Nuclear submarines plan is an expensive mistake - there are better things for UK to spend money on: Andy Brown

Military planners are notorious for being very good at getting us ready to face the last war and rather poor at preparing for the next one. There is not much point in spending 3 per cent of everything we produce in this country on our defence if the weapons aren’t fit for purpose and we don’t have the equipment we need for what happens in the real world.

Putin’s war in Ukraine has already destroyed lives and property for far too long yet it is unlikely to end until both the man responsible for it and the US President stop trying to impose terms of surrender that betray every notion of national self-determination.

European leaders really do need to step up to the plate and learn the lesson of what it takes to defend democracy.

That conflict should also have taught us a great deal about what wars are going to look like in the future and what weapons are a necessary but unpleasant reality right now and which ones are a complete waste of money.

President Putin spent enormous sums of money on building up a large Russian fleet. It has sat in the ports unable to put to sea because the Ukrainians have deployed some cheap nimble self-made undersea drones.

It is therefore extraordinarily unlikely that Britain is going to be able to send a fleet of battleships and aircraft carriers into harm’s way anywhere in the world that is within the range of a small enemy drone launch site. That includes virtually every location where we might conceivably be drawn into a necessary battle. We were, for example, unable to send large ships into the Gulf of Arabia to defend ships heading to the Suez canal because of this risk.

What Britain does need are large numbers of fast and nimble small military boats that can successfully deal with situations we are already encountering in our own waters which we don’t have suitable resources to deal with. Policing smuggling boats carrying desperate migrants can’t be done by a destroyer.

Nor is it possible to protect our waters from incursions from giant fishing vessels or hostile powers intent on destroying undersea power or communication cables with a few large ships. The focus needs to be on speed and on decentralised deployment around our coast not on a few large ships.

That same focus on decentralisation has also been evident in the ground war. The Russian army was heavily trained and very experienced in set piece wars which it conducted by flattening entire cities. That is how it fought in Syria.

Despite nightly and very deadly efforts to repeat the tactic in Ukraine it has proved remarkably incapable of moving its armed forces and protecting its supply lines in response to intelligent decentralised attacks particularly by drones. Its attempts to march on Kyiv turned into a particularly deadly mistake.

The British government is therefore right to begin to focus on equipping well trained and highly motivated ground forces with more flexible weaponry. It is much less clear what the point is in spending billions on buying extra nuclear attack weapons. Even if you believe in nuclear deterrence then the ability to drop one bomb on Moscow is all that could conceivably be needed. Having 12 expensive nuclear submarines doesn’t guarantee our safety. It does guarantee that someone in Moscow will want to target Britain.

Safety doesn’t tend to come from entering an expensive arms race. As we should have learned from the First World War. Then the build up of arms on both sides simply resulted in an increase in dangerous paranoia about the intentions of the other and the consequences of the miscalculations that resulted were horrific.

My grandfather fought in the trenches in the first world war. My father flew in the Second. I didn’t have to fight a war because some very wise people developed the European Union and forged alliances between former enemies.

We now face a very dangerous world. In every past war Britain found itself at risk because it was over dependent on food imports. So why isn’t the government spending more on helping our farmers to ensure that we have food security instead of wasting billions on vanity weapons like excessive numbers of attack submarines?

It is entirely possible that London could be destroyed by a dictator in the Kremlin making a miscalculation and it makes sense to guard against that risk. It is increasingly certain that large parts of it are going to be inundated by sea water within the lifespan of children alive today.

Why isn’t the government putting us on a war footing in our preparations for the more certain crisis of climate destabilisation? Defending our people matters. So does spending money on the right priorities.

Andy Brown is the Green Party councillor for Aire Valley in North Yorkshire.