The United Kingdom under Prime Minister is crafting its hard-line defence paradox policy.
Aid Ukraine to go deeper into Russia and thereby escalate a war against an adversary which has means to escalate beyond what Ukraine can ever do.
So an article in Politco noted:
Keir Starmer defended Britain’s support for Ukraine as “proportionate” and legal Thursday after reports that missiles donated by the United Kingdom were fired on Russian territory.
The U.K. prime minister did not confirm that British-made long-range Storm Shadow missiles had been approved or used.
But, in a House of Commons statement, he repeatedly declined opportunities to deny the widespread reports — and appeared to pre-empt condemnation from Moscow.
“The U.K.’s support for Ukraine is always for self-defense,” Starmer told members of parliament. “It is proportionate, coordinated and agile, and a response to Russia’s own actions, and it is in accordance with international law. Under Article 51 of the U.N. Charter, Ukraine has a clear right of self-defense against Russia’s illegal attacks.”
Storm Shadow cruise missiles — which Britain has donated to Ukraine — were fired at targets inside Russia for the first time, multiple outlets reported Wednesday.
And yet the government is pursuing defence cuts at the same time.
So on November 20, 2024, the UK government was cutting the force.
As this Politico article noted:
The U.K. is scrapping five warships, along with a dozen military helicopters and drones, as part of a cost-cutting program for the army, Defence Secretary John Healey said Wednesday.
The measures could save up to half a billion pounds over the coming five years, Healey told MPs.
The cuts are aimed at easing “financial pressures,” although Healey said the U.K. was still committed to meeting a target of spending 2.5 percent of GDP on defense.
This AUKUS partner is just what President Trump will be able to welcome when coming to office.
To put this into perspective, the historically challenged PM Chamberlin long remembered for the 1938 Munich Agreement as Chancellor of the Exchequer built up Britain’s defence capability.
This 2018 article discusses this neglected side of the Chamberlin story:
Far from leaving our defences ill-equipped, he was the leader responsible for ensuring that Britain had the planes ready for the titanic struggle against the Luftwaffe. For most of the 1930s, while he was prime minister and chancellor, his decisions provided the funds for the RAF’s expansion and ensured the money was focused on fighters. As he wrote to his sister Ida in July 1940: “If I am personally responsible for deficiencies in tanks and guns, I must equally be responsible for the efficiency of the RAF.”
In the 1930s, Chamberlain had a crucial impact on air policy because he challenged the RAF orthodoxy, which held that its central purpose was to deter a continental enemy by the threat of devastation through strategic bombing. This theory of the so-called knockout blow was known as the “Trenchard doctrine” after the first head of the RAF, Hugh Trenchard, who put all his faith in bombers and believed that fighters were an irrelevance. “The aeroplane is no defence against the aeroplane,” he once said. Even after he departed in 1930, Trenchardism remained in the ascendant until Chamberlain broke its grip.
It must be admitted that he did so partly for fiscal reasons, since one bomber cost as much as four fighters. But he also saw that new technology, particularly the introduction of radar and fast, single-seater, forward-firing monoplanes like the Spitfire and the Hurricane from the mid-1930s, had the potential to transform aerial combat by making bombers far more vulnerable.
In this video, the noted British journalist Andrew Neil discusses the Starmer Paradox.
