British defence: Fraudulent, weak and strikes terror into no one

Jonathan Carley, 64, is the latest addition to the UK’s impressive national armoury, doubtless intended to inspire terror amongst Putin’s myrmidons. Last week, the fully-uniformed and richly-bemedaled Rear Admiral Carley presented himself at a Remembrance Sunday service in Wales, claiming to represent the Lord Lieutenant of Clywd. However, that the bottom of his sleeves covered his finger tips, his unpolished shoes did not match and some of his medals appeared to have issued by both the Emperor of Dahomey, 1820-1884, and Kaiser Wilhelm II, tells a deeper truth about British defence policy.

For the fraudulent Rear Admiral Carley is probably as authentic as anything else within the British military establishment. Indeed, it is hard to ascertain which is more comically awful: The British or the Irish attitude to defence. Whenever news from the Ukrainian front is bad, Putin watches a video of the RAF’s four aircraft flypast over Buckingham Palace to celebrate VE Day, the aeronautical equivalent of a mangy burro hauling a one-wheeled  cart bearing a slumbering Mexican peon. A broad smile on his face, he then views a video of the Irish Naval Service on active service, namely an empty sea off Ireland’s west coast with the signature wakes of half a dozen untroubled Russian periscopes. The roars of his laughter echo over the Kremlin, while minarets shake and flat-faced sentries from Siberia exchange nervous smiles. These are the islands that once ruled the seas of the world: Today, they could not protect an Oxfordshire duckpond.

Ireland recently elected a pacifist-president who denounced Germany’s rearmament plans as being reminiscent of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Well, of course she did. Whenever leftists want to deplore anything, they reach for dear old Germany and the early days of the Third Reich. What would we do without handy clichés that merely confirm our prejudices and reassure us that further analysis or thought are unnecessary? Isn’t that the real purpose of history, to comfort the cowardly and calm the lazy? 

Life is not like that. Every single historical event is as unique as a snowflake and with an outcome as complex as Leonardo’s DNA fusing with the Virgin Mary’s. If wisdom had been so easily banked from human experience, rather like Warren Buffet pocketing the proceeds of his latest investment, how come the world is in such a sorry way? Perhaps one per cent of any previous event has a lesson for us all: but which one per cent? Hmmm.

So, is it better for Germany not to arm in the face of Russian aggression? Come back and ask me in fifty years. But in the absence of any other obvious choice, I’d settle for a militarised Germany being a bulwark within a revitalised mitteleuropa, an inconceivable concept in the days of the Iron Curtain. The latter was the world’s predominant geopolitical and psychological factor between 1945 and 1989. Only those who came to adulthood in the 21st century can be intellectually free of its magnetic field. However, that freedom is now subject to other cultural forces, such as the almost universal acceptance amongst Generation Z of the unproven and therefore communist-like dogma that humankind can intentionally improve the world’s atmosphere without calamitous size-effects (meaning, of course, than any “improvement” is probably nothing of the kind).

Concern over complexity should not paralyse us:  Fear of leaving the reassurances of the Amazon rainforest is what doomed the Yanomami people to a recycled existence rather than the evolving one that has characterised the modern world. That our western civilisation has taken many false steps – communism, fascism, hyper-nationalism, mass immigrationism –  should not paralyse us. Grown-ups should behave according to their years, not their fears. It takes time to unveil what is wise and what is not: But unarmed passivity is seldom rewarded with peaceful prosperity.

Chancellor  Merz’s €98 billion debt package to enable the rearmament of Germany reverses decades of unprincipled dependence on others, most especially on the US and Canada. Military kit –  such as 155mm howitzers and modern tanks – is eye-wateringly expensive, but not – as Ukraine has revealed – so expensive as defeat and subjugation. Germany’s approach to these matters seems to be far more sensible and healthy than the slothful predation on others that is apparently Ireland’s defence philosophy.

Explaining UK defence policy, even to the British people, is rather like describing the moral order of a beehive to an interplanetary photon. But at its simplest, the UK has two aircraft carriers that have cost billions and don’t work properly, and can’t be made to because they are equipped with exotically useless vertical take-off F 35s, but with no proper early-warning airborne-radar to enable them to take off on time. Yes, and I’ve been reading about this comic-opera for the past twenty-five years, yet even now I understand as little about it as I do the life-cycle of the light-hating moles that live underground on the far side of moon.

Nor are these carriers and their pathetic aircraft unaccompanied in their majestic incompetence, for the RAF and the British Army have been determined to match it. The RAF is already scrapping the first generation of its  Typhoon Eurofighters, even though it cannot replace them. The British Army has been so thoroughly feminised that officers have been told to cancel membership of men-only clubs  on “inclusivity” grounds even as war-fighting, bayonet-toting  infantry remain all-male. 

Moreover, like virtually all European armies, the British Army cannot recruit enough soldiers of quality, because its pay is poor and structural investment is hopelessly inadequate. But there is another, deeper reason why the British army can’t attract recruits: It was defeated in the field by Iraqi and Afghan irregulars, reverses from which its morale has never recovered. 

But steady, chaps! If the worst comes to the worst, and Russian troops are landing below the White Cliffs of Dover, the other white, that of Whitehall, can deploy Britain’s secret weapon: Rear Admiral Carley, VC, DSO, DSC, MC, DFC, Croix de Guerre, Abyssinian Cross of Gold, Paraguayan Medal of Sanguinary Sacrifice, et cetera. Aged 64, he is exactly what the Beatles were singing about when the Cold War was at its height. So, who would  guessed? Lennon & McCartney, wealthy defence-foretellers, prophets before their time.

Kevin Myers is an Irish journalist, author and broadcaster. He has reported on the wars in Northern Ireland, where he worked throughout the 1970s, Beirut and Bosnia.