10,000 – strong strike force
He pledges new units as MPs are told to act like Churchill not Chamberlain
DAVID Cameron will today pledge to create two 5,000-strong strike brigades that can be rapidly deployed to war zones or to thwart terror attacks.
Backed up by 600 armoured vehicles, the units are the centrepiece of the Prime Minister’s long-awaited strategic defence and security review.
In a statement to MPs, he will announce £178billion of spending on defence equipment over the next decade, £12billion more than planned. It follows years of cuts that have seen troop numbers slump from 102,000 to 82,000.
In the foreword to the review, the PM says that with the rise of Islamic State and tumult in the Middle East ‘the world is more dangerous and uncertain today than five years ago’.
The strategy is published amid a further intensification of the Government’s efforts to secure the Commons votes it needs to launch bombing raids against IS in Syria.
It is believed the Prime Minister will tell wavering MPs this week that Britain must start acting like ‘Churchill not Chamberlain’ if it is to defeat terrorism.
Chancellor George Osborne also publicly made the case for RAF strikes, saying that Western nations were now seeing ‘the price of not getting involved’ in Syria after MPs voted against action two years ago.
He claimed the UK should be shaping the world rather than being shaped by it and warned a Commons vote against strikes would be a propaganda coup for the jihadists.
Mr Cameron is due to publish on Thursday his case for RAF attacks on IS in Syria. If sufficient Labour MPs can be persuaded to vote with the Government to compensate for an expected 15 Tory rebels, bombing could begin by Christmas.
The two strike brigades included in the defence and security review will be ‘rapidly deployable’ by 2025, Whitehall officials said. They will be able to operate thousands of miles away and, if needed, split into smaller units to deal with threats to Britons abroad, or to enter war zones.
The brigades will be drawn from existing troop numbers, rather than recruitment.
Mr Cameron will promise funding for nine new Boeing P8 patrol aircraft. The planes can be used for maritime surveillance, with military chiefs arguing they have a vital role to play in protecting the Trident nuclear deterrent from enemy attack. Armed with torpedoes, they can strike against submarines as well as ships, and will also be used to protect the country’s new aircraft carriers.
The Government is extending the life of its Typhoon fighter jets for ten extra years to 2040, creating two extra squadrons.
Mr Cameron will say ‘we cannot choose between conventional defences against statebased threats and the need to counter threats that do not recognise national borders’.
Yesterday, it emerged that the purchase of fighter jets is to be speeded up. The Government had proposed to have only eight of the US-built F35 Joint Strike Fighter aircraft available for deployment to the new carriers HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales by 2023. That has been trebled to 24.
The reference to Winston Churchill, and his predecessor Neville Chamberlain, effectively compares opposition to action against Islamic State to Mr Chamberlain’s appeasement of Adolf Hitler at Munich.
Labour’s John McDonnell said the situation in Syria was very different to the Second World War ‘where you fight against an enemy on one terrain, you defeat them, they sign a peace treaty and that’s it’.
The shadow chancellor indicated, however, that the antiwar Labour leadership was planning a U-turn to allow their MPs a free vote on extending airstrikes to Syria.
Left-wing Labour MP Paul Flynn tweeted: ‘Government should not ape Chamberlain or Churchill. Harold Wilson is best. He stood for an independent UK policy and kept us out of Vietnam.’ The most senior civil servant under Margaret Thatcher said yesterday that she would have demanded assurances that any action against Syria was legally justifiable on self-defence grounds.
Lord Butler, the former Cabinet Secretary, told Sky News: ‘You have to be satisfied that it’s an imminent threat to the UK.’
Last night a Downing Street spokesman said he did not recognise the Churchill versus Chamberlain line.
‘World is more dangerous’