their party positions on a second vote. listen to ‘Hammond: ‘Circumstances would have to change very significantly’ before MPs get another vote on military action in Syria’ on Audioboo

Libya is a success from which David Cameron might not recover. This, at any rate, seems to be the fear of Sir David Richards who has marked his exit as head of the military with a Daily Telegraph interview. He appears to reinforcing a point David Cameron once made: ‘I am not,’ he once said, ‘a naive neo-con who thinks you can drop democracy out of an aeroplane at 40,000 feet.’  The Prime Minister was proved right in Libya: the Tomahawk missiles he fired at Libya cruised at just 400 feet before sinking into their targets which (in Gaddafi’s case) was enough to restrain the tyrant and introduce democracy. Bur

David Cameron and Vladimir Putin have just concluded their pre G8 talks, the main topic of which was Syria. Cameron wants to use the next few days to try and persuade the Russians to stop backing Assad; the weapons they’ve been sending him have enabled him to gain the upper hand on the rebels militarily. Cameron instinctively wants to do something about the slaughter in the Levant for both strategic and moral reasons. As one figure intimately involved in British policy making on Syria told me earlier, ‘The one certainty is that, if nothing is done, not only will lives be lost, not only will Assad not negotiate, but we

What is the point of Britain’s nuclear deterrent? If it is an insurance policy it is a remarkably expensive one that might not, in any case, ever be honoured. I suspect that, more importantly, retaining an independent [sic] nuclear capability is a psychological crutch for politicians who fear that leaving the nuclear club would somehow make it harder for Britain to remain a member of the Top Nation club. And perhaps it would. This is not necessarily a trivial thing. It would change the way we think of ourselves and might, in some sense, be considered an admission of defeat or as some kind of retreat. No Prime Minister wants

MPs on the Defence Select Committee made a similar warning this morning about the UK’s withdrawal from Afghanistan as Con Coughlin made in The Spectator last month. He wrote that Britain’s ‘attempt to undertake a dignified retreat from Kabul has all the makings of yet another Afghan disaster’. You can read the full piece here, but here are the main points that it makes, followed by the main warnings from the select committee’s report: 1. Is the ANSF ready to take over? Because of a failure to defeat or reach a political settlement with the Taleban, the withdrawal plan depends on trusting Afghan troops ‘who have already shown a worrying

David Cameron – who, in case you’d forgotten, leads the Conservative and Unionist Party – made a rare visit to Scotland yesterday. He spoke about defence. His message was clear: an independent Scotland could not expect to win defence contracts from what remains of the United Kingdom. Jobs and expertise, therefore, would be lost. Vote no. This is, as Iain Martin notes, smart politics. The Nationalists are weakest on those briefs which are the central functions of a nation state: defence, foreign policy and welfare. Cameron, as the British Prime Minister, should make more of this natural advantage. (Incidentally, Alex Massie has an excellent account of the referendum battle. It’s

Sometimes I wish Conservative cabinet ministers would couch their arguments in favour of the Union in terms of principle, not process or drab accountancy. Philip Hammond, the unimpressive Secretary of State for Defence, is the latest minister to warn that some of the perfectly solvable problems that are an inescapable feature of unwinding the United Kingdom are in fact so intractable that it’s a fool’s mission to even think about resolving them. Mr Hammond’s interview with the Daily Telegraph today is but the latest example of this question-begging. He appears to believe that Scottish independence is an idea so obviously ridiculous that it effectively refutes itself without the need for

On The Sunday Politics today, Vince Cable told Andrew Neil that he disliked ring fencing particular departments. But he accepted that the NHS and DFID budgets would remain protected for the rest of this parliament Cable, who joked that he was being fingered as a shop steward of the National Union of Ministers, made clear that he opposed any further welfare cuts. When asked about Philip Hammond’s comments that welfare should be cut not defence, Cable responded by saying that the Ministry of Defence should scrap Trident. Interestingly, Cable conceded that capital spending was still too low and that he would push for further increases in it in the Budget.