Labour’s Strategic Defence Review
Labour governments have been as consistently willing to employ military force in defence of British imperialism as their Tory and Liberal counter-parts. The Strategic Defence Review, published in July, shows the British state intends to extend and quicken the global reach of its forces. ‘Rapid deployment’, ‘expeditionary warfare’, ‘long-range strike capacity’ are the words. ‘A force for good’, said Labour Defence Secretary George Robertson – a force for killing in defence of a system of exploitation and misery, says Trevor Rayne.
Monopoly capitalism ‘is, by virtue of its fundamental economic traits, distinguished by a minimum fondness for peace and freedom, and by a maximum and universal development of militarism’
VI Lenin
British forces have engaged in at least 94 separate overseas military interventions since 1945; 27 of these in the Middle East.
Supplying this constant warfare is the arms industry, the biggest and most valuable industry in the world. Britain is second only to the USA as arms trader to the world. Half of Britain’s top 20 industrial companies are involved in the arms business.
Britain is the second biggest holder of overseas assets after the USA. Nearly half of Europe’s 50 biggest multinationals are British or Anglo-Dutch. The City of London is one of the world’s three chief financial centres, earning up to a quarter of this country’s income. The ruling class owners of this wealth do not intend to give up their global position, military power is essential to them. To quote the Strategic Review, ‘Our economy is founded on international trade. Exports form a higher proportion of Gross Domestic Product than for the US, Japan, Germany or France. We invest more of our income abroad than any other major economy. Our closest economic partners are the European Union and the US, but our investment in the developing world amounts to the combined total of France, Germany and Italy’.
However, armed forces and weapons depend upon the level of production in society. Since Suez 1956, Britain has seen rival capitals surpass its productivity; consequently, the ruling class has turned to the ‘special relationship’ with the USA to compensate for its relatively diminishing capacity. Plus, while the rest of the economy is thrown to the ‘free market’, arms producers are protected and subsidised by the state. Britain must be able to ‘punch above its weight’.
The 1991 Gulf War and continued use of sanctions and military mobilisations against Iraq show the extent to which the British state is prepared to go to defend the status quo in the Middle East, a status quo benefiting US and British interests. Britain, under Tory and Labour governments, is loyal to the US with troops and diplomatic cover. Like a junior partner, the British ruling class seeks to join the USA in policing the world. ‘We must never forget the historic and continuing US role in defending the political and economic freedoms we take for granted. Leaving all sentiment aside, they are a force for good in the world. They can always be relied on when the chips are down. The same should always be true of Britain’. Tony Blair
Flexible forces
Approximately 36% of the army and half the navy are based overseas; in Brunei, Malaysia, the Gulf, Turkey, Bosnia, Belize and the Caribbean, the USA, Germany, Italy, the Falklands/ Malvinas, Gibraltar, Cyprus, the Indian Ocean, Nepal, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. They focus on strategically significant locations, available for regional interventions. Nevertheless, the lessons of the Gulf War, the conflict in former Yugoslavia and the collapse of the Soviet Union necessitate a Strategic Review. Fixed positions are seen as of potentially reduced value.
The Gulf War and its aftermath demonstrate the critical role of aircraft carriers in projecting a global reach for the armed forces when local bases are denied use by unco-operative governments. The recent US attacks on Sudan and Afghanistan were mounted from the sea.
Labour’s Strategic Defence Review is based on the assumption that there will be no significant threat to Britain or NATO in the medium term of 10-20 years. It is assumed there will be ‘small scale’ wars over resources, ethnicity and inequality. A sound assumption given the grotesque divisions inflicted on the world today, explosive tensions as in Indonesia and the readiness of British firms to sell the potential protagonists weapons.
It is also believed that Britain must be able to intervene on two fronts – two battlefields – at once, if it is to retain its global status. As the Malvinas and Gulf wars showed, this could be an expensive business, beyond the means of the British exchequer unless some more cost-effective methods of fighting can be developed (or resorted to). ‘Punching above our weight’ was almost beyond the British state against Argentina, and the Gulf states had to foot the bill against Iraq.
The Review also assumes there will be no significant integrated European defence force in the near future. Always looking to the Atlantic alliance with the USA, Labour envisages any integration with Europe as ‘a more effective European Security and Defence identity in NATO through the Western European Union’. The Western European Union is to act as a subsidiary of NATO and hence will be restricted by the USA, for the time being. British governments have persistently obstructed moves towards the creation of an independent European defence body, seeing it as a rival to their alliance with the USA. Note the dispute over Westland in the mid-1980s and Michael Heseltine’s resignation from the Cabinet as the US United Technologies won out over a European consortium in a battle for the helicopter company.
In Labour-speak, the Review emphasises ‘peace-keeping and humanitarian missions’. This is the language used to dress up jet and missile assaults on Iraq, training teams in Indonesia and Turkey, occupation forces as of the USA in Somalia and Panama, Britain in Ireland and former Yugoslavia. Always ‘a force for good’ carrying out the ‘ethical foreign policy’ etc, putting machine guns in the hands of Indonesia’s death squads, ensuring the Turkish army can carry on its war against the Kurds, stocking up the Nigerian generals – a foreign policy based on arms sales and repression.
Where overt intervention is not possible there is always private enterprise, as with Sandline and Executive Outcomes in Sierra Leone and Papua New Guinea. Or then again, why not just break the rules and try to hide it, as with arms for Iraq and the Pergau Dam affair where aid was tied to arms supplies for Malaysia?
Central to the Review are two new aircraft carriers, costing £4 billion each, which will be twice the size of the current Ark Royal, Illustrious and Invincible. Accompanying each carrier will be two roll-on roll-off amphibious assault ships and a new air-manoeuvre cavalry brigade using US Apache helicopters and jet-bombers. This enormous initial cost is to be spread over a global deployment, prowling the world, ever ready. Technological advance renders distance less relevant and can reduce the need for forces in situ.
The current Joint Rapid Deployment Force is to be changed into the Joint Rapid Reaction Force. Emphasis is put on making this new force integrated, combining the army, RAF and navy. So, for example, all three forces would share the use of helicopters and other weapons. This is the Review’s version of the flexible workforce and just-in-time stock control, adjustable for different requirements and keeping costs down. The idea of stationary forces sitting in bases and unable to act is seen as an unproductive expenditure to be avoided.
Significantly, the Review specifically excludes Trident nuclear submarines and the Eurofighter from consideration. Both were initially conceived as weapons with which to confront the Soviet Union, which no longer exists. These are very expensive weapons; the Eurofighter upwards of £40 billion and rising, Trident even more. They are also very political weapons. Trident, a largely US weapon, is British imperialism’s ticket to sit at the top table, one of five permanent seats on the United Nations Security Council, or as Prime Minister Blair put it, ‘Britain must retain its historic role as a global player’. The Eurofighter (now to be called Typhoon) is at the centre of attempts to build a European weapons industry, from which British Aerospace, GEC etc do not want to be excluded. It is critical to technological developments from which British capitalism cannot afford to be left out.
With the Soviet Union gone, the four Trident submarines, each with 48 nuclear warheads, have a new priority. The government seeks to retain ‘an option for a limited strike that would not automatically lead to a full-scale nuclear exchange’. Trident must be capable of a ‘sub-strategic role’. The British Labour government continues to support the first strike threat, nuclear strikes being seen as aiding manoeuvrability for forces in non-European contexts.
What this amounts to is a preparedness to fire nuclear weapons at Third World targets; a preparedness to launch a nuclear attack on an Iraqi city, for example, a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant, whatever. Is it considered a cost-effective means of war? As Blair said, he is ready to ‘pull the trigger’. Where are those CND marches now, those rallies with prominent Labour speakers who were also members of CND? For New Labour they are an anachronism, out of date, unsuitable, unwanted.
Arming the world
While Britain’s trade in manufactures went into deficit in the 1980s and has stayed there, the trade in weapons remains in surplus. Labour Defence Secretary George Robertson says that Britain’s defence industry is ‘one of the best in the world, worth £5 billion a year in exports, with 440,000 people employed in it. We have to show a commitment to it’. Even though 300,000 workers have been shed from the defence industry since 1980 it remains the case that today, as in 1980, one in ten workers in British manufacture works on arms.
British government defence procurement expenditure, which was cut by a third by the Tories for the decade from 1985-86, is barely touched by the Labour Review. Arms chief executives pronounced themselves ‘gratified’. As defence budgets have been cut so dependence on export markets to earn revenue to cover the high costs of weapons development has increased. Yet the world market has, on some estimates, halved since 1987. The US share of the world’s $40 billion export market has grown from 7% to 40% in a decade. Britain’s has grown from 4% to 15% in the same period.
However, up to 75% of Britain’s exports are part of one contract; Al Yamamah, with Saudi Arabia. The approximately $3 billion a year payments from this contract include 600,000 barrels of oil a day, which are sold on British Aerospace’s behalf. As these barrels have almost halved in price so the value of exports dwindles.
The USA is Britain’s second largest arms export market, with Britain providing 40% of US weapons imports. Britain sells far more weapons to the USA than any other European state. The Ministry of Defence has set the target of Britain selling $8 billion of arms abroad each year. On one calculation 68% of British arms sales go to regimes with bad human rights records. If the $8 billion target is to be reached then there will be no room for consideration of Kurds gassed and burned out of their villages in Iraq and Turkey, no time to worry about the ethics of killing people in East Timor, no place for a conscience about the corpses piling up around the world – this is business.
Arming the world and keeping British forces on global alert have grave consequences for the working class in Britain. The Scott report showed that the British government was prepared to see innocent men gaoled to cover up breaking its own rules on selling arms. Prime Minister John Major said, ‘It may be that the time has come to look at the activities not only of those who actively conspire to commit terrorist acts but also those who from safe havens abroad foster dissent elsewhere in a way which creates a climate in which terrorism can flourish’. He was talking in the context of a Saudi dissident, Dr Mas’ari, based in Britain. Now we have Labour’s Criminal Justice (Conspiracy and Terrorism) Act. A nation which oppresses another cannot itself be free.
FRFI 145 October / November 1998
