410. China, Russia, and Cyberwarfare: Is the UK preparing for the wrong war?

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1:23Welcome to the rest of politics with me, Alistair Campbell and me Rory Stewart. Breaking news, Rory, the Dutch government has just collapsed. We might get a few researchers beavering away as we talk to find out more about that. The Strategic Defense Review, presented by Kierstarma, Big News in the UK and I think as well as going into the detail of that, we should look back at the defense reviews that happened as it were in our time because I think there's some interesting parallels and differences to draw. Also related to defense, I think the election in Poland at the weekend, where Donald Tusk guy narrowly lost and that could give him a bit of headache, going forward and difficulties possibly in relation to Ukraine as well.

2:02And then the second half, I think we should focus on China and Asia more broadly. You've been in Japan at a conference in China. I've been in Kazakhstan where China came up way more than the United States so lots to get going on. Let's start with the defence. So on your 14 hour flight back from Japan, did you have time to read the Strategic Defense Review? I did. Well done. Let's give a quick introduction down and dirty to Strategic Defense Reviews. So I guess the cliche on British Strategic Defense Reviews, which has been a long -standing tradition, is they tend to be very, very elegant, a very big picture and not funded in a great deal of detail.

2:39And actually in a funny way, if you wanted to make a joke about different national characters, you could look at the way the Americans, the Germans, the French and the Canadians do their defence reviews. So the Americans basically sound like a general giving orders. They're very, very brisk. They're connected to rafts of classified documents on funding. And they're full of very aggressive language about dominating, deterring. The French, as you'd imagine, talk a lot about sovereign capability, but one of the interesting things about the French is that they all are driven by a legally binding law about funding that happens in advance of the review.

3:14The Germans are most woke of all. The Germans defence review under shorts, which came out last year, has a lot of talk about feminist defence policy, climate, human rights, arms exports. Right up your street, Rory. Right. You love the German defence review. And the story of British defence reviews is that, in my experience, I used to be chair of the Defence Select Committee, so I used to spend a lot of time looking at these things, is that when they come out, everybody celebrates them, because partly I fear, because it's quite a tight -knit group, all of whom have contributed to the Defence and Security Review.

3:50And then a few years later, they all say they were complete rubbish. So the last one that we had that came before this was put together by your friend and my friend Boris Johnson. And this was the Strategic Defence Review, which came out in 2021. Sorry, just before you got on the roof, was that the same Boris Johnson who three months before the invasion of Ukraine said that it was absurd to think that we'd have a war in Europe involving tanks ever again? That one. That would be exactly the one. And unusually being fair to Boris Johnson, this was the complete consensus of all the great Poo bars and grandees who were involved in his strategic defence review.

4:25So it was released to great fanfare in 2021, and it missed one big thing, unfortunately, which was Russia Ukraine, which happened within a few months of the review. Instead, it said the big future for Britain is Asia -Pacific, and the real headlines of the review were we were going to send an aircraft carrier to sail around the Pacific and reinforce the United States in the Pacific. And we were going to tilt hard towards quantum and AI and away from old -fashioned legacy things like tanks, artillery shells, etc. Now, the only reason I'm saying this is that at the time, I was a very rare voice saying, I cannot see the point of us tilting towards the Pacific.

5:08It seemed to be completely mad. Britain has very little equity in the Pacific. We would have done much better concentrating on Europe and on Africa, and in fact backfilling the US while the US went to the Pacific, done stuff in Africa. And it's also very striking that it completely ignored Putin invading Crimea in 2014, and all that we knew about hybrid warfare and attacks on the Baltic, which the Defence Committee had been writing about. I've just been rereading some of the stuff we did in 2014 -15. We wrote about it a lot, and yet it really didn't feature at all. And the reason I'm raising it is that this review, which was brought together very elegantly by a man called John Buu, who wrote the biography of Atli, was really celebrated at the time.

5:47There were very few dissenting voices, and yet within a few months, it proved to completely misread the risks of the world. Well, before we go on explaining what's in this defence review, let's go back to the one I was involved in 1998, where I guess at the time, peace dividend was a phrase that was doing the rounds. But that one, too, actually became somewhat overtaken by events. In fact, so that came out in 1998, George Robertson, who was then Defence Secretary, was in charge, and he's the guy who was the main author, along with Fiona Hill and General Barons, was the sort of three that put this one together.

6:20But after the September the 11th attacks, they actually added a chapter to the 1998 Strategic Defence Review, we need to look further into how we should allocate the investment, which is needed, including, for example, intelligence gathering, network, centric capability, special forces, capabilities, unmanned aerial vehicles, etc. I also went and had a look at it, and some of the kind of headline stuff. And it was really interesting, because, you know, at the time, as I say, the country felt pretty confident, we didn't really feel under threat. But let me just tell you the thing about aircraft carriers, for example.

6:53So the Strategic Defence Review recommended that our then three invincible class aircraft carriers should be replaced, and the new ships, the Queen Elizabeth classes, it became known, entered service in 2017 and 2019. So we're talking almost two decades between the review and that happening. The Royal Navy fleet was reduced from 35 to 32 frigates and destroyers. There was a lot of focus in this one about submarines, in the new one, and submarines. Back then, we did confirm the purchase of an initial batch of astute class submarines, then, how going to go. And interestingly, on nuclear deterrent, so the current one that we're about to talk about, there's about 15 billion pounds more.

7:36Back in 1998, we did not exploit the maximum capacity of the triadent missile system that we could have, I think we reduced the warheads from 300 to 200. So clearly, although we were increasing the size of the Army, the truth is that if you read back to it now, it feels like you're reading in a much more peaceful age. Yeah, whereas what Gears Starmer set out yesterday was very much an argument that we are in a more dangerous age than any time since the end of the Cold War certainly, and that's why we have to up our game. You've completely identified the challenge, which will be at the heart of this defense review.

8:13So what you pointed out in 1998 is that these reviews come down to what's the threat? You know, what's the big threat that's coming in terms of national security? And then what kind of kit, what kind of people do we need to deal with that threat? And related to that, your other point, which is procurement and the length of time it takes to make a kit. So you have to make a judgment on threat, and then you build an aircraft carrier that doesn't appear for 20 years. And obviously the world changes a lot in 20 years. That point in 1998 and 9 -11, of course, is really interesting, because it's just another way of, I think, getting listeners to concentrate on how consistently poor we've been around the world on predicting things.

8:55I think we talked about the fact that, basically no Iran expert predicted the Iranian revolution just before it happened in 79. No Soviet expert predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall in 89 or the collapse of Soviet Union in 91. And in 1998, I was in government. In 1996, I think, we talked about this, but when we interviewed Alex Younger on leading, we were basically moving to shut down almost all our international counterterrorist capacity within our intelligence and security services. It was a tiny, tiny fraction of what we were doing. And then after 9 -11, it became nearly 90 % of the entire activity of those organizations sort of changes on a dime.

9:34What's the risk here? Well, the risk here is that Fyoneril, who we interviewed on leading, and we should maybe get George Robinson on. He's keen to get on, actually. I saw him reasoning. He said he was keen to get on. They wrote this, basically, in January. And it's been ready to go for some months. And privately, they've been pretty frustrated about how long it's taken to get out. But in some ways, it's fortunate to took so long to get out because, of course, it was written initially for an old world. So the George Robinson that I spoke to in Edinburgh, I guess, in November, was the George Robinson who was still very much focused on fighting Ukraine with the US as the major funder and donor, and the kind of Biden world, US and Europe against Ukraine.

10:21And you can still see traces of that in the report. So there's still quite a lot about buying American kit. So buying these incredibly expensive multi -hundred million dollar, American F -35 aircraft using American nuclear missiles to be fired off those aircraft. But in between, they've had to change it to adapt to the fact that suddenly we have a very different Trump, a Trump who isn't interested in the war in Ukraine and who is much less interested in data. And almost certainly is going to be removing American assets that we were relying on from Europe much more quickly. But what it hasn't quite got to, and I think this is maybe the gap, is that I think if it had been written three months later, it could have been much, much bolder about thinking about the new European defense security architecture.

11:05It recognizes a little bit belatedly that the American thing is fading. It hasn't quite got the full direction to the future. That's why in the end, the politics around it become so important. And I actually thought the messaging, the overall messaging of the government yesterday was pretty effective, talking about moving to war fighting, red and earths, never fighting alone. And that was, there was a lot of emphasis on NATO without actually going into. And Fiona Hill is very, very articulate, and very robust about her view that Donald Trump is frankly unreliable in relation to our relations with the rest of NATO.

11:40But seeing it as the alliances that we can build, but not always just talking about America. And then the whole thing about innovation and so forth. Just very briefly to go through what the key announcements were. There are a lot of recommendations, but we're talking about 12 new nuclear -powered tax submarines and the 15 billion investment in the warhead program I mentioned. Massive focus on a hybrid Royal Navy, blending drones with warships and submarines and planes. We should maybe talk a little bit about that incredible Ukrainian operation the other day, where we talk about drones. A new drone center, four billion pounds worth, new digital targeting web, one billion pounds, six new munitions factories.

12:19And it was interesting how much Kierst Armor and John Hilly wanted to focus on the jobs element. British jobs making British munitions. New stockpart of 7 ,000 British built long -range weapons, better housing and equipment for members of the armed forces, and my god, they need it. And I think there was an understanding that we are going to need more troops, and that is going to mean pay and morale being addressed. So they were the main chunky bits. And there's a lot in it. I guess what I wonder, and I've been seeing your take on this, and we mentioned last week that conversation I had with the reform member.

12:57And he said he doesn't think the young people, if we were, in a World War young people, wouldn't fight it. Do you think there's a risk in Kierst Armor talking about war readiness, almost saying that we have to be ready now, an imminent, there's an imminent danger from Russia? Do you think if then nothing happens, that sort of feeds into the idea that young people just think they're being played, and they don't really feel that they're part of the defense of the realms it were? Yeah, I think there's always a big risk of that, isn't there? And but part of the problem is how do you talk honestly about risks, because the temptation for politicians is always to, instead of saying, we don't, the truth of the matter, which is we don't know much about the world.

13:38We can't be certain exactly what kind of threat Putin faces. Some people think that he would take four, five years to recover from what he did in Ukraine. That's the Alex Younger, more optimistic position. And that we've got time. Other people think that if he were to do well in Ukraine, he'd be moving into the Baltic quite quickly. Some people think we need to fight him in Ukraine. Some people think we need to fight him in the Baltic. And these are real experts disagreeing. So when the government's communicating what it isn't really able to say to people is we're in a uncertain world where we don't quite know what could happen.

14:10You know, the US could become more normal again after Trump, or it might not. Putin might back off, Xi Jinping might not go into Taiwan. We need some capacity just in case. And the threats to us are not an Napoleon or Hitler trying to land on British soil. And that means that the risk is that you need to excite people because you want them to pay more tax. You want to increase GDP from two and a half to three percent. That's tens of billions of pounds extra you're taking in tax. Are you saying that part of the job is actually to explain to people that we might have to invest very significant sums of money as we are doing in Ukraine right now in places like Lithuania and Latvia and Estonia.

14:52And that our troops might have to go there. Rather than give any sense that we might actually have to see British people fighting in Britain. That's the bit that I think was when we talked about this, they talked a lot about this kind of home guard idea. People getting more engaged in the reserve, cadet force and so forth. It is sort of trying to shape the psychology of the nation to think that we can no longer take it for granted that Britain might not be involved in a conventional war very close to home. Yeah. Well, if you look at detail of what they predict the most likely nature of a conflict with Russia would be, it's much more about missile exchange and it is about Russian soldiers landing on British soil.

15:32I suppose the point I was trying to make though, which is you know, goes to the core of what you were involved in in Iraq and we were all involved in an Afghanistan, is that in order to get votes through Parliament and raise money, you're under a lot of pressure to really emphasize how much of a threat it is. So I mean, obviously the most controversial is this question about a weapons mass destruction. But the same was true in Afghanistan, which is Obama saying in order to catch a sunbine line, we need to win an Afghanistan and stabilize Pakistan or Afghanistan is an existential threat to global security and the problem with it is it creates in the short term, as I think you were implying, the sort of motivation maybe from the public or politicians to get behind some, but in the longer term, the risk is that people think you've overstated your case and they then overreact in the other direction and think as they do now with the rock and Afghanistan that these were $3 ,000 trillion wars and that they weren't really much of a threat to us anyway.

16:28So that's why I think, I don't know whether this is what she was saying, but that's only by my instinct, that the really good policy, really great leader, is able to say this really matters without pushing the argument so far that you create kind of exhaustion and a reaction against you. Well, I just looked at it, just looking at some Paul in 41 % of under 30s say they would refuse conscription in the event of a world war. So I think this thing about, you know, one of the lines in the review is that every part of society will need to play their part. That is trying to engender a sense of real risk, real threat and they sort of analyze the threats as Russia being kind of imminent, not imminent, but a real threat to our way of life and a lot of focus on cyber attacks.

17:13China's probably next in line and then North career in Iran as being very, very unpredictable. I thought this was interesting the way that Kierstarr and John Haley both emphasizing this never fight alone, this sense of the alliances. And I think that goes back to, it's interesting, I watched a little bit of the Parliamentary debate. Once they got over the fact that there was lots of the speaker very angry, and lots of MPs angry that this whole thing was announced in a shipyard in Glasgow rather than in Parliament. But once John Haley got up on his feet, really emphasizing that this point about, you know, the alliances that we have to build and working with other European nations.

17:50But then we're going to talk about Poland in a minute and just think about that. You were saying there the challenge for politicians to persuade the country to take a threat seriously. And you know, the fact is that even though it was a very, very narrow defeat, Donald Tusk, the Prime Minister, his candidate losing presumably, if Poland was totally signed up to this side, then I'm spending almost 5 % of their GDP on defence. If Poland was fully signed up to the threat that he's talking about, then you might have expected his candidate to have won that election. So the challenge for politicians in this is really, really tough.

18:24Just want to take about one more stage, which is just to remind people what a whole Britain is in. And so Fiona Hill and George Robertson and General Barrens, are dealing with a British military where the number of soldiers we've got is famously at the smallest level since Napoleon at war. You've got some figure about a football stadium. Yeah, they can fit you one of our biggest stadiums, yeah. And if you look at the figures, the US will have something like 2 ,500 battle tanks ready to go in about another 1700 in reserve. The Chinese have about 5 ,000. The Poles have about 777. This is a slightly unfair question, but guess how many ready tanks we haven't written?

19:02From 720 to 25 ready. Oh, God. How many unready do we have? Well, we've got about 148 going through upgrades at the moment, right? Okay. But the gap between Poland having 777 and a pretty good state and us having 20. And the same is true with our ships. Half the time our aircraft carriers are being refitted, we have a particular problem around our frigates. We're only six of them are really able to float around. We've only got, if you look at planes, we built these two enormous aircraft carriers, and each aircraft carrier can take between 60 and 80 of these F -35s. But we've only had the money to buy 33.

19:40That means that you can't fly the number of sorties remotely that the US or the French could and you don't have a carrier battle fleet to defend them. I mean, one of the reasons why Boris Johnson's defensive view was a sort of classic Boris production. It was quite elegant in literary terms. It made great claims about global Britain. But in the end, it came down to a British aircraft carrier bobbing around somewhere in the Pacific, completely dependent on American planes to fly off the deck and American ships to protect the aircraft carrier. And is it completely sort of is a bit like Boris stuck on a zipline?

20:16So, getting from that state and getting from a massive, 15 billion pound famously black hole in our flight answers. 22 billion. 22 billion. Who knows what the black hole is? There was 22 billion. I believe Rachel Reeze on this. No, this is the Ministry of Defence unaccounted for black hole. This isn't then not really in her figures. And I think where George Robertson and Fiona Hill are being a bit polite is George Robertson really, I'm sure he can correct me if I'm wrong, would have wanted the government to come out with a clear commitment to three or even three and a half percent of GDP under fence.

20:53That is where a lot of the politics was yesterday because there was all this sort of you know dancing around what was a commitment, what was an ambition, what was a hope and labor very much hold into the line that because they'd said they would get to 2 .5 and they have that when they say there was the ambition to get to 3 % they will. But what you're saying is even at that there is a huge gap between what that would deliver and what others are feeling that they maybe those are particularly those are closer to Russia feel they have to they have to develop. And of course if the Americans maintain that they're not going to provide the sort of security guarantees that we've taken for granted to the Second World War then the bill goes up.

21:37Yeah and if you look at one of the bits in the plan which I guess is not an iron dome or a golden dome but a kind of British tin dome which is a sort of cheaper British version of trying to knit together electronic warfare satellites to provide protection for the UK. They've put I think a budget of about a billion behind it. That would almost certainly I would guess 12 20 billion to do it properly. You know you defend a very very small amount of the UK with that kind of budget and the same is you know this question around are we really serious about instead of really leaning into your really working out what European defence procurement would look like developing a new generation of European fighters to keep being reliant on these American F -35s where access to software is always tricky and where this idea of flying nuclear weapons of them the idea would have to be to fly American nuclear weapons of them.

22:28And again do we really think we're in a world where we can completely rely on the US being willing to actually give us control of American nuclear weapons off the bottom of our place. Yeah not really the problem with all these reviews that you've pointed out is that we're always fighting the last war we always find it impossible to predict what the next one will be. We didn't see fallers over union we didn't see 9 -11 we didn't see Ukraine. So what are we not seeing now because the risk is that actually this is about the last war this is about us fighting the Russia Ukraine war. What could the future war be?

23:00Well it could be obviously China Taiwan and that's not necessarily about China attacking Britain but that's about all American assets suddenly being stripped out of Europe as they rush off to deal with China Taiwan. Leaving us with nothing. Yeah. It could be quantum computing so this is this extraordinary idea that we could get to a quantum computing that could completely overwhelm all our encrypted classified military systems in the space to about a week allowing enemies to get into every detail of the way that our command control works. It could be wars in space, it could be autonomous swarms of drones, it could be biological warfare.

23:38You'd be scaring quite a lot of people here, Roy. Yeah but I suppose the reason we're scaring people is that Britain as usual has made a very elegant sort of exquisite sort of Oxbridge essay on what it thinks the world will be like and how we're going to focus but we don't really have the the money to have the mass and the coverage across multiple threats and that's the problem it needs because we're so short of cash we're always having to make a bet. Now because the other thing which all three of the reviews of elighted upon is the role that our special forces play. I think we do have to recognize the extraordinary operation of the Ukrainian special forces and intelligence services and these drones taking out so many Russian bombers.

24:27I mean that was James Bondess getting these drones into Russian lorries, getting them to four airfields deep inside Russia and getting a lot of them on the other side of the Russian positions they're firing in from Siberia. Absolutely and taking out so they've they've you know I mean who knows what the the true value is and but if it's true that they've taken out a third of the planes that were responsible for these sort of long -range bombing attacks on Ukraine and that is a hell of a hit and I don't know if you saw already yesterday I just saw a picture of the the meeting in Istanbul which didn't really go anywhere between the Russians and the Ukrainian delegation supposedly to talk about a ceasefire but actually yet again just agreeing a few releases of prisoners but my god the Russians looked like they swallowed a really really really bad pill and the Ukrainians were looking quite chirpy.

25:17Psychologically quite clever too wasn't it because I guess the story that was being sold in the international media was here are the naughty Russians mounting attacks just before the peace conference in Istanbul and that may well have allowed the Russians into thinking well the Ukrainians aren't going to attack us at the moment because we're about to go to Istanbul. The other final point I guess is that Britain has always liked to spend a lot of money on very high status, very very expensive bits what we call exquisite precision kit. That of course is a reminder that in a world of swarming drones some very cheap things and you can get you know some of those Iranian drones basically cost of $1 ,000 you can get up to a $10 ,000 $30 ,000 drone can take out incredibly expensive bits of kit and we haven't quite worked out I think either the procurement mechanisms because a lot of these companies that manufacture stuff don't want to manufacture $1 ,000 drones they want to manufacture $350 million aircraft.