What is to be defended - and how?

Tweet

 

It was reported a couple of weeks ago that there is a £28 billion ‘funding shortfall’ for the UK’s military forces. It underlines the way in which a careful choice of words can frame any discussion. The substance of the story is that the military needs a lot more money to do all the things that it wants to do, and is presenting the lack of that money as a ‘shortfall’. It’s not the only word that could be used. The same gap could equally be framed as a deliberately planned overspend: the expenditure plan has been drawn up in a way which requires more money than the budget has allocated. A ‘shortfall’ is the responsibility of government, but an ‘overspend’ is the responsibility of the defence chiefs. It’s all about blame avoidance.

The more substantive underlying question is about what the UK’s military needs are; establishing that is a prerequisite to talking about how the expenditure is funded. It’s not a question on which either the government or the military really wants any sort of debate, because an open discussion on the question must inevitably put the question of the Trident upgrade on the table. This enormously expensive project is a major element of the UK’s planned military spend, yet it is, in essence, a weapons system which could only ever be used as a posthumous act of revenge following a nuclear attack on the UK. Even then, there’s considerable doubt as to whether the UK could really decide to fire any of the missiles without US authorisation. The UK government always claim that it can be so used, but the phrase attributed to Mandy Rice-Davies applies. Scrapping Trident completely would free up enough funding to overcome the alleged shortfall, even if we collectively decided that we still wanted to do everything else on the military shopping list.

Meanwhile the Lib Dems have come up with an alternative funding mechanism – the issue of what they are calling ‘war bonds’, based on what the government did during the two world wars. According to Ed Davey, this could raise an additional £20 billion for military purposes, and it’s clear that he thinks that the target market is individuals across the UK, so it would be giving the public a chance to "support patriotically our defence". I suspect that he’s right in saying that the government could raise that sort of money, although it’s more likely to come from the wealthiest in society rather than the man in the street, and they’re more likely to buy such bonds for the security of the capital and the interest they would attract than out of any great patriotic fervour. Given that the government (and there is no indication that a Lib Dem government would take a different view on this) regards all bond sales as ‘borrowing’, it would blow a massive hole in any fiscal rules. But they are correct in identifying that there is a market for more government bonds, which gives the lie to the idea that bond-holders are demanding that the government redeem existing bonds, aka ‘pay off debt’.

What they are all doing, though, is talking about the issue as though the constraint is a lack of money, when it really isn’t. The constraints on government spending on the military are firstly whether the spare physical resources (labour, materials, etc.) exist, and secondly, if they don’t, to what extent do we wish to prioritise weaponry over wellbeing by redirecting those resources. Treating money as the constraint serves only the few in society, and makes it more or less inevitable that the cost of increasing military expenditure falls, ultimately, on the wellbeing of the many. Destroying that which we wish to defend is no defence at all. It’s easy to see why the purveyors of war all want to avoid that question.