Richard Seebohm
23/11/21
Under the auspices of the Oxford Changing Character of War Centre, I went to a lecture by a defence insider.
The UK military are climate aware. They know that climate change will destabilise the world and make local conflicts more likely. And they know that their role is to destroy things. They themselves have a target to be carbon neutral by 2050. The RAF want to do it by 2040. How? Our speaker thinks this not good enough. But I did not get the feeling that carbon emission audits were a fact of life. One statement that struck me was that the UK defence industry is no longer seen as a field of competing suppliers but as an asset to the UK armed services.
Informally, I asked whether armed drones could go the way of land mines and get banned. I said I was terrified of the scope for insurgents to deploy them on powers that be, or on benign powers that might one day be. I was told that they were too useful because of their ‘accuracy’. Mines had already been thought counter-productive.
I asked about nuclear warheads – what was the point of holding more than was needed to destroy life on earth? The savings from holding fewer would not be massive. The UK had cut delivery capability to a cost-saving minimum. France had more warheads than the UK. Israel had just 20, knowing where they might deploy them. Apparently the USA claimed to target nuclear strikes to within a prescribed area limit. The Russians were not so capable.
The North Pole is becoming an ocean, opening new trade and naval options. But the focus of geopolitical attention is now the Pacific and not the Atlantic side of the world. The UK military should be seeing the Europeans as more reliable partners than the US. The legacy tangle of the Middle East – and Afghanistan – seemed to me out of sight and out of mind (reminding me of the Chinese translation of this as ‘invisible idiot’).
The UK services think they are up to speed in cyber space and AI. But the Chinese hypersonic ballistic missile may be a ‘sputnik moment’.
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Forty-Three Newsletter • Number 512 • December 2021
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