Thin Pinstriped Line

According to  the Sun , in an article so exclusive it had  already been written about  by multiple different organisations already and put out in a press release for the whole world to read, UK defence spending has declined to 8 th  in the world. This is apparently a bad thing as our spending is now lower than France or Germanys. Cue moaning, ranting and harrumphing about how this isn’t good enough. The problem is that the article isn’t actually true. Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright What has actually happened is that a well known think tank called ‘SIPRI’ (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute) has published its annual estimate of global military expenditure. This is an attempt to state how much money each country in the world is spending on defence and rank accordingly. The challenge is that the Institute can be rather fickle in its assessment of what constitutes defence spending, with a lengthy list of criteria about what the...

Should the UK bring back National Service? A perennial space filler for bored columnists, people talking in pubs and any many of other social situations where people can blame the lack of discipline in todays society on the fact that todays youth have never heard the sweet whispered tones of an angry Sergeant Major on the parade ground. The latest contribution to the debate came today in a paper written by RAND, partly funded by the MOD by Professor Hew Strachan ‘The Utility of military force and public understanding in todays Britain’ . One of the key findings of the paper was that a discussion on National Service should not be off the table in perpetuity, but instead considered in an appropriate manner. The article has been picked up online and in the press. This has quickly led to some suggestions by observers that what the author was trying to suggest was that we should bring back conscription, get the youth of today to be forced to serve and that we should see a return t...

The Ministry of Defence has been accused of censorship and attempting to muzzle serving personnel’s ability to contact the press by publication of its media policy. The DIN (which can be found here ) was seen in some parts of social media as an attack on fundamental ability of personnel to raise concerns and the press to hold the MOD to account. Is this fair criticism, is this a new policy and why would the MOD be so restrictive to how its people communicate about their work? From the outset, its important to be clear, despite the perception that some have, this is not a new policy document. In fact, complaints about this policy surface relatively regularly, with a Guardian article from 2007 being the earliest example of complaints about it. The DIN itself was first published online in 2008, so its been around for about 13 years – so hardly a new story. What seems to have occurred is the latest version of it has been issued online, hence the response. 4.5 Media Contact Polic...

There has been much speculation in the press this weekend about ‘Cobra’ meetings, who goes to them and whether a failure by the Prime Minister to attend implies that somehow an issue doesn’t really matter. Is this fair comment, or is it perhaps an indication that people don’t understand fully how the UK system of government works? There has been a growing tendency in recent years to focus on attendance, perhaps over asking what the purpose or value of attendance is, and in turn to focus less on the output of the meetings, and more on who was present. At its heart is perhaps the problem of trying to understand how the UK system of crisis management works. We are not a presidential system, and while the Prime Minister of the day holds sway, this person is the head of Government and not the head of state. Their cabinet is intended to bring empowered people together to lead their respective parts of government machinery to a common end. Nowhere is this more visible than the m...

The Royal Navy has confirmed that HMS QUEEN ELIZABETH will next sail on 27 April as part of her long planned programme. This news, confirmed via the Sunday Times today raised questions about whether the ship should sail, and how she could keep her crew safe given the fact that both US and French carriers have returned to port due to COVID-19 outbreaks. The pandemic and ensuing lockdown has raised all manner of challenges and issues for the armed forces, and this is the latest example of how, for at least the next few months short term protection may have a potentially longer term impact. But the response has also shown the armed forces at their finest, with all three Services quickly rising to the challenge of supporting the Civil Power, while also continuing business as usual. There have been two very different strands of operations underway recently – the first has been the superb mobilisation of UK forces to provide support to a variety of tasks in the UK. While MACA taski...