Military must be a force, not a facade

IN 18th century Russia, Governor General Grigory Potemkin built a series of sham villages to impress his lover and empress Catherine the Great, and disguise the dilapidated state of her nation.

What she saw as she was driven through them were colourful, freshly painted house and shop fronts. Behind this gaudy façade, however, was emptiness and decay.

The notion of the Potemkin village has since come to mean any showy display designed to conceal an unpalatable reality. While it would be an exaggeration to say this describes the state of our national defences, there are certainly troubling parallels.

We can boast two £3.5 billion state-of-theart aircraft carriers. We’ve spent upwards of £12 billion supporting ukraine in its hour of need. And we’re in the vanguard of international efforts to protect Red Sea shipping from Houthi rebel attacks.

Yet behind these shows of strength and hubris lies an under- manned, underresourced and under-appreciated military. The Army is at its smallest since the napoleonic wars, a naval recruitment crisis has seen ships mothballed and the RAF has too few modern warplanes.

The dangers of complacency were starkly illustrated on Thursday, when an RAF jet carrying Defence Secretary Grant Shapps home from a visit to nato soldiers in Poland was hit by a Russian cyber-attack, jamming its communications.

We now learn the plane was merely an ‘RAF paintjob’ – a civilian aircraft with military livery but no military-grade protection. Despite appearances, it was defenceless. Potemkin would have been proud.

Mr Shapps has told the Mail he wants military spending raised from under 2.3 to 3 per cent of GDP. This highly personal brush with danger should stiffen his resolve to fight Chancellor Jeremy Hunt for the money.

if the Budget is anything to go by, it will be a bitter contest. Despite billions being sloshed around, Mr Hunt offered not a penny extra for defence, showing how low it comes down his personal shopping list.

He is wrong. Yes, everyone needs money in these straitened times – the NHS, schools, police, the courts etc. But while their causes may have merit, nothing is more important than the defence of the realm.

We live in an age of global threat. Vladimir Putin is bent on building a new quasi-soviet empire by force. As we report today, Sweden, the latest country to feel threatened, has joined nato and massively expanded its Home Guard reserve.

iran is financing a terrorist war on israel and the West, while China is bringing great swathes of the developing world into its ambit and menacing its neighbours.

We must be capable of military as well as diplomatic responses. US President Theodore Roosevelt said the key to foreign policy was, ‘speak softly and carry a big stick’. Britain’s stick is shrinking by the day.

With a recent all-party Commons report exposing a record £29 billion shortfall in the MoD budget, the Mail, backed by four former defence secretaries and prominent military figures, is campaigning for a substantial funding boost.

An immediate commitment to spending 2.5 per cent of GDP would be a good start, followed by a path to 3 per cent or beyond, as circumstances dictate.

Big-ticket projects, diversity initiatives, glossy advertising campaigns and grand gestures are all well and good, but we must have the ships, aircraft, tanks, and personnel required to keep Britain safe.

Otherwise, our armed forces will soon have about as much substance and durability as a Potemkin village.