UK government must go much quicker on boosting defence

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At this year’s LDC Investment Forum earlier this week, I was joined on stage by Lord Robertson for a conversation about UK defence, the threats we and our allies face, and the need for his Strategic Defence Review to be implemented much more quickly.

I’ve known him a long time now – from the days in the early 1990s when as a young reporter on the Sunday Times in Scotland I used to have to phone him up and ask him presumably annoying questions about meetings of the Scottish Labour Party Executive. With a sigh he would explain politely that the proceedings were private and he was trying to watch the rugby on the television.

Since then he has had a remarkable career, in the UK cabinet and at NATO seeing Russia’s return to authoritarianism up close. He is a vital, wise voice making the case for much stronger defences in the face of the growing threats confronting the West.

Here is the transcript of our conversation:

Lord Robertson, we are talking about getting to 5 per cent but I think we have to start by talking about Ukraine. It’s been a very strange few days. What kind of security guarantees do you think Ukraine really needs if this 19-point plan is going to work?

Only the United States has got the capability, both the air cover and the equipment, that would make any coalition of the willing credible in the eyes of the Ukrainians and in the eyes of their potential adversaries. So that’s going to be one of the big stumbling blocks. That’s going to be a problem for the negotiators to take on board and I think that’s one of the areas that is not in the 19-point plan but is being left for Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin and Zelensky to deal with.

Do you think such a deal is feasible?

It’s going to have to be feasible. It’s going to be necessary because the Ukrainians will need to have some guarantee that whatever deal is done is not going to be as paper-thin as the Budapest Memorandum was. So it’s going to have to be robust and it will have to involve troops on the ground for it to be in any way credible to the Ukrainians of the future.

How do you think these negotiations, particularly regarding the initial exclusion of European allies and coalition of the willing, will affect the cohesion of collective European security?

We are in uncharted territory. We are in a situation where a real estate expert is doing the negotiation on behalf of the US directly with the Kremlin, and then the diplomats pick up the pieces later on. So it’s impossible to tell what the outcome is going to be. In a normal course of events, you would go into the details, you would not have a guy with real estate experience going in and getting a piece of paper, that it transpires was translated from Russian, and bringing that back as an authoritative version that has to be adopted. So that is where we are in an area not only of uncharted territory but in the area of unreality.

There’s a meeting in Abu Dhabi in the next couple of days, following on from the Geneva talks. Marco Rubio is now engaged and Rubio has got a track record of being suspicious of Russia. He’s not only national security advisor, he is the secretary of state, so he carries the clout of the state department. But nobody can tell what on earth is going on. You need a psychiatrist to be able to get inside the minds of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, and even a psychiatrist would find it difficult at the moment. So, we will know when we know, we will see when we see.

In the meantime, the Russian economy is in trouble and the Russians are not making any real progress on the battlefield, advancing one metre at a time. The younger Russian generation are being eliminated in a country where the ethnic population is anyway declining…

What does this mean for the threat facing the rest of Europe if you end up with a frozen Europe? That presumably frees up Putin’s resources in terms of the High North, the Baltic states and Poland? He then has more to send to those border areas and more free time and capacity on his hands.

We need to be very very worried about how this ends up, because we are under threat as well. It’s quite clear from the Russian press and the Kremlin-controlled media that we, the United Kingdom, are being seen as a proxy for America. It’s inconvenient to attack America on a broad scale because of the relationship between Trump and Putin so we, the United Kingdom, are in the crosshairs. Relentlessy, the Kremlin media is attacking “the Anglos”, “the UK”, “the English”. So we need to be worried as a country as a whole that if Russia got the space to reconstitute its armed forces – and it’s already doing so but, if it could on a grander scale – then clearly the rest of Europe is in danger. If I lived in Moldova or Armenia or Azerbaijan, I would be very very worried about the possibility of a deal being done that left Russia with its forces intact and with at least some prize to be gained from Ukraine.

You recently talked about the UK being underinsured and underprepared in terms of modern threat. What do you think it is that the public doesn’t understand about this?

I don’t think that we see the threat in the way that we should. If the lights go out, what do we do? 98 per cent of all the data we use in this country comes in undersea cables, 77 per cent of our gas supplies to the UK comes in one pipeline from Norway, so the vulnerability of the country is really acute. But people are not in their day-to-day lives aware of it. But if the lights go out and the hospitals close and the data centres melt because the air conditioning has gone off, then the political classes will be told, ‘why have you not done something about this?’

A couple of months ago, Spain and Portugal came to a standstill, an outage. Nobody knows why, they claim it was to do with an excess of renewable power. But you got the experience there very very visibly, for 48 hours, of a country at a standstill – cash machines that don’t work, traffic lights that don’t work, two modern European countries paralysed. Imagine if that was to happen here.

Russian spy ships are mapping these undersea cables all the time, putting sensors on the seabed in order to detect where the main data lines are going to be. You’ve got these shadow tankers dragging anchors in the Baltic, and they can do so in the Atlantic as well. So people need to be made aware of how unprepared and uninsured we actually are. A CFO would be sacked if he allowed insurance policies to lapse at any of these buildings here today (in the City of London) and a country is no different. We need an insurance policy. There needs to be an insurance policy through robust defence – war-fighting capability that deters any enemy from making the kind of attacks we are talking about.

This question of war-fighting capability seems to be absolutely critical. In recent decades, we have focussed quite a lot on operational questions, which are important, but actually being able to fight wars and deter, that’s where we’ve got to get to. To that end, you oversaw and led the recent SDR, what do you think the next steps on that need to be? And, based on what you’ve said, we need to go faster surely?

It needs to be implemented, the Strategic Defence Review fundamentally transforms the way in which we do defence, from top to bottom, right through the whole system.

My nephew sent a text message when I got the job saying ‘more tanks, more ships, more planes, job done.’ And there are some people who think that, there’s some people in the defence industry who think that. But it’s not. We need to transform the whole way in which we do defence: the heavy metal is part of it but it’s also to do with logistics, it’s to do with modern training, with innovation, with reforming the way in which we do procurement, which is mired in bureaucracy and contrary to risk-taking. So all of that has to be done, and it needs to be implemented quickly.

The defence secretary sent me a message last night saying that we’re underway and that of the 62 recommendations, all of which have got timelines built into them, some of them are being delivered in advance of what the timeline suggests. But we need to move much quicker than that.

The minister has just said that we are going to reach 2.5 per cent in 2027 – that’s a year after next. But the Prime Minister is talking about a coalition of the willing, and putting troops on the ground into a World War Three war zone now, and I think that’s where our lack of preparation comes up against the ambitions of European leaders at the present moment. So the money that the PM has promised – an extra 13.4 billion pounds in 2027, and every year thereafter – the government is committed to the 3 per cent at the start of next parliament and 3.5 per cent by 2035, according to the Hague summit, but we’ve got to deal with what’s happening at the present moment.

When I went to NATO at the beginning, President Clinton said to me, ‘sort the relationship with Russia out’, that was one of his imperatives at the time, and the relationship was very badly fractured, with Boris Yeltsin believing that Kosovo had been a betrayal. So what I did was I sort of sat myself in a seat in the Kremlin, thinking how do they look at us, what does NATO look like if you’re sat in the Kremlin. So when Putin took over the following year, at least I was partly in his mind about how to deal with him. And we need to do that, we need to stop looking at the world through our own eyes and think about it in the eyes of these three guys who stood at Tiananmen Square last month – the president of Russia, the president of China, the president of North Korea. They weren’t spectators at that parade, they are part and parcel of a group of people who want to end the domination of the West, to stop the power of the EU, the power of NATO and they are banded together. They don’t like each other or trust each other but they have one common objective, and that’s what they are mobilising on at the present moment. Every single day they are doing that.

The world in 2010 was completely different from the world you’ve just described. This was a world in which we hoped Russia would be our economic partner and we were entering a golden era with China. Surely we need to think much bigger and go much faster?

We do and I believe that we do, and I think the defence secretary believes that we do. But is that the mind of the Treasury yet? The Treasury is being lobbied by the welfare lobby, by security, by education, all relentlessly putting pressure on it. But where is the outside lobby that says ‘we need to be safe, we’ve got to keep the country safer than it is at the present moment’? We are under-resourced, under-insured, under attack and therefore we are not safe as a nation.

The government signed up to the SDR, it’s the view of His Majesty’s Government and the review says this: ‘the UK and its allies are once again directly threatened by other states with advanced military forces. The UK is already under daily attack with aggressive acts from espionage, cyber attack and information manipulation causing harm to society and the economy. State conflict has returned to Europe’. So, these are words of the government of the day and I think the Treasury are going to have to pay attention to that. If the lights go out and the hospitals shut, then what happens?

When 9/11 came and I was at NATO, and you ride out the implication of Article 5, the German government put a levy on every insurance policy in Germany as a special security supplement at that time. I tried to get all the countries to do that but they failed to do it. But I think that is what, in my view, they should be doing. The country needs to know it’s not safe and that it can only be safe if the insurance policy is paid, and that means extra money for defence. And it will have to be before 2027 when that extra 13.4 billion comes in.

What is your perspective on the role of private capital, private investors and their expertise in this great endeavour?

The involvement of private money, the involvement of the private sector, is going to be absolutely crucial. It is quite clear that, in the short term, that the government is not going to be able to confront the welfare bill in the way that it should in order to release money for the defence of the country. But the private sector has the money and it can spend the money up front.

I was at a meeting last week where somebody said, ‘in terms of Europe, it’s either 5 per cent with the Americans or 7 per cent without the Americans’. That’s a dawning realisation. So the private sector has to be involved. There’s no way that the state can do all of this, especially in infrastructure terms, in terms of paying up front to get the equipment of the future. It’s one of the ways in which we can leverage the money, the skills, the ability of the square mile in order to make sure that the country and the square mile is safer than it is just now.

QUESTIONS

(Juliet Samuel of The Times)

Europe collectively spends more on defence than Russia does so why are we getting so little for our money and should we resolve that faster before we spend more?

We do spend much more than Russia, and it’s a colossal amount of money, but of course it’s used for sovereign projects, it’s used domestically, and a lot of it is not terribly productive in terms of war readiness. There are some countries that spend about 20 per cent on pensions which doesn’t exactly translate into capabilities, so the last secretary general of NATO and this current one are actually making war readiness a priority. But the Europeans are going to have to face up to the fact that the taxpayer in Europe deserves to get Euros for the money they spend and they’re not getting it at the moment.

(Iain Martin) This question of ‘Europe’, let’s try and define that. There’s the European pillar of NATO, there’s what the European Union is trying to do. There clearly is this urge for European countries to do more together to meet the threat. But how do you see it institutionally?

Institutionally, the European Union has changed. They now have a commission for defence. That was unheard of even in my day. They’ve changed the financial structures to allow more money to be spent on defence without breaking the stability pact. So Europe is waking up and is systematically changing a lot of its programmes. But the EU, like NATO, is made up of sovereign countries and they have relations – unlike the Warsaw Pact where one man in the Kremlin said ‘move’ and everyone said ‘how high do we jump?’ – you’ve got a conglomeration of countries, so NATO has got Viktor Orban in Hungary, Fico in Slovakia, they’ve got a new Prime Minister in the Czech Republic, who are not all on the same page as those who see Russia as a major threat. It’s a fact of life that the countries closest to the threat are more aware, the Poles are spending over 4 percent on defence at the moment but the Spanish and the Portuguese, certainly the Spanish, wanted to opt out of the agreement that was done at the Hague. But, generally speaking, they act together and I think we should recognise that its towering strength is that it’s made up of democracies unlike with our adversaries, but it makes it more difficult to come to common decisions. Institutionally though, the European Union has picked up thanks to the challenge of Ukraine and is moving faster than ever before.

(Iain Martin)

But is it a structure that’s built for speed? And the reason I mention that is I’m thinking increasingly about the question of denial and denying the Russians territory. The lesson of the last 11 years, since Crimea, that the Kremlin will draw psychologically is that ‘if you take it, no-one is going to come and take it off you; not the Ukrainians, and no other power. So if you can claim territory fast in a chaotic way, presumably the Russians then bank on us taking a while to organise a response to try and push them back. Or then you move into the peace conference phase of things and then the territory is lost.

I think that’s the dilemma we are all facing. There is an assumption that Ukraine is going to have to give up territory, sovereign territory. Despite the pledge guaranteed by the Budapest Memorandum in 1994, by the UK, by the US but also by Russia, China. And I think that presages a very difficult, worrying world for our grandchildren in the future, if it can be legitimised through whatever is being done at the present moment, then the principle of the use of force to change borders will be enshrined in some new peace treaty and that has profound implications across the world. I don’t understand why countries in the global south don’t wake up to that threat to them. The whole of Africa is based on colonial boundaries but they all decided collectively to keep them because otherwise you’re going to have tribal rivals and all sorts of territorial claims, so there was an element of stability in Africa for example that allowed it to survive all the proxy wars that were going on there at the time. The moment the principle is established, especially by the big powers in the world, that you can change borders with the use of force and with violence, then anarchy is the outcome. So all of us have a stake in what’s going on in Abu Dhabi today but we are all excluded from it. That’s the worrying aspect of what’s happening at the moment.”

Lord Robertson thank you for joining us.