New technology will help the West rebuild a military industrial base
Every time you read about wasted government cash, remember they could be spending on keeping us – and the free world – safe, says James Price
“Defence is of much more importance than opulence”. This might seem, to the discerning CityAM reader, an obvious point. But both in the days when Adam Smith wrote it, and today, it is a lesson that clearly needs to be remembered – ideally before it has to be re-learned the hard way. The world is getting more and more unsafe, and yet we act as though the peculiar peace brought about by the end of the Cold War will last forever.
European nations fail to even spend their NATO commitment on defence, despite a brutal land war on our continent.
The conflicts in Ukraine and those fought by Europe’s main ally in the Middle East, Israel, are civilisational ones. The forces of despotism and barbarism are represented by Putin’s sick and fatalistic Russia and the many Islamist and theocratic fascist enemies like Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis. Add to this another enemy of civilisation, communism, today represented by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and the threat of their invasion of democratic Taiwan, and the contours of World War Three are already terrifyingly visible.
The incoming Trump administration is often pilloried as being isolationist, but the intellectual forces behind MAGA foreign policy are clear-eyed about the overarching threat of China in particular. Secretary of state-designate Marco Rubio has been the biggest China hawk in congress over many years, and Elbridge Colby, a potential pick for the new regime, has been extremely vocal on the inability of the USA to compete with the CCP.
The arsenal of democracy
Much of that inability is down to the weakened military industrial base in the West. A picture hangs on my wall of the world in the 1940s, the allies in one colour and the axis on the other. The USA is described as being the “arsenal of democracy” following FDR’s line about the role his nation played in arming the defenders of freedom. That role needs to be filled again today. Last year, Ukrainian officials stated that their army needed 20,000 artillery shells a day for its roughly 300 Western-made artillery systems to support its ground operations effectively. At best they have received enough shells to fire 9,000 per day, and more recently only 2,000.
And if the tensions around Taiwan were to boil over, various war games have predicted America running out of certain munitions in just one week. All this whilst our politicians are being asked about the bloke off Masterchef.
Helpfully, the West’s key advantage in the 21st century – tech ingenuity – is being brought to bear. Palmer Luckey’s Anduril Industries has launched a range of cruise missiles called Barracuda, whose cartoon launch video looks like Japanese anime but promises to help rebuild an industrial base to explicitly defeat China and allow the US to become the gun store for the free world.
And here in Britain, despite the many early catastrophes of the Labour administration, the defence secretary John Healey launched a very welcome plan to fund British-based defence companies to grow our industrial base.
A proper free market in defence is undesirable for the for the obvious reason that we don’t want the bad guys to get our guns
Normally, I would scoff at yet more ‘strategies’ from government. But in the case of defence, where a proper free market is undesirable for the obvious reason that we don’t want the bad guys to get our guns, I am again with Adam Smith, who said the “wisdom of the state” was needed to provide and finance a proper standing army.
Smith also praised the soldier who would sacrifice his life for his country (a rebuke to those who think he preached a creed of selfishness). But thanks to these new technologies, this is no longer such a likely outcome. Helsing is a European company that exemplifies the best of these trends. This week it announced that it would be mass-producing thousands of strike drones in the UK that will be capable of assembling in a swarm and operating largely autonomously. They are much cheaper than previous versions, giving the West the ability to re-arm. And they are already being used in Ukraine to devastating effect.
Defence is much more important than opulence. So, every time you read that government is wasting more cash, remember they could be spending it on advanced drones to keep us safe – and fight for western civilisation.
James Price is a former government advisor