There has been a flutter in the media and political worlds this week about the possible axing of Newsnight. Director General Matt Brittin, interviewed at the Edinburgh TV festival by my former colleague Kirsty Wark, on Thursday described the rumours as, “nonsense”.

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Well, that ought to be the end of the story then, surely? I would argue that it isn’t both because previous management promises to protect Newsnight if it met certain targets were broken and because this week’s coverage prompted some interesting ‘what is the BBC for’ coverage.

The Sun broke the story earlier this week, citing the fears of unnamed staff members. But notwithstanding the DG’s welcome response at Edinburgh, having worked there for 33 years, the rumour is all too familiar, and I can understand why the team is on edge.

Over those years, we faced four rounds of redundancies. Back then, when worried colleagues used to ask me whether we were about to get axed I would tell them we were cheaper than almost anything else they could put in that slot and that the bigger likelihood was being turned into a political chat show.

We will come back to the costs in a moment – because I’m not sure I’ve ever seen reporting about the programme that had hard figures about its budget, so I will give some. The Corporation regards programme budget details as highly confidential but that’s often because it’s afraid of pressure from people with various agendas getting hold of the figures.

Early in 2024 the bosses reached for the chat show option, reducing Newsnight’s staff from 57 to 23, axing filmed reports and explainers. That was the end of the old format.

But of course, previous cuts were also sold as being the last that would be asked for. This week, the Sun reported that the desire to save £500m was now so desperate and need to keep the main Six and Ten news bulletins going so important, that the existential question was being asked again.

Andrew Neil, whose own BBC political show got the chop a few years ago thundered in the Daily Mail, “if the BBC is no longer prepared to invest in high quality current affairs journalism, it does then raise a rather fundamental question: what exactly then is the BBC for?” He touched a nerve online with that one, and many others chimed in.

New Statesman veteran George Eaton followed up on X, arguing “something has gone seriously wrong if the BBC can’t afford Newsnight with an annual income of £5.96bn”.

So how much does it cost? When the axe was wielded in 2024 it was around £8.5m a year. It’s about £4m* now. Divide that by the number of programmes each year and that’s a little more than £15,000 a show*.

Believe me when I tell you that re-runs of panel quiz shows are often more expensive than that. If you’re looking to do something cheaper than £15,000 an episode, you may be left with re-runs of ‘I Love Lucy’.

There is here, another question about the BBC’s long term plans, which is whether BBC2 itself can survive the next few years. The long decline of Newsnight’s budget is mirrored by the wider one of its network.

Kim Shillinglaw, BBC2’s former controller is one of the few to have broken the Corporation’s taboo on revealing budget figures, in a piece she wrote about the channel’s slow strangulation. Perhaps in recent years management thought BBC2 was just too middle class – but let’s face it that’s a loyal demographic that now seems to feel let down by the Beeb.

What’s more, even if the network is safe for a little longer, costing peanuts has not saved Newsnight’s Radio 4 sister The World Tonight, which is being axed under the current cuts. This has also upset the traditional BBC supporters in its audience.

It’s harder to disentangle that show from the wider R4 and World Service output it shares resources with, but we can surmise that it’s well below Newsnight’s budget, not much more than £1m. Having its own distinct pot of money has, by the way, been one of the things that caused the news barons to send the axeman after Newsnight time after time.

It was a nice, plump, budget line with a diminishing audience and no matter that the main bulletins were dropping by similar or greater margins. It is near impossible though to give a meaningful figure for a show like the Ten O’Clock News because it draws on the wider resources of the entire news division.

Repeated raids on the Newsnight budget meant blunting its ambitions, shrinking its staff, and sapping its self confidence. The team who remained after the 2024 battering succeeded in the task given them by its architect, then director of news Deborah Turness; they found an audience of similar size but at far less cost.

There are those – and there was an element of this in Andrew Neil’s article – who think that far from cutting, the Corporation should reinvest in high quality current affairs.

So what would Newsnight the way we used to make it cost?

Back in the mid-1990s the programme’s budget was £12m a year. Feed that into the Treasury inflation calculator and it gives you £25m today.

Yep, if the show’s budget had been pegged to inflation – flat cash as the Treasury likes to call it – it would be more than five times the money that today’s team are given to make it. Well, times have changed, you may be thinking, those days are over.

But consider Channel 4 News (where in recent months I’ve been a podcast co-host). I believe its budget is not a million miles off £25m a year.

So that gives us an idea what ‘Newsnight as it used to be’ might cost today. The fight for audiences is increasingly hard for linear TV news – all the bulletins are suffering - but that isn’t the only reason you invest in quality reportage.

The Channel 4 News team has been collecting BAFTAs and Royal Television Society awards most years of late. Meanwhile, in-field reporting and studio moments can form the basis for big rakes on TikTok, YouTube, or Facebook.

Anyone who was on Newsnight during 2022-24 before key elements were axed, knows that these films or clips can drive digital engagement, because the programme hit the targets it was given, in terms of millions of hits online, by its bosses. They had told us that achieving those figures would protect us from further cuts.

That digital achievement didn’t matter to Deborah Turness when she was appointed so she moved ahead with big further reductions. And there’s a lesson there for the current team, who’ve made a success of the new format, her format, now Turness is gone a new director of news may have completely different views about what Newsnight’s for and whether it’s still needed.

As for the long term decline in its budget, many BBC supporters on the left say, unfortunately the BBC was starved of money by Conservative governments that wanted to ruin it. Well yes and no. There were certainly license fee freezes and Boris Johnson undoubtedly wanted to pile on the pressure.

But compare the license fee in 1995 (£86.50) with today’s £180 and you will see it has almost kept up with inflation (it would be £183.74 under the Treasury model). And the Corporation has been very successful at boosting its non-license fee revenue, which now forms £2.15bn of this years £5.9bn income.

So cutting the budget of a show like Newsnight by four fifths in real terms over this period was largely a matter of management choices. They did it because they were constantly pursuing other priorities, launching new services, trying to compete with the streamers and all the rest.

Returning to Andrew Neill’s formulation about what the BBC is for, I would argue that increasingly the license fee justification will be about things that competitors will not do. The old management balancing act between what former DG Tim Davie called ‘high fibre content’ and the big audience winners may have to be tweaked.

It was never an easy judgment, but now even a budget the size of the BBC’s doesn’t buy you parity with Netflix or the big sports rights holders. Perhaps it is not too much to hope that the new DG’s dismissal of the Newsnight closure rumour is a recognition that quality news content, and perhaps even some reinvestment in that, has to be a key part of that in the future.

*annoyingly I gave a budget figure that was too high in my earlier version of this. My apologies, it’s closer to £4m now.

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After years in which the Ukraine war had become a brutal stalemate, that’s changing. Vladimir Putin is under pressure from deep strikes against his economic infrastructure, his economic room for manoeuvre is narrowing and there is widespread speculation that after years in which hundreds of thousands were fed into the Donbas meatgrinder, he may need to order a large-scale mobilisation too.

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But Volodymyr Zelenskyy is under strain too. Several weeks ago I wrote about ‘Putin’s Hot Summer’, the strains that Ukrainian strikes were causing both in Crimea as well as the Russian energy sector. It is now apparent, having wondered out loud whether these would bring Putin to negotiate or cause him to escalate, that the Russian president has chosen the latter course.

Zelenskyy announced his ‘40 Day Campaign’ of intensified strikes on 25^th June with the stated aim of getting Putin to enter peace talks. Having ended on 4^thAugust it’s now clear both that this has failed and that, facing a winter without the ability to shoot down Russian ballistic missiles, some opposition is coalescing around Mykhailo Fedorov the defence minister he sacked, who is calling for new elections in Ukraine.

So, some of the certainties that seemed to mark this past three or so years, in which both sides battered on without apparent pressure to change course, are dissolving. I say this with the humility of someone who has before detected – or claimed to have! – signs that the conflict might be moving to an end game, only to see the war continue.

It’s not the first time that Zelenskyy tried to take the strategic initiative in August. Two years ago, he launched a ground attack into Russia, the Kursk offensive, that ultimately achieved little, while the elite brigades involved took significant casualties.

This time, with the 40 Day Campaign the emphasis was on large scale drone strikes, particularly against infrastructure targets, and Russian shipping in the Black Sea. It’s clear that striking Moscow, Petersburg, and energy plants deep in Russia has had impact, Putin acknowledging a few days ago, “of course, they do cause us harm, that’s obvious”, though insisting that was not “critical”.

We’ve also seen a campaign of strikes against Russian online trader Wildberries’ warehouses. While Ukraine argues a military motive for these, it’s self-evident that the billions of roubles-worth of lost goods have harmed the broader economy.

In response, Russia has upped its strikes on Ukrainian economic targets, and we see telltale indicators of escalation in their actions towards Europe. Whether it was explosive-laden drones at Leipzig airport, Geran one way ‘effectors’ flying into Polish airspace or an uncrewed sea vessel targeting Romania’s offshore gas installations there are now myriad signs of it.

There have also been threats to retaliate against western countries’ seizure of ‘dark fleet’ tankers. Given the Kremlin’s many previous warnings, mostly not followed by action, there are risks here of misperception and a crisis emerging suddenly between Russia and a Nato nation.

The UK and other Nato countries’ role in the Ukrainian supply chain for long range drones we can expect further Russian operations against Europe. So this is one clear sense in which the war is changing now: Ukraine’s increasing use of deep strikes is prompting Russian escalation.

Given the critical shortage of anti-ballistic missile interceptors we can also expect Ukraine’s campaign of hitting the plants where Russia’s long range strike weapons are made to continue. So far, it’s not delivered a marked effect – but of course you can argue the Kremlin might have been hitting them even harder if they hadn’t done it.

The only area where we’ve seen some element of de-escalation relates to shipping in the Black Sea, with the claims that US Vice President JD Vance has negotiated a truce in this regard. With reports of another Ukrainian strike on a Russian ship this week, the jury, as they say, is out on that one.

What we see then, even taking account of a possible truce in the Black Sea, is both Putin and Zelenskyy are under additional pressure.

Some of these forces, like Russia’s big state deficit, or the manpower shortages on both sides, are things we’ve known about for a long time but are just that much worse now. Others are new factors, like Ukraine’s deep strikes or the emergence of Fedorov as a challenger to Zelenskyy.

We’ve seen enough to know that both of these leaders are survivors, and while Putin’s approach is based far more on coercion, Zelenskyy can also be ruthless. They know that challenges to their rule in a time or war can be neutralised and indeed may allow them to consolidate their own power.

Even so, the coming months could be testing times for both of them – and for the European countries that Russia will attempt to coerce. Putin’s hot summer continues but we know now that he will escalate rather than seeking a truce, whatever the strains on his military and economy more widely.

As the winter chill bites then attention will move to Zelenskyy: was Fedorov’s move a miscalculation or something that speaks to a deeper yearning for change? Will energy shortages, exacerbated by Russian strikes, feed popular discontent?

There are a great many unknowns then. But going into this winter both leaders are under growing pressures, with the risk that they will gamble that escalation is preferable to capitulation.

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Back in 1995 world leaders gathered for the funeral of Yitzhak Rabin in Jerusalem. He had been assassinated by a far-right settler trying, tragically all too successfully, to derail the peace process.

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I was there covering it for Newsnight as dozens of leaders’ motorcades sped towards Mount Herzl cemetery. Knowing the event itself would be covered by Israeli TV we sought our own shots, finding a place on the central reservation of a dual carriageway where the armoured limos shot by within touching distance.

President Hosni Mubarak passed with GMCs full of commandos in assault rig. One could understand the precautions, Anwar Sadat, his predecessor having also been murdered, another martyr in the search for peace.

Naturally, we perked up when we saw President Bill Clinton’s motorcade bearing down upon us. There were at least half a dozen vehicles, including The Beast, that enormous, armoured limo, flying the presidential flag and Old Glory from its front wings.

But as it passed us, with the occupants just a few feet away I could see that the man in the back was not Clinton. The suit and tie were identical to those we’d seen POTUS wearing in a photo call, but this was a Secret Service agent doubling for him.

A second limousine of the same design passed almost immediately behind the first. It made sense to have two available to confuse would be attackers, but the president wasn’t in there either.

So where was the big guy? My curiosity was answered within seconds as a GMC, a big unarmoured SUV followed, flashing by with five men inside. The pair in the front had the predictable Secret Service buzz cuts and shades. The president, clearly recognisable, was sitting between two more of them in the back.

Anyone who has watched the comings and goings of US presidents during the past fifty years will have picked up on some of the precautions his bodyguards use – from tented entry points at certain events, so you can’t see which car he’s come out of or got into – to arrivals on military transport planes, doubles, and all the rest. Evidently that day in Jerusalem was regarded as quite high risk, worth taking the chance of putting Clinton in an unarmoured SUV rather than in one of the obvious target vehicles.

Now the Washington Post has broken the story about how Donald Trump boarded Air Force One (the big, modified Boeing 747) when leaving the Nato summit last month in Turkey but was almost immediately spirited off the plane’s other side in an airport catering truck. It shuttled him to a different US Air Force VIP jet, a C-32A for you plane spotting types, that flew to Mildenhall in England, ahead of the scheduled presidential jet, with even some officials and the press corps on board unaware that the switch had been made.

It was already obvious that the Boeing 747 gifted to him by Qatar and resprayed in US Air Force colours had not made the Turkey trip because, it was reported, it didn’t have the same standard of defensive aids fitted to the regular Air Force One. But even those are inferior to the protections on the C-32A.

So, there was evidently intelligence of a significant threat on this trip that an attempt might be made on his life, perhaps using an anti-aircraft missile or drone. My former Crisis Room podcast co-host, ex-CIA counter-terrorism Ops boss Marc Polymeropoulos commented, “the Iranian threat [was] far more serious than reported (need more on that)- also begs question of why POTUS travel Turkey to begin with during the war, given longstanding [counterintelligence/counter-terrorism] issues there”.

Trump being Trump there was uproar. The press corps were riled that they weren’t in on the switch, complaining that they’d been used as bait. Then the geopolitical takes followed, from claims that the intelligence of an imminent plot was Israel manipulating Trump, to loyalists praising his courage in going through with the Nato summit.

This, as we’ve seen countless times in this presidency, is how everyone from social media grifters to big name White House correspondents, remain relevant. But surely this security operation in Turkey was one of the more justified episodes in the dizzying news vortex surrounding Trump?

We know people have tried to kill him. And we’ve also read before about Iranian plots to strike being uncovered.

In Tehran there are billboards depicting Trump in a coffin or being throttled in revenge for the war he unleashed on that country. They are literally promising to kill him.

The more you think about it, the task of running his security detail, trying to maintain some kind of openness and normality in the face of everyone from lone whack jobs to state-sponsored special operators with missiles at their disposal, is just mind-boggling.

To quote Marc P again, on almost any other day of the week, a trenchant critic of this presidency “[the] Secret Service does everything possible to protect POTUS. This diversion tactic clearly was effective and worked. Do not criticize them for pulling this off”.

But of course, this is Trump so people are determined to. CNN’s Jake Tapper posted, “obviously the life of the president is paramount, and previous White Houses have used deception to protect the president’s life. But no officials I’ve spoken to have ever before heard of using an AF1 full of WH staff and journalists as a decoy during an imminent threat”. As Jon Snow once said, “everything before the word ‘but’ is bullshit”.

Decoys or not, I think you have to get used to the idea that if you’re around the president, you might be in the line of fire. That will make for a tremendous scoop if you’re the first eyewitness on air, or maybe… it’s the one you never get to file.

I have another personal anecdote on this. In 2007, when Benazir Bhutto flew home to lead the opposition in her native Pakistan. It was widely predicted she would be attacked, and indeed that evening, as she was driven through the streets of Karachi, a truck bomb detonated nearby, killing 149 people.

I, along with dozens of other journalists was on the flight from Dubai with Benazir earlier that day. There was some discussion before we boarded about the possibility of a bomb on the plane, but off we went anyway.

Several years later I was talking to a senior US military officer about secrecy and his view that the line between intelligence and journalism is sacrosanct. He had only crossed it once, he said. Back in 2007 he had phoned a journalist friend of his, telling her to stay off Benazir’s flight home. This officer had been briefed on specific, well sourced, intelligence that it would be blown up.

Those of us on her plane understood at some level that we were taking a risk – we just didn’t know how much of one! And of course, the bomb didn’t take us out of the sky, it came later in Karachi when there were also many journalists around her.

Morals of the story? In this case and the Trump one there was significant intelligence but in the event neither jet was attacked.

The US Secret Service or any other leader’s retinue have to take these threats seriously. And if we as journalists are travelling with them, we need to understand that we do so at our own risk.

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More than two years have passed since I left the BBC and now I’m outside, I’ve been able to take advantage of the burgeoning appetite for journalism about geopolitics, conflict, defence and diplomacy. There are big audiences for this, with legacy media organisations developing their international security coverage and new players emerging from YouTube to TikTok.

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Early in 2024, when I began actively to plan my escape route from our national broadcaster, the editor of the Sunday Times told me, “you couldn’t be doing this at a better time”. How right he was, soon after leaving I started as a columnist on his newspaper.

I’ve looked for other opportunities too, having a very happy eight months making The Crisis Room podcast for Global and when, much to my chagrin, that finished, I then went to Channel 4 News where I now co-host a weekly strand of their Fourcast pod called Indicators. I’ve also been making videos for the Times Originals YouTube channel that now go out under the Defence Decoded strand.

If you’re thinking ‘so far, so smug’, I’m really not. I’m citing these activities (and of course my substack is another example) because some people ask ‘what are you doing now’ and to say that there are opportunities out there for an experienced national security journalist.

Enough of my portfolio existence. The case is best made by looking at what others are up to.

Reuters news agency is expanding its defence team, and Sky News will be launching a defence and security app in a few weeks’ time. That’s right, a whole UK-facing news service devoted to the subject.

Meanwhile legacy media, from the Economist where outgoing defence editor Shashank Joshi contributed to podcasts as well as video strands to the Telegraph, where their award-winning Ukraine podcast continues to play to solid audiences, there is so much good content. And if I wanted to see the verdict of retired naval commander Tom Sharpe on MoD’s plans for an autonomous fleet, I could find it on The Sun’s YouTube channel (6.5m subscribers) as well as his own one on that platform.

Tom is the sort of person I would have got on Newsnight to talk about this back in the day when we made taped reports, or maybe Captain John Foreman, ex-UK defence attaché to Moscow. He did an interview recently for The Sun’s channel that got 353k views, which is similar to the audience for my old BBC programme.

Look outside the accounts associated with legacy media and there is much else going on. One example: Mark Felton Productions, a YouTube channel that established a big audience (2.42m subscribers) with explainers about World War Two and the Nazis has also been posting videos about current geopolitics, one a couple of weeks ago on whether Argentina could invade the Falklands has already had more than 1m views.

So where is our public service broadcaster in all this? Among its 5,500 journalists it has a single defence correspondent – and tried to get rid of even this post a few years ago. The move was stopped after personal representations to the BBC by the Chief of the General Staff.

Of course there are several other reporters there who cover conflict, often very bravely, and the security correspondent sometimes steps in too. But my long experience at the BBC tells me there are very few people there who have a passionate interest in military or diplomatic affairs, or who have served in the armed forces, and who might therefore be able to report with authority on the strategies adopted by today’s warring parties.

Instead, the progressive values of that and indeed many other newsrooms in western countries, have since the Balkan wars of the 1990s focused on daily death tolls, usually of non-combatant victims. Evidently, this is an important part of many conflicts, particularly one like Gaza, but the desire to reduce things to ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’ has distinct limitations. Indeed, it also gives very little idea why Trump’s war on Iran, to seize upon just one example, was so ill-conceived, and how the Iranians by their prior preparations and strategic nous, seem to have pulled off a remarkable victory.

As the national political arguments about defence spending ebb and flow, it cannot be a good thing that the BBC’s output on the subject is so slim. Military chiefs complain that attitudes might be quite different if voters were better informed about the poor readiness of our armed forces as well as the dangers of Britain being drawn into a major conflict.

In many other places – from Sky News, The Sun, and Channel 4 News no less – there have been impressive attempts to address this. Starting with Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Sky did daily military updates, taking academics or ex-military people to compensate for a lack of in-house expertise. And why not? They’ve found that videos about Ukrainian drones or Iranian forces can get terrific numbers of views on digital platforms.

Back in 2022 some reporting I and the Newsnight team did on a Russian unit that had got mauled in Ukraine, the 331^st Parachute Assault Regiment was posted on BBC Online, where the page attracted more than 10m views. A few months later, when we offered them a follow up, they weren’t interested.

Someone still working there tells me that’s not changed, “defence really isn’t loved at the BBC”. But why on earth forego millions of hits given the organisation now says digital audiences are its top priority? “Editors at Online have made clear to me”, comes the reply, “that the sort of people who view those pages, basically older men, are not of interest to them, that their priority is younger audiences”.

There have been one or two exceptions to this woeful trend, notably Security Brief, an occasional strand on the BBC News channel fronted by Christian Fraser and former Royal Air Force officer Mikey Kay. A strong episode gets hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube.

But overall, the Corporation has made less effort to provide coverage of the strategic forces at work in our roiling world than many news organisations with far smaller staffs.

They have shut down Ukrainecast, covering that war, and I know from my forlorn attempts to get such a thing commissioned while I still worked there, that the BBC is uninterested in a geopolitics or defence podcast. Their indifference to the subject, despite ample evidence of the millions of views such content could get, helped trigger my departure.

During the Covid pandemic, the BBC had 14 health correspondents – quite rightly, the story completely dominated the airwaves. But these days, insiders tell me there is no likelihood of them boosting defence or conflict specialists while the organisation is implementing yet another wave of cuts.

So, starved of cash, and with a strong headwind of a staff culture that fears anything that could be labelled ‘war mongering’, we might as well accept than in this moment of international flux, BBC News is most unlikely to assign more people or launch new output on this subject. The situation outside that division is even worse, be it the dearth of military history documentaries or producing a military drama of the quality of the Northern Ireland police series Blue Lights.

That’s a great shame because many of the legacy BBC programmes still get audiences in the millions. And while it might be possible to rake in hundreds of thousands of readers and viewers by combining the Sunday Times, Defence Decoded videos, or the C4N Indicators podcast, there were certainly advantages to having all of one’s output with Auntie.

It is true also that while there has been a great flourishing of coverage from other newsrooms, many of these depend on platforms like YouTube or TikTok with their own algorithmic peculiarities. Some of these brave new ventures, covering the international security world will no doubt fold, since these tech firms demand big numbers before they’ll pay meaningful revenue.

So many flowers may have bloomed in the world of defence or geopolitical journalism of late. I predict that demand will remain as long as there are big conflicts ongoing around the world – and the reluctance of our great British public broadcaster to satisfy it ultimately leaves more room for others.

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The good news? All that strategic theory about getting into your enemy’s decision-making loop and escalation dominance holds true. I have had my doubts at times, for example watching events unfold in Ukraine.

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And the bad news? It is Iran that has demonstrated that these ideas remain valid, using them to shape events in the Gulf and beyond to their advantage.

For some fleeting moments it seemed that the US might grasp what was needed, but the activation of the Yemeni front once again shows the Iranians and their partners will still take dramatic steps. The Houthi attacks of the past week on Saudi Arabia’s oil infrastructure have again changed the calculus to America and its allies’ disadvantage

.Back in March, about three weeks into the US/Israeli bombing offensive, I blogged about how Iran had gained escalation dominance. Their attacks on facilities like the Ras Laffan gas terminal in Qatar or refineries in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, following an Israel strike on the Iranian Pars gas field demonstrated a willingness to wield massive damage on energy infrastructure.

For good measure, as sound strategists do, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps people now running the country thought a couple of steps ahead. If their enemies started retaliating against their own oil facilities, they would target Gulf states’ desalination plants, leveraging their greater dependence on such sources of fresh water than Iran’s.

Given that the business of escalation dominance often resembles a barroom fight, with the winner being the one who demonstrates the will to apply maximum violence without further hesitation, that did the trick for the IRGC. Could the US or Israel have ever got back into the strategic driving seat?

Benjamin Netanyahu would, I think, have been willing to call the IRGC’s bluff on this, and cripple the Iranian energy sector. That would likely have brought terrible retaliation against the Gulf States but not advanced the Israeli objective of regime change. It might though have brought them back to the negotiating table.

Instead, Donald Trump publicly rapped Israel across the knuckles when it did bomb the targets most painful to Iran (such as the Pars gas terminal) and put his hope on the economic blockade of Iran starting on 13^th April.

Due to Trump’s overconfidence and the Pentagon’s miscalculations, the forces needed to enforce this operation had not been in place at the war’s outset. Once underway, it certainly got Iran’s attention, and it was noteworthy that despite threats of a Houthi counter-blockade of the Bab el Mandeb (the chokepoint where the Red Sea meets the Arabian one off Yemen), Iran did not escalate further at that time, instead returning to negotiations.

The collapse of the subsequent ceasefire – essentially because Iranian attempts to reinforce their grip on the Strait of Hormuz through violence against passing ships – has now led them to a further and very significant escalation.

After one month of unhindered trade, the US reimposed its blockade. This offered if not a path to victory, at least a chance to put Iran under negotiating pressure again. Having experienced the consequences, not least billions in lost oil revenues, of the first round of that, IRGC leaders adopted the mentality of the barroom fighter once again.

After many threats to play the Houthi card, they finally did it, initially targeting Saudi tankers in the Red Sea. Now in recent days they have struck key facilities – from the terminal at Abqaiq on the Gulf coast which is a major refinery in its own right as well as the starting point for their pipeline, across the country’s desert interior, to the Red Sea terminal at Yanbu, which they hit for good measure.

There are differing accounts on open source intelligence social media accounts as to whether these attacks have been completely successful or not. But one thing we can be sure of is that having managed to keep exporting nearly two thirds of its usual oil deliveries via the Red Sea route, this development will cause deep alarm in the Kingdom and has already made its effects felt in energy markets.

As in 2019, when Abqaiq was crippled for months by a cruise missile attack, this new blitz involved careful orchestration of Iran’s regional allies. IRGC-led militias in Iraq fired drones and missiles at both ends of the pipeline, while the Houthis targeted the Red Sea end of the Saudi operation with ballistic missiles.

Evidently Saudi Arabia, which has one of the region’s most powerful air forces, can hit back and has done in recent days. Iran and its neighbours have their own escalation battle going on quite apart from that with the US.

Reliable accounts suggest the United Arab Emirates had already thrown in the towel, having been battered by Iranian strikes in March and April, began providing the cash-hungry Islamic Republic with the necessary incentives not to hit them again. Presumably Iran thinks it can now bludgeon Saudi Arabia into doing the same, and for good measure lean on the US to stop its bombing.

It’s notable that US strikes stopped at the weekend. We don’t yet know if that was as a result of US back channel diplomacy with Iran. Or was it simply the Saudi’s reining in the US in order to stop the pain?

That’s what happened, briefly, in May when the Pentagon announced its Operation Freedom escorting shipping through Hormuz only to abandon it 36 hours later: the Saudis shut it down. And without their cooperation American operations in the Strait really aren’t viable.

There are plenty of Americans whose dislike of Trump and Hegseth, with their blather about imminent deals and banishing wokery from the military, is so intense, that they take pleasure in the failure of this campaign. Some of the critical attention focuses on things like the lack of interceptor missiles, which is important but is an issue of the failure by multiple administrations over the past 20 years.

The big takeaway for me is not that the Chinese or Russians will be counting the number of Patriot or Tomahawk missiles fired, though of course they will. It is that America has forgotten both how to make war against another state or how to prevent allies from being turned from assets into liabilities.

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Much ink has been spilt about how Donald Trump has undermined Nato or alliances more generally. From the threats against Greenland to European leaders finding a political bounce in shunning his war against Iran, or the president’s general unpredictability, there is all too much evidence that the Transatlantic partnership as we knew it for decades no longer operates.

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But what about after Trump? To what extent might harmony be restored?

I’ve been quite pessimistic about this too, not least because of the anti-European positions taken by Vice President JD Vance, a frontrunner for the Republican nomination, and even by Governor Gavin Newsom on the Democratic side. And let’s face it, whoever gets elected, is vanishingly unlikely to do so on a slogan of, “I want to spend more on the defence of Europe”.

While the imperative for Britain and its neighbours to step up, security-wise, is very evident, I find myself feeling more optimistic about one thing. We should not underprice the determination of the USA’s military leadership, as well indeed of its intelligence and law enforcement establishments, to keep the alliance going.

To be fair, you do hear our securocrats making this point, but you really have to experience it first hand to appreciate how important these relationships are. Having attended the Global Air and Space chiefs conference in London this week, I am feeling a little more optimistic about these ties generally and Nato in particular post-Trump.

The conference is hosted annually by the Chief of the Air Staff or professional head of the Royal Air Force and was attended by 60 of his counterparts. Taking in the speeches and chatting to these professionals in the margins it is quite evident that America’s senior military represent an important counterweight to the political tensions buffeting the western alliance, and indeed those inside the US.

Don’t take my word for it, the theme was explicitly tackled in a keynote by the US Chief of Space Operations General Chance Saltzman. Having been the first boss of this new force, he is about to retire and was therefore in reflective mood. Such was his candour that I will quote him at length:

“In the hyper-political environment we find ourselves in, with partisan politics creating divisions between a multitude of stakeholders, I remind myself that military institutions in our democracies, particularly military leadership, serve as the ballast in the ship. While it may feel like this ballast slows progress as the ship of state attempts to quickly move towards its goals, the ballast creates stability when the inevitable storms arise. We as military leaders in our democracies must remember our roles, think long-term, offer our military experience to decision-makers, and do what we can to provide stability and be a calming presence”.

Saltzman’s caution about waging war in space – noting the unpredictable consequences – seemed sane and measured compared to that of an earlier generation of US military leaders and their talk of ‘full spectrum dominance’. No doubt, the environment is evolving quickly, with countries like China gaining capabilities that make it unwise to assume there would be any ‘winner’ from a war in space.

But in a week in which defence secretary Pete Hegseth announced that testosterone supplements would be available to personnel who lack sufficient ‘testiness’, the avoidance of simple formulas about American dominance was welcome.

So too was the appreciation of allies. Gen Saltzman remarked, “we are stronger as a team of nations than any one of us is individually. There is far too much evidence over the last 80 years or so to argue otherwise”.

His words about the senior military acting as a force for stability reminded me of General Mark Milley, formerly US Army boss and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, keeping open back-channels to China during the final months of Trump’s first term. But of course, Milley earned his enmity and that of the MAGA base, resulting in his security clearance and bodyguards being taken away when Trump returned to office.

In the roiling atmosphere of today’s Pentagon, those suspected of heresy or acting as part of the ‘deep state’ or ‘blob’, ie frustrating Hegseth’s agenda, can expect to be sidelined or sacked. So Saltzman’s courage and care in his choice of words was quite something.

Earlier this month General Chris Donahue, commanding allied and US land forces in Europe stepped down after Hegseth took against him. Senior Nato officers on the margins of this week’s conference lamented Donahue’s fate, one telling me, “I suspect we haven’t heard the last from him”.

What could that mean? As a former Delta Force commander, Donahue is evidently both courageous and comfortable with risk, so will he speak out publicly against this administration’s efforts to impose ideological purity on the general staff?

Probably not, I inferred. But the example of the current Chair of Joint Chiefs, USAF General Dan Caine, who had left the military but was recalled to duty by Trump, was raised. Might Donahue also return at some future point?

Fears were expressed to me that having chased out those whose views Hegseth disagrees with or who are too-independent minded, a follow on Democratic administration might feel the need to do its own purges – of those who passed the MAGA purity tests. “I fear it could take fifteen years to straighten this all out” one senior serving officer told me.

Surviving the next couple of years no doubt requires America’s generals to be most careful in their choice of words. But I do feel more confident at the end of this week that their emphasis on alliance partnerships and joint action, once just cut and paste cliché for a conference of this type, has assumed a new meaning in the light of the treatment meted out to general officers like Milley and Donahue.

The current US Air Force boss, General Kenneth Wilsbach, also spoke at this week’s conference in London. As a relative newcomer to his role there was evidently a measure of caution in what he said, but again he’s worth quoting:

“our greatest advantage is not any single platform, weapon, or technology, it is our network of allies and partners willing to stand together in defence of shared interests, values, and responsibility… the most effective airpower is combined airpower… one of the most powerful deterrent signals we can send is demonstrating that free nations are united, capable, and prepared to act together”

So while the abuse or belittling of allies comes all too easily to Hegseth and Trump, America’s military leadership clearly understands their value. More than that, they are trying to reassure us, from the podium and in the corridors, that they will do their best to restore the security relationship with Europe in the years to come.

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The latest US strikes on Iranian infrastructure targets and threats to reimpose their naval blockade on the Islamic Republic point to the centrality of economic warfare in current conflicts. Both types of action aim to alter decision-making by disrupting output and feeding public discontent.

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And indeed, look at the way Iran tried to shape its ongoing fight with America, or Ukraine is turning the tables against the Russian invader right now. They are blowing up key installations - infrastructure – often by means of long-range strikes.

Neither the Islamic Republic nor Ukraine can match America’s long-range air force with dozens of piloted bomber aircraft. But both are engaged in what might be called a strategic air campaign. There are lots of questions about whether such methods work, in delivering victory, and others too about whether such strikes can be justified in terms of jus in bello, what we used to call the ‘laws of war’, and now often refer to as humanitarian law.

Blowing up a purely civilian structure like the ‘baby milk factory’ that Iraq claimed had deliberately been struck by Coalition aircraft in 1991, evidently violates these rules (codified in the Geneva and Hague conventions). But of course while accusation and propaganda surrounding such damage contribute to the information warfare battle, the definitions of what is a ‘dual-use’ or military target are often so broad that many of the strikes we see by belligerents will never be subjected to forensic judgment.

Iran has hit Dubai airport, Qatar’s main natural gas terminal, and oil refineries throughout the region. Ukraine has also blown up elements of Russia’s energy infrastructure repeatedly, and so effectively of late that significant shortages are developing.

You might justify – or attempt to - any of these strikes as undermining your enemy’s ability to make war. After all, Dubai airport might be used by American forces, or the fuel produced in Russian refineries delivered to their army occupying eastern Ukraine.

But let’s get real. We can see, from the frightened passengers cowering in that emirate, or the huge fuel queues developing in Russia, that hitting these targets has an impact on the civilian population. Indeed, you might say in many cases that this is their primary effect – with the attacker aiming to change the enemy’s calculus by exposing the public to a war and its costs.

Ukraine knows when it is hitting Russian warships in dry dock, or the Iranian Revolutionary Guards when they launch missiles at Prince Sultan air base in Saudi Arabia that these are straightforward military targets. By the same token, they know when the case is far less clearcut.

These days most European countries would be very nervous about hitting what is mainly civilian infrastructure or imposing a blockade – they are afraid elite opinion and accusations of illegality. Inevitably perhaps, Trump’s strikes against infrastructure have prompted such charges, a sign of implied bias if ever there was one since you will search in vain for similar headlines about Iranian or Ukrainian targeting.

But it wasn’t always like that, and you don’t need to go back as far as the Royal Air Force bombing Dresden because it was a ‘railway hub that might be used for reinforcements’ to find them. During the 1999 Nato war against Yugoslavia when there were quite a few attacks on Serbian infrastructure.

At Novi Sad, the Alliance destroyed three bridges over the Danube, ostensibly to stop the Yugoslavs shifting troops towards Kosovo, the theatre of war. But the city of Novi Sad was more than 300km away from that province and evidently most bridge users were civilians.

While the ‘dual use’ argument was sufficient for military lawyers to sign off on these missions it was part of a pattern of Nato actions to hit sites that were key to the prestige and economic wellbeing of the Belgrade government. It gained their attention in a way that weeks of taking out tanks or trucks in Kosovo, one by one with precision guided munitions, could not have done.

So, when the US and Israel started bombing Iran on 28^th February it might seem surprising that there was a reluctance to strike similar targets. Naturally, during the opening phase of an air campaign, their primary focus was the Islamic Republic’s air defences and missile forces.

But even when Iran responded with thousands of drone and missile strikes on the infrastructure of its Arab neighbours, the US initially held back from following suit. That was doubly surprising given defence secretary Pete Hegseth’s commitment to, “maximum lethality”, and rejection of, “stupid rules of engagement”.

Indeed, Donald Trump upbraided the Israelis as they started to switch to infrastructure targets. When they hit the Iranian side of the Pars gas field on 18^thMarch these criticisms became public.

Was this because Gulf states, who were then on the receiving end of Iran’s response, pressured the Americans to stop Israel? Quite possibly, certainly the IRGC’s threat to hit the desalination plants so vital to those emirates gave them a powerful deterrent in that ladder of escalation.

Those facilities, converting brackish water into the drinkable variety, are civilian targets by almost any definition. Iran did not in fact put them out of action, successfully using the threat to gain escalation dominance at the time.

Trump has threatened to hit desalination plants and indeed to end Iranian civilisation, but not followed through either, exposing his words as bluster. It seems curious he and Hegseth, who so often revel in transgressing liberal norms, might have held back even momentarily. But like many aspects of the late campaign, Trump’s muddled war objectives were to blame, he argued for a time that destroying key infrastructure or economic targets was contrary to the principle of trying to help the Iranian people.

In any case this restraint was relaxed with the US giving Israel to green light to hit certain key places like steel mills and petrochemical works. And by 13^thApril, having taken some weeks to get the requisite forces in place, the US stepped up economic warfare by imposing its maritime blockade on the Islamic Republic.

My assessment is that these steps played an important role in getting Iran back to the negotiating table. Shutting down their trade provided an opportunity to nullify the edge that Iran had gained by closing the Strait of Hormuz.

Little wonder that the manoeuvring for advantage since the two sides signed their memorandum of understanding, had concerned Iran’s attempts to extend its authority over the Strait and America’s to thwart that, while threatening the Islamic Republic’s own ability to continue exporting its oil.

Similarly, Ukraine’s long range drone offensive aims to alter the Kremlin’s position by a combination of economic harm and making Russians fuming in the petrol queues confront the consequences of invading their neighbours. Volodymyr Zelenskyy has even ironically referred to the deep strikes on Russian refineries as ‘applying sanctions’.

Neither Putin nor those ruling Iran are particularly sensitive to the popular mood. But they cannot ignore possible long term economic harms. Does that mean that effective strikes aimed at exacerbating these fears will prompt both the IRGC and Russian president to alter course or escalate? We don’t yet know.

But what we can see, after decades in which western countries were focused on expeditionary campaigns or insurgent groups that in this new moment of state on state coercion, economic war is regaining a central place. You might argue that faced with all out struggle, even European countries might overcome their scruples about what might recently have been classed as civilian infrastructure. But at this moment, I sense that many decision makers on the Continent have not yet absorbed this harsh reality.

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It’s 250 years since the American declaration of independence but the war had actually started fifteen months earlier in Boston. During that period many of the colonists claimed that they would remain subject of King George III if a new deal could be hammered out with their faraway sovereign.

The idea that they had been driven to revolt by the stupidity of ministers but remained loyal to their king came about in part because many thought the monarch was part of a divinely ordained ‘hierarchy of order’ against which rebellion was not only a sin but ‘unnatural’, a word often used by their British enemies to characterise the revolution. And while this confusion among the rebels continued it found many forms, not least that the colours under which many of George Washington’s regiments fought during that first year had the British union flag on them.

But by the time independence was declared in Philadelphia in 1776 their leaders at least had recognised that this was a definitive break with the mother country. Hundreds of thousands of loyalist Americans begged to differ, fighting the revolution tooth and nail.

So today I am re-posting a piece I wrote at the 250th anniversary of the war breaking out in Boston, when few of you subscribed to this blog. It’s based on deep research on the journals and letters of the time and is about what the redcoats thought of their enemies. Were they brothers or foreigners? was this a continuation of the long struggle at home between Whigs and Tories or something very different? and how best to quell the revolt?

That gap between the outbreak of war and the declaration of independence was a critical time in the emergence of an American national character. If nothing else, sifting through the papers of those who served King George III in that distant campaign, even 250 years later the vitriol and wry humour make for entertaining reading.

Are they Like Us or Not?

From the get-go, as companies of militia armed themselves around Boston, preparing to take on the King’s troops, this question of whether they were kith and kin or not preoccupied the garrison. Because if they were the same people, did that mean you had to go all out for reconciliation, or on the contrary was this rebellion that had to be put down as brutally as the Scots had been in 1745.

Writing home weeks before he was picked to lead the expedition to disarm the rebellious militia at Lexington and Concord, Brigadier the Earl Percy expressed the hope that he would not be given exactly such a mission: “I cannot say this is a business I very much admire, I hope it will not be my fate to be ordered up with them”.

Captain Harris, of Percy’s regiment, the 5^th Foot, also wrote home, “though I must confess I should like to try what stuff I am made of, yet I would rather the trial be with others than these poor fellows of kindred blood”.

For many in the garrison, talking over the rebellious goings on, as they supped their drinks in Boston’s coffee houses, this was a civil war which echoed England’s 17^thCentury struggle between the King’s party and those who wanted the landed gentry to have more power – factions characterised as Tories and Whigs respectively. ‘Brother Jonathan’ or just Jonathan, terms often used by British soldiers for the rebels was an English Civil War derogatory name for the King’s Roundhead enemies.

Indeed Lieutenant Richard Williams believed it was the same families causing the trouble, often puritans, who had enthusiastically backed the English revolution but emigrated to America after the return to power of the king in 1660: “these people have not in the least deviated from the steps of their ancestors, always grumbling and unwilling to acknowledge the authority of any power but what originated among them. They certainly have long looked forward to the day of independency”.

If Brigadier Percy or Captain Harris dreaded seeing action against the colonists, it was precisely because as Benjamin Franklin put it, it was a quarrel between ‘English men’, that not only had it roots in the Old Country’s history but was still very much being played out in London and Dublin in 1775. Many of the biggest landed families in those cities supported the colonists and did not want George III to succeed in suppressing the revolt by force.

So Percy, whose father (the Duke of Northumberland) had voted against the Stamp Act, that helped trigger the revolution, had a good deal of sympathy with those resisting the king. But, and this is critical, while he opposed the war, he heartily disliked the American Whigs. His experience of trying diplomacy with the Select Men of Boston left him agog at their refusal to compromise. Writing to England in August 1774, he blasted them: “the people here are a set of sly, artful, hypocritical rascals, cruel, and cowards. I must own I cannot but despise them completely”.

Among the king’s troops, that idea of hypocrisy loomed large. They believed revolutionary firebrands like Hancock, Adams, and Warren were uninterested in compromise, were out for themselves and taking advantage of a credible populace. Commenting on the state of Boston after fighting began when these leaders and thousands of other Whigs or rebels left the city Lt Williams reflected that it had, “no such thing as a play house, they were too puritanical a set to admit of such lewd diversions, tho’ perhaps no town of this size could turn out more whores than this could. They have left us an ample sample of them”.

The use of the pulpit in particular to preach rebellion rankled with many officers. And once the populace or rather that section that sympathised with the Patriot or Whig cause became more militant, abuse of the king’s troops became common. In the months before Lexington and Concord they were often spat at, stoned, or abused verbally as ‘lobsters’, ‘bloodybacks’ and so on. This brought many to the conclusion that, “these lawless people” were not the same as the British, that they had evolved a distinct national character.

This was put most cogently by Major Henry Blunt, writing home the year before full scale rebellion broke out: “the Patriots, like some of ours indeed, have started up from obscurity by talking loudly of Liberty to a crowd of fellows that know nothing of it, rascals that have emigrated from, or been banished from their own country and sold themselves here as slaves. These people, most of them originally Scotch or Irish, have united in marriage with French, Germans and Dutch and from them have sprung the high-spirited race that boast so much of British Blood and British Liberty, and who have had the folly and impudence to talk of chastising Great Britain”.

The Early Bitter Lessons

In the days after Lexington and Concord, in which British troops showed indiscipline and were harried for miles by American militia as they hastened back to the city, there was much uneasy comment. The settlers who had performed very well were animated by ‘enthusiasm’, an earnest belief in their cause, and had been expertly trained by those who had served the crown again the French during the earlier wars on the Canadian frontier.

“Whoever looks upon them as an irregular mob, will find himself much mistaken”, Percy wrote after his brigade’s rough handling on 19^th April, “they have men amongst them who know very well what they are about, having been employed as Rangers against the Indians and Canadians… for my part, I never believed, I confess, that they would have attacked the King’s troops”.

When the Patriots gave battle on Bunker Hill a couple of months later the results were even more disturbing, 226 redcoats were killed and 900 wounded. “We have learnt one melancholy truth”, one of the British officers wounded in the battle reflected on his sick bed, “which is, that the Americans, if they are equally well commanded, are full as good soldiers as ours, and, as it is, are very little inferior to us even in discipline and countenance”.

Following these setbacks the British abandoned Boston and waited for reinforcements. When they took the war to New York in 1776 the ultras among them hoped to use harsher measures. Colonel James Grant, a Scot who was close to the commander in chief who had derided the New England people as, “bible-thumpers”, wrote at the outset of the new campaign, “lenity is out of the question, or ought to be, for depend upon it, this continent is lost to Great Britain, if it is not crushed and conquered, exceptions may be made, but Boston and Philadelphia should be treated with the greatest severity”.

Defeating General George Washington’s army in New York that summer, some argued for extreme measures against the American captives. Captain Frederick Mackenzie wrote, “an exchange of prisoners is talked of. The measure may be right and politic; but it appears rather extraordinary that under the present circumstances we should treat them as if on an equality”. While aware that some, like Grant, argued they should all be put to the sword, Mackenzie felt, “although the humanity hitherto shown to the Rebels has not had the desired effect, I hope it may in the end; and I am of the opinion it is right to treat our enemies as of they might one day become our friends”.

Though the British won many battles they were defeated in the summer of 1777 at Saratoga, triggering the entry of France into the war, which in turn helped produce the defeat at Yorktown in 1781.

Defeat and Reflection

The loss at Saratoga and entry into the war of France caused attitudes among the British troops to harden. After all, if the Americans were siding with the old enemy wasn’t this treachery of the worst kind?

Even those from British families hostile to the policies of George III who believed his American war was futile, the feeling of betrayal by the inhabitants of the 13 colonies was clear. “Every day confirms me the more, in my old opinions”, wrote Brigadier Charles O’Hara of the Guards in 1780, “that England has not only lost this Country for ever, but must for ever consider the people of this Continent, as the most inveterate of her enemies”.

Of course, not all colonists sided with the revolution – far from it. It was often suggested around one third remained loyal to the crown. And as the conflict came to a close, many of them decided they wanted no part of an independent America, around 10% of the entire population chose to leave, heading for Canada, the Caribbean, and the British Isles. Major Richard Dansey of the 33^rdFoot, at New York in 1783 as ships carrying these refugees departed, commented, “the desertion of the loyalists is looked upon by all of us as the most dishonourable act that was ever done by a nation”.

Of course there were some, notably among the contingents hired from German princelings who admired what the rebels had achieved. Although there were significant settlements of German immigrants too, the Hessians and other foreigners fighting for Britain did not take the revolution as personally as many of the British officers.

“Although I shuddered at the distress of these men”, wrote the Hessian Jaeger Captain Johann Ewald after watching Americans file by in ragged uniforms near the end of the war, “it filled me with awe for them, for I did not think there was an army in the world which could be maintained as cheaply as the American army… to what cannot enthusiasm led a people !”

As the British fleet sailed off form New York in 1783, quite a few could not reconcile themselves to the loss of the war, making predictions that the colonists would soon be at each other’s throats. General Guy Carleton, the governor of Canada, was convinced that, “another revolution as inevitable and at no great distance”, the new republic would not hold, because he wrote, “many [Americans] look back with regard on the tranquillity and happiness of former times and are persuaded that neither peace nor safety can be procured but under their former government”.

These tensions did contribute to further warfare in 1812. But the conviction on the part of many Redcoats that the Americans would return to their ‘true allegiance’ proved mistaken.

For more on the Redcoat’s’ war, my book Fusiliers tells the story

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I’ll say one thing for the British government. Their spin on the Defence Investment Plan, shorter version ‘ooh shiny drones’, worked well for a time. Knowing the weakness of many commentators, news editors, and lovers of tech for such systems, it was a predictable play.

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And sure enough, many of the scene-setting pieces majored on that theme, while on Tuesday Radio 4’s Today programme went to a Ukrainian drone commander and someone making these devices in this country before giving a few minutes to General Richard Barrons, one of those who’d written last year’s Strategic Defence Review or SR, to get to the essence of what yesterday was about, which is that the government is still dodging the financial commitments necessary to meet its own funding promise to Nato, something considered essential by military chiefs.

I have since before the SDR was published, written repeatedly about the centrality of this financial question. And regrettably it was all too clear before the Defence Investment Plan (DIP) was published yesterday that it would not significantly change an offer that the previous defence secretary and his armed forces minister considered so inadequate, and so far adrift from the government’s language about preparing for war, that they both resigned.

By Tuesday evening, diligent work by political correspondents and financial analysts had exposed the hollowness of the ‘new money’ claims. Underlining the dark comedy of it all, the lobby were soon stampeding in the direction of a strong Westminster angle, that Keir Starmer was passing the parcel to Andy Burnham to work out where billions of this would come from.

So today I’m going to consider the question of why the drone story is such catnip for journos and commentators. The first and most obvious point is that well educated, often progressive, generalists don’t particularly like military spending or the senior officers who they see as constantly demanding money with menaces.

Of course, there’s a humanitarian impulse here too – why put people in harm’s way, far better to lose an uncrewed aircraft than a pilot. Well, amen to that.

As someone who’s been a tank crewman and smelled the incinerated remains of others in war zones across the world, I’m very keen on the idea that people might not have to go to war in them anymore. But for lots of reasons, for example that the soldier operating it remotely is not as good at stopping it from getting stuck in ditches, we’re not quite there yet.

‘But, but Ukraine!’ comes the rejoinder. Yes, they are using robot ground vehicles to evacuate casualties from places too dangerous for crewed ones or flying in supplies by drone, but they are also working hard to find ways to protect their tanks better, their army chief said this week, so that they can restore some manoeuvre to the battlefield.

The mangling or misrepresentation of Ukrainian drone experience is an important part of newsroom discussions. I’ve several times been told that ‘people are shooting down a $5,000 drone with a $5m missile’ – versions of those figures may vary.

And while that has happened, the Ukrainians in particular have gone to great lengths to avoid doing it in recent years. The vast majority of engagements there deal with Russian attack drones by jamming or low cost interception.

Another trope is ‘billion dollar/pound warships wouldn’t last five minutes with all those drones around’. That’s another misreading of Ukraine experience – many of the big hits from the Russian cruiser Moskova to a submarine in dry dock were carried out with legacy weaponry, cruise missiles, not drones.

And what about those billion dollar American destroyers that have cruised back and forth through the Strait of Hormuz recently, swatting Iranian missiles, drones, and speedboats away as they went? Very evidently that kind of ‘exquisite capability’ a highly advanced warship with the systems required to deal with attacks from the surface, air, or subsurface, is still viable for now.

The thorny issue for people writing something like an SDR or a DIP is whether that very expensive, crewed, destroyer will still be viable in ten or twenty years’ time? You might argue that what we’ve learned in Ukraine or the Gulf is that pulling apart that exquisite weaponry like a warship or fighter jet can allow you to get part of the mission the pilot or ship’s complement would have done performed at lower risk, but cost-wise, I’m not so sure.

A Ukrainian FP-1 drone, for example, can fly one thousand kilometres into Russia and blow up an oil terminal for about $50,000 a pop. But then think about a weapon that isn’t a ‘one way effector’ to use the ghastly British jargon, something you can use many times over to drop bombs or launch missiles, and the add some sensors to it so it can detect its own targets.

Well then you’ve upped the spec a lot, and what you’ve got is an RAF Protector uncrewed air system that will actually cost you £30m to buy. It’s much cheaper than an F-35 piloted jet – you can get ten Protectors for the price of three F-35s.

But in Iran and Yemen we’ve seen rather a lot of these unpiloted planes (American Reapers) getting shot down – dozens in fact. It’s not the equivalent of an F-35 either in terms of stealthiness, in-flight refuelling, or manoeuvrability. Add those characteristics to a Reaper or Protector and you start closing the gap between the £30m cost of the drone and the £100m of the F-35.

And how to control advanced uncrewed weapons, especially ones like submarines where communication with a distant headquarters can be very difficult? Full autonomy? Many people are uncomfortable with that, not least the crews of ships that might get torpedoed by an autonomous submarine.

Think about the fighter jet too, and the many scenarios it might get used in. If I’m ever on a hijacked plane, I’d rather there be a person in the cockpit of the interceptor sent up with orders to shoot it down if necessary.

This brings many of us to the realisation both that a mix of crewed and uncrewed systems are likely to remain necessary. And also that by ditching the old Cold War habit of combining ever more attributes into a single weapons system, there could be some real opportunities.

So to one of the most eye-catching aspects of the DIP, its plan to shelve the Type 83 destroyer, designed to replace the Royal Navy’s Type-45 air defence ships. The new plan is to pull apart that capability so that it’s not vested in an exquisite, crewed, vessel, probably costing £2bn a time, but in an autonomous sensor vessel (with the radar) and another sort of vessel with the missile battery.

It’s easy to see pros and cons with this approach. For example, if the ‘missile barge’ had fired off all its weaponry, it could return to port to rearm, while the sensor ship remained on patrol. The individual parts of this system (six ‘support vessels’ are also planned) will surely come in well below the cost of a Type 83 destroyer, but add them all together?

I get the sense that one of the ways this new approach appeals to those in uniform is that it could end the domination of the big prime contractors, the firms like BAe or Lockheed Martin. And this is where the bitter experience of cost overruns involving over-specified weapons has created a sweet spot, a coincidence of interest between those who bear grudges against these defence contractors and the drone-struck enthusiasm of the commentariat.

It may well be that ‘dis-aggregating’ advanced weapons, using unpiloted ‘wing men’ for fighters or a floating sonar station rather than an anti-submarine frigate, will offer real chances of doing a better job, more cheaply. It seems pretty clear already that using long range strike weapons from drones to ballistic or cruise missiles, offers many advantages over legacy piloted air strikes so western countries are investing accordingly.

But let’s not pretend there aren’t risks too. If your missile battery autonomous ship proves a lot easier to build that the radar station one and is ready to go to sea three years ahead of it, you still don’t have a viable system. If the enemy perfects ways to fry the datalinks between them, ditto.

And talking of linking them up, if you’ve eliminated the legacy big prime contractor from the procurement equation because you felt they’d fleeced the taxpayer one too many times, who is going to take responsibility for integrating all the elements of your ‘dis-aggregated’ fleet or air force? New firms, disrupters like Anduril, Palantir, and Helsing, are vying for that type of business.

So yes, the crisis of military preparedness that we now face demands new solutions. And it creates plenty of opportunities for drones and disruptors. But will it all cost much less? I doubt it.

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For a long time now supporters of Ukraine and armchair generals more generally have been arguing that the best form of defence against Russia’s largescale drone and missile attacks would be to hit the factories or launch units. Of course there’s a huge effort to shoot own the incoming threats over Ukraine itself but the logic is that it’s vital to ‘shoot the archer, not the arrows’.

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So I just wanted to bolt on to my last post a few thoughts about this specific point. When it comes to long range strikes, the Ukrainians face three types of threat: ballistic missiles like the Iskander-M or Kinzhal that plunge down onto their targets at high supersonic speeds; jet powered cruise missiles; and the Geran or Shahed type drone, most of which are still propeller driven.

Geran strikes are by far the most numerous, but the ballistic missiles are the hardest to defend against, particularly as Ukraine is starved of US-made Patriot missiles, which remain the best answer to that threat.

The Ukrainian’s have long grasped the ‘shoot the archer’ idea, their problem has been making it happen. So although they first hit the Geran factory in Yelabuga a couple of years ago, it was hard for them to have a big effect on production there.

That plant requires the Ukrainian munitions to fly around 1,000km, and the drone types used to hit it had relatively small warheads, doing limited damage to the sprawling facility. For a long time they pinned their hopes on the new FP-5 Flamingo drone that delivers a thumping one tonne of explosive up to 3,000km away, but development took time.

Lately, as part of the wider uptake in deep strikes made possible by increased Ukrainian drone production and a weakening of Russian air defences, we have started to see a bigger, joined up effort against targeting the Kremlin’s arms industry.

The Yelabuga plant was hit multiple times in April and May. Ukraine also attacked the Atlant plant in Taganrog on 19^th April, a key site in the manufacture of Molniya and Orion drones.

Then on 22^nd June, as I mentioned earlier this week, they hit the Sborka factory in Voronezh. It’s critical for the production of microprocessors and circuitry for a wide variety of Russian weapons including missiles.

This morning I see Ukraine has blasted the Titan-Barikady factory in Volgograd, using Flamingo missiles. It makes launchers for Iskander-M ballistic missiles as well as intercontinental range systems.

The pattern that emerges is that numerous pinch points in the Russian missile and drone supply chain are being hit. And among the hundreds of strikes now going in weekly, there may have been other plants in this system struck that we don’t even know about yet.

The Ukrainians have exploited the full range of weaponry at their disposal, according to the target and defences that have to be beaten: drones on Alabuga; Neptune missiles at Atlant; Storm Shadow or Rusty Dagger air launched cruise missiles at the Voronezh target; and Flamingo in Volgograd.

Have they had an effect? Russian attacks have been building this year from around 6,000 drone and missile deep strikes each month at the start of the year to 8,350 in May. So is the answer no? Arguably the figure would have been even higher without the Ukrainian bombing of Russian military plants but it can hardly be said that it’s delivered big results yet.

So now, with thousands of advanced deep strike weapons being delivered to the Ukrainians there may be a difference. Certainly they will be able to sustain their bombardments, which at places like Alabuga have only produced short term disruption up to now.

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Ukraine’s fight back against Russia has scored some notable successes in recent weeks. Ten days ago, in the Sunday Times I flagged up some key developments, trying to assess what it meant to the overall course of the war, but here I can go into more detail

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Also, since I wrote that, things have only got worse for Russia as a series of spectacular strikes on Moscow has shown the Ukrainian ability to bring home the war to the core population most protected by Vladimir Putin from its ugly realities.

Given the number of false dawns, and the overselling of Ukraine’s abilities for years by certain over-zealous partisans, some caution is naturally in order. Russia retains advantages as the larger, more populous, nation, and if Putin really starts to feel things slipping away, he has options for escalating the conflict, trying to frighten his neighbours and the West more generally into backing off.

But there are some developments that, at the very least, mark an evolution in the course of the war, increasing the pressure on the Kremlin. And in an influential analysis published last month, Nigel Gould-Davies of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, argued that Putin has very little leeway left, be that in arms production, finding more soldiers, or financing the war.

So let’s list what I consider to have been the key developments of recent weeks – allowing that some of these changes have been in the pipeline for years.

Frontline Attrition

We all know that Russia has for years accepted losses at a scale that would have caused western governments to throw in the towel after a few weeks. In recent months HUR (Ukrainian military intelligence) has been claiming that it’s been meeting or exceeding its target of putting 30,000 or more Russians out of action each month. That means ‘deleting’ more soldiers than they can recruit.

Adding to the mind-boggling claims, the Director of GCHQ last month claimed that western agencies assessed half a million Russian soldiers had been killed in the war so far. There have been arguments about the definition of casualties and loss rates throughout the war, but HUR has introduced a new system for compiling verifiable evidence of Russian losses. It takes the form of a macabre competition where units get rewards for their kills.

Much is unclear about this deadly contest but it is evident that both sides have ramped up their production of the First Person View (FPV) or small killer drones used on or about the ‘zero line’. Ukraine is now for the first time close to Russian production figures and claiming a 5:1 advantage in casualties caused. Personally, I doubt that growing numbers of FPVs can on its own win the war for Kyiv, but in causing so many casualties they add to the financial costs of war for the Kremlin, which must compensate the victims or their families and constantly raise the sign-on bounty for those obtuse enough still to head for the front.

The 50-200km Band

It is when you look at the battle beyond the front and its immediate sterile hinterland that things start to look more important. At these ranges, the Russians cannot use fibre optic cable to make their drones un-jammable. The spools of this fine line cannot be made that long (yet!).

To add to the Russian army’s problems, Starlink has since February shut them out of its satellite system, which they had been using to control some of their longer range drones. So now it’s just the Ukrainians that can exploit it, and it’s very hard to jam.

Combine this Starlink factor with growing numbers of drones or missiles operating at this depth and it had given Kyiv a big operational edge. They’ve been using that to hit ammo dumps, command centres, and all the rest.

This advantage has been wielded to the greatest advantage in Crimea and parts of occupied Kherson district that the Russians use as a ‘land bridge’ to that key territory.

The authorities in Crimea have declared fuel rationing, Russian social media is full of anguished accounts of supplies running low and complaints about the ineffectiveness of their air defences. This week, in a sign of how carefully thought out its campaign is, the Ukrainian military hit three key ferries that ply the Kerch Strait between Crimea and Russia. The isolation of this key peninsula seems a very real possibility now.

Deep Strike

Repeated strikes this month on an oil refinery at Kapotnaya South-East of Moscow have produced dramatic images and exposed the limitations of the capital’s air defences. Ukraine has been striking in depth, particularly at oil installations, for a couple of years, so again the salient question is, is this changing meaningfully now? As with the shorter range systems, production initiatives begun some time ago are now delivering big numbers.

They are also allowing a wide variety of attack profiles, the recent Kapotnaya strike employed around 200 drones, encompassing jet and propeller powered ones flying at various altitudes. Copying the tactics Russia has used for years, careful timing allowed drones launched from widely scattered sites to arrive simultaneously at the desired times.

On 22^nd June, the Ukrainians struck a key Sborka electronics plant in Voronezh nearly 600km south of Moscow. By all accounts it’s a key location in the production of microchips and other electronics for the Russian military. This attack – arguably of greater military importance than the Moscow refinery – was not apparently carried out by drones at all.

Accounts differ as to whether the Voronezh strike used Storm Shadow cruise missiles or newly received AGM-188 ‘Rusty Dagger’ missiles. The latter were developed at speed by American contractors specifically for Ukraine having a range of more than 800km. More than 3,000 are on order, the first ones having arrived in October.

Either way, the use of advanced cruise missiles would involve manned aircraft from the Ukrainian air force (likely Su-24 for Storm Shadow or F-16 for Rusty Dagger), in case you think war is now all about drones. These are advanced weapons, and evidently accurate, given the built-up surroundings of the target area.

Escalate or Ceasefire?

There’s no doubting the embarrassment for Putin of these major strikes in St Petersburg and Moscow, or that the use of western supplied cruise missiles in Voronezh will infuriate him. In the past he’s sometimes resorted to nuclear sabre rattling, and more recently some analysts have connected a growing number of drone incursions in the Baltic states with the uptick in Ukraine’s strike campaign, suggesting bigger provocations against these Nato members might be another option for the Kremlin.

It must also be very galling for the Russian leadership to see how effectively the Ukrainians are now interdicting Crimea. Putin’s seizure of the territory in 2014 was such an important and popular moment for him that the present situation must rankle.

That assumes of course that he knows about it and the stories of him being lied to by his generals are legion. That IISS study I mentioned earlier suggests the Russian leader may be coming to some sort of crunch where, unable to squeeze any more out of the military or economy he has to take drastic action to mobilise more resources or accept a ceasefire.

Adding to these dilemmas are the apparent calming of the situation in the Gulf. As world oil prices fall, that’s another problem for the Kremlin, given its dependence on energy exports for money.

Again, prediction is a perilous thing here. What one can say with certainty is that Ukraine’s ability to harm Russia, whether that’s killing men on the front, lighting up the Kerch ferry, or causing black rain to fall in Moscow is growing significantly. The ball is now in Putin’s court.

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If we are to take one lesson from the British government’s defence car crash of the past week it is that the battle to reverse this country’s long term decline as a military power is over. Faced with the prospect of trying to switch billions from benefits to rebuild our national security, they have buckled, and barring an existential 1939-style crisis, this discussion is now over for the foreseeable future.

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As historical setbacks go, what has happened is as significant as the 1956 Suez Crisis. Certainly, the deal that Keir Starmer offered John Healey – of increasing defence spending to 2.68% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by 2030 was so bad that it triggered his resignation, and renders Britain’s Nato pledge to get it to 3.5% of GDP by 2035 a near impossibility.

The ‘back loading’ of the spend needed to reach that target was flagged up in Healey’s resignation letter. It means you need to find so much more cash during 2030-35 that it’s hard to see any government, whether Labour, Tory, or indeed Reform, managing it.

To add insult to injury, Downing Street continues to insist that it was an amazingly generous offer that could only be achieved by strong-arming other government departments. And because of this, it is also suggested by No10 briefing, Dan Jarvis, Healey’s successor as defence secretary, could not plead for more as a condition of taking the job, the decision is settled.

There is a chance, in an attempt to avoid the disastrous implications of such an outcome, that the service chiefs may go to Andy Burnham, if he comes the next PM, threatening resignation. Given that he has shown a tendency to make policy on the basis of the last person he listened to (note his flip-flop over the ‘Waspi’ pensions case, something that could have added billions a year to the benefits bill) perhaps it’s worth a try.

But smart people who know the defence world – like former National Security Adviser and Cabinet Secretary Lord Mark Sedwill, have already been thinking through the implications of Starmer’s settlement, and projecting the loss of one of Britain’s major defence roles: strategic nuclear weapons; a navy capable of operating against peer adversaries in the North Atlantic; air forces able to support our allies in northern Europe; and an army that can be deployed on the Continent in support of Nato. Hinting that this last capability is now unaffordable (bad news for the Army in other words), Sedwill posted on social media this weekend, “Britain can’t sustain a ‘balanced force’, we need integrated forces to protect the North Atlantic and High North against Russian aggression and hold their Arctic bases at risk”.

That brings us back to the reality of that slo-mo spending timeline approved by the Treasury, estimated to yield £13bn more for defence over the next four years rather than the £28bn service chiefs wanted. It means that instead of glimpsing the sunlit uplands, as last year’s Strategic Defence Review encouraged us to do, with its talk of putting the country back on a footing where it could defend this country against the forces of another state, we are now back to ‘painful choices’ and likely losing a major capability even though the money is still going up a little.

If you believe the counter-briefing we’ve heard from Labour figures hostile to Healey, this is because the Ministry of Defence is so useless at running its projects that it will waste any more money it’s given. Well, yes, there’ve been some stinkers, project-wise, over the years, Healey can be criticised for being too slow to reform the department and not going far enough in his re-think of procurement.

That said, the emphasis on projects that have gone wrong is usually a distraction by those who don’t want to spend the money on defence at all. Is the record of other departments – from HS2, to nuclear power, or NHS IT systems – really so different, if you cherry pick the worst examples?

In fact, the reason that the hitherto modest increases in defence spending have yielded so little up to now is because it is a system that was broken by successive governments that mouthed glib nonsense about war between states being a thing of the past, chosing to save money by kicking vital programmes into the long grass. If you don’t order a new frigate for 17 years or skimp on Trident by shutting maintenance facilities and postponing refits, while repeatedly dodging decisions about new facilities for manufacturing nuclear warheads, then correcting these problems will cost you tens of billions.

Prevarication and a pretence that all was still well was the only way to balance the books ten years ago, when it was already quite clear that the post-Cold War peace dividend was over and the taps would have to be turned back on. Britain did spend 3.5% of its GDP on defence back in the Eighties – go back to 1961 when I was born and it was 6%!

Please forgive me for reproducing my favourite graph – that of declining defence spend. There are others that show the steadily rising cost of entitlements.

Nobody would suggest a 6% defence spending effort now – instead we have a country that has stumbled when asked to aim for half of that. And all at a time when it has become crystal clear that the United States’ willingness to defend Europe is vanishing.

In the space of a few years, Britain’s ability to lead that rebuild of European defence has ebbed away too. It is tumbling down the league table as a proportion of GDP spent (UK was 3^rd highest in Nato in 2014, 12^th in 2025), or deployable forces. The total spent is still high, but that brings us again back to the huge costs of maintaining nuclear weapons status.

So you hear the barbs about ‘Belgium with nukes’ and grumbling from the Nordic and Baltic countries that Britain is no longer fit to lead the Joint Expeditionary Force. And even if the current attempts to recapitalise the armed forces go well, things may not yet have bottomed out.

We may go down to a couple of frigates in commission during the next year or two. Even the ability even to maintain Trident nuclear submarines patrols may falter before the replacements are fit for service. Changing that outlook would require a spending commitment this government is evidently unwilling to make.

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Over the past year the Treasury, Ministry of Defence and Downing Street have been locked in a three-way battle about how best to bolster national defence. But having talked the talk in last year’s Strategic Defence Review, with lots of ideas about what’s needed to get us to a ‘war footing’, they have had the greatest difficulty walking the walk, ie working out pay for it.

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The problem was there from the outset, with the Treasury trying to avoid committing itself to anything more than a modest rise across a three year public spending horizon and it persists now, all these months later, as we await word of how much money is on its way. So, with one leak following another recently about the Defence Investment Plan, some suggesting it will be published before this week is out, those who deal with national security for a living are marvelling at the dysfunctionality of it all. With all this briefing going on we are certainly on a jaw jaw footing if not the war kind.

Nothing could better prove the emptiness of those phrases about a war footing than the bureaucratic fighting we’ve seen across Whitehall. It suggests that if anything it’s worse than business as usual, due to the parlous state of Britain’s public finances.

So what kind of announcement should we be looking for?

Timing: there’s been lots of set dressing about something coming on Thursday and some suggesting it will slip to Friday. But with leak and counter-leak still going on, demonstrating the participants are still fighting over the money, it may be that it will take longer and the real imperative will be getting it out before the Nato Sumit in Ankara in early July.

Name: is it going to be the Defence Investment Plan (DIP) or isn’t it? There still seems to be complete uncertainty about this in Whitehall. In the dreams of senior officers, the DIP was going to be a seamless design for what was needed, who would make it, how much it would cost, and how that spending would be structured over the coming years.

But a good deal of the leaking has implied that we will not get the DIP as such but a government commitment to boosting defence spending between now and the end of this Parliament (2030). What to call it then? When will the actual DIP with its elements of industrial strategy appear? Today’s situation bears a strong resemblance to one following the defence review of 2015 which was soon found unaffordable leading to various financial bandaids, a further quasi-review in 2018 and a feeling after years of fretting that the comprehensive solution had never been found. Perhaps it will be different now and we will actually get the Defence Investment Plan, Lord knows everyone has been working on it for long enough, but ultimately many will judge any announcement by the numbers in it.

How Much: whatever this new package is called people, particularly Westminster journalists, will be looking for the numbers. Many will measure it against the defence chiefs’ hopeful plea for another £28bn for defence between now and 2030. Today we are seeing figures of £13.5bn and £15bn being bandied about, so we can see expectations are being managed.

As so often with government announcements, political correspondents will get briefed in headline terms by spin doctors trying to avoid small print that might spoil the headlines. But I think we can guess in advance what those might be, depending on the partisan affiliation of those reporting it.

It will be critical to see whether the Treasury really binds itself to these increases up to 2030 or whether it sidesteps such commitments, which are precisely what the forces and manufacturers are looking for. Alas there are still plenty of people in government who hope that peace in Ukraine and Donald Trump leaving office might mean that our commitment to rearmament might be softened later on in this Parliament.

Whose Money: joy last year at the Strategic Defence Review’s spending promises was quickly tempered by the realisation that £6bn of the ‘extra’ cash was meant to come from ‘economies’ within the MoD and much of the rest from the Overseas Aid budget. Now it is reported that some other departments, including Health, have had their capital spending plans trimmed in order to pay for the new defence uplift.

This gives rise to many questions ranging from how much of the spending increase might have to come from cuts to whether it will be money committed to short term capital costs (like buying new munitions) rather than underwriting the long term resource or running costs of new defence capabilities.

Priorities: it’s another constant of British defence rows that we hear of ‘tough choices’ between the services and their preferred new weapons. If we hoped that his might become a thing of the past once the long decline in post-Cold War defence spending was reversed, we’ve learned to think again; the tendency of our armed forces to want more than they can afford continues.

So we face a situation where there will inevitably have to be trade-offs between the new nuclear system replacing Trident, plans to rebuild the surface fleet, the new GCAP fighter (pictured above) jet being developed jointly with Japan and Italy, and the ongoing rebuilding of the armoured fleet with Ajax and other vehicles. Each is a multi-billion, decades-long, business and given the issues in many of these projects further overspends are all but inevitable.

It helps that heavy spending on re-building the army is happening currently, whereas GCAP won’t peak for a few years but there are still many big challenges. Some of these will be dealt with by budgetary ‘moving to the right’, delaying the spend or stretching things out.

In my view we are likely to see the government commit itself to GCAP and move some of the ship building to the right. People are already talking about delays to the Type 26 frigate.

But it may also mean some cancellations, for example reducing the numbers of new warship classes or cancelling the new Type 83 destroyer altogether. It might also mean freezing some of the army’s vehicle projects.

So much of what I’ve described here, of spending trickery, political mis-selling, mismanagement of defence projects or turf fights between the services is so wearily familiar that the promise of last year’s defence review, to reset the whole system, has been exposed as hollow. There is even some talk going around today of another review because last year’s will soon be out of date. As if to underline the absurdity, Shashank Joshi the Economist’s stellar outgoing defence editor posted the AI created (humorous) graph below – of a system so consumed by increasingly frequent exercises of this kind that it achieves a singularity, ending up doing nothing else. One can only guess what they make of this in Moscow or Beijing

.

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Last week I wrote about the ending of the Iran war – or at least this phase of it – and what that meant for the protagonists in the region. It was unwise perhaps to do so ahead of the US and Iran agreeing some kind of formal Memorandum of Understanding to bring the whole sorry business to a close, but I think even now we’ve got a good grasp on what has happened, even if it stutters in some more.

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So now I wanted to address the broader global dynamics of where this leaves the US. It is clear to me, even if many in political life there don’t see it, that it marks another milestone in the decline of that great power even if the question of whether America can indeed be made great again remains open.

Evidently there are implications for the USA’s Russian and Chinese rivals, as well as some of the emerging lesser powers. There are no prizes for guessing that a war embarked upon over-confidently, without the forces in place at the outset to challenge any Iranian blockade of Hormuz or impose a blockade on the Islamic Republic’s shipping, will have harmed America’s standing as the world’s leading military power.

Donald Trump created so much static with his overconfidence and constantly changing positions about the war and its purpose that it’s hardly surprising that so many opinion formers around the world have reacted with unalloyed schadenfreude. But it’s important to understand that today’s situation has resulted from decades of underinvestment, and decisions taken by other presidents too.

In The Edge, a short book I published eleven years ago, I looked at the falling indices of Western military power and the rising ones of challenger states, examining the effects these combined trends would have. My chapters took in everything from US under-investment in missile stocks, as well as other advanced weaponry needed to fight state adversaries (as opposed to insurgencies in Iraq or Afghanistan) to the embrace of emerging technologies such as drones by countries like Iran.

Pointing out that even at the time The Edge was published (2015), the US military had lost the capability to deploy the kind of forces, including six aircraft carrier groups and several armoured divisions it had at the time of its 1991 campaign against Iraq, we could draw certain conclusions. Such was the reduction in American power, I wrote, that, “even a conventional military campaign against Iran could be a real challenge”.

So here we are, more than a decade on, seeing the outcomes, both in terms of Iran’s ability to strike its neighbours with a family of long range weapons and America’s military limitations. As I’ve noted recently, the US Navy currently struggles to sustain more than two aircraft carriers in the region or to provide a viable system for escorting merchant ships out of the Strait of Hormuz.

It is true, in an all-out war, the US could mobilise hundreds of thousands more troops, dozens of warships and scores more combat aircraft for these tasks. But evidently Trump is not ready politically to commit the country to such a struggle and even if he was there would be many limitations imposed upon such a force by the long under-investment in munitions and support for advanced equipment.

The other point not to lose sight of is that the US military, being highly professional, has demonstrated some advanced capabilities that to some extent mitigate its loss of numbers or mass. Noteworthy for me:

- Use of a large air tanker force to produce strike numbers almost as great as those in 1991 when the US had five times as many combat aircraft in the region;

- The effectiveness of some of those very expensive ‘exquisite’ weapons both in bringing down incoming Iranian missiles as well as suppressing their air defences;

- Relatively low losses in combat aircraft compared to 1991, critically denying the Islamic Republic its chance to parade captured pilots;

- Similarly, US Navy warships have successfully withstood attacks from a variety of Iranian weaponry, protecting their sailors and (so far) preventing the image of a blazing US warship from defining the conflict.

On the other side of the ledger though there are enough negatives to cause many to declare that Trump’s failure to bend Iran to his will, while protecting Arab allies in the Gulf, mark a major defeat for America. Quite a few professional weaknesses have been exposed from the poorly protected nature of US bases in the region to an aircraft loss rate that is unmistakeably higher than that of Israel, that flew almost as many missions.

Perhaps more importantly, in terms of the historical ebb and flow or great powers, the US has been unable to break Iran’s hold over Hormuz, upholding the principle of free navigation that is so important for everything from the global economy to international security.

Furthermore, US military performance even against the more limited yardstick set at the beginning by the Pentagon, of neutralising Iran’s forces has been mediocre. Early claims of having destroyed the great majority of Iran’s missiles or drones have been tempered by more sober analysis over time. Having prepared for this contest for decades, the Islamic Republic have developed whole families of long range weapons, some very cheaply produced, as well as dozens of bunkers, deep underground, in which to store them.

Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee recently, Centcom commander Admiral Bradley Cooper gave an insight into lessons learned by US forces. Asked to list what US forces need to prioritise he replied, “I’d put three things: more electronic warfare, keep counter-UAS [ie anti-drone defences] on the leading edge—tactics change very quickly—and we need to invest more in hard and deeply buried targets”.

On this last question, it has been reported that a couple of years ago the US Air Force had a stock of just 40 of its most powerful bunker-busters the so-called Massive Ordnance Penetrator. Fourteen were used during the June 2025 raids against Iranian nuclear sites.

As for the expenditure of scarce munitions during the latest round of fighting, the Talon interceptor used by the THAAD anti-missile system stands out. The total stock was thought to be about 600 two years ago, 150 were fired in defence of Israel during Iranian attacks of October 2024 and June 2025, now around 200 more have been launched since February this year meaning more than half the national stockpile is gone. Furthermore, Iran has succeeded in damaging some of the radars and launch vehicles used by THAAD batteries sent to the Middle East.

The implications of this for any conflict against China, which, if it goes to war, plans on launching thousands of ballistic missiles against US bases in the Pacific are obvious and grim. There is no rapid fix or easy blame game here: just 73 Talon missiles were manufactured during Joe Biden’s presidency, and although there is now an imperative to boost production by a big margin, the line is not expected to gear up until next year.

Similar stories can be told for the offensive stockpile; more than 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles have been fired in this year’s campaign, and almost the full 400 unit inventory of the new PrSM strike missile. In both cases production is being stepped up but it will take years to replace lost stocks, let alone supply the Gulf allies who need replenishment, particularly of items like the Patriot, and, at the back of the queue, the Europeans.

So there is a window of vulnerability here for the next year or two, precisely what General Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned Trump about in February, before the war started. That is particularly relevant to the Chinese, with their timetable of readying the People’s Liberation Army by 2027 for possible operations to take Taiwan.

Longer term, the Trump Administration plans big defence spending increases in order to modernise elements of the US military that fell behind during the long ‘procurement holiday’ of the Clinton, Obama, and Bush years. There are one or two stars here, like the new B-21 bomber prototypes of which are now flying, with reports suggesting development is going very well.

The American military therefore, to use the cliché, stands at a crossroads. It is possible that the recapitalisation planned with Trump’s big increases will turn things around. For both Chinese and Russian leaders this might create a temptation to go sooner rather than later with any military adventures.

But there are other possibilities, not least that a Democratic Party president of a very different hue may replace Trump in 2028, leading to a scaling back or even reversal of Pentagon spending plans. There are also some signs in key areas, that regardless of intent or budget, a future president may be unable to win back US dominance.

That China is building warships at a frantic rate is only too well known in Washington. The Biden Administration began, and Trump has continued, attempts to rectify this.

Despite years of attention to the problem in Washington DC however, little improvement has been achieved, with the construction of nuclear submarines in particular remaining stubbornly slow. Many reasons have been cited, but the loss of critical skills, for example in specialist welding, is key.

Frustration with the lack of progress caused Trump to sack his navy secretary recently. Increasingly, the Pentagon is search for ways to boost its naval strength with construction in Japanese and South Korean yards.

Looking more broadly at the economy, and the struggle for dominance in AI and advanced electronics, attempts that started under first term Trump and Biden to onshore production of the most advanced microchips have so far delivered little despite billions invested. During last year’s tariff war, America received a salutary lesson in its continued dependence on Chinese rare earths and magnets.

Progress by the People’s Republic on everything from shipbuilding to missile stocks, space warfare, to advanced computing may now mean that its rise to dominance is unstoppable. It even outstrips the US in nuclear warhead production, another area where the Americans are struggling with crumbling, long neglected, infrastructure.

So the chances are significant that the late Iran war may be seen not just as an example of presidential hubris or miscalculation, but of underlying realities and the humbling of a great power.

With rumours, leaks and briefings aplenty, the arguments are already raging about ‘who won’ the Iran war. And of course with this week’s strikes against Iranian ships suspected of laying mines in the Strait of Hormuz and of Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, we’re not there yet.

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For me, trying to distil the realities of who gained what is made all the harder by the distortions and disinformation broadcast from all sides. Of course, Iranian media will proclaim it as a glorious victory, and those close to Donald Trump insist that he has gained things that the Obama-era nuclear deal (the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) never could.

There’s a further issue, which is that the largely progressive journalistic mindset of our British coverage causes them to be reluctant to admit that military solutions in general can ever work or that Trump or Benjamin Netanyahu have ever done a wise thing. There’s another reason to adopt their analytical line which is that there’s a big public appetite for takes that suggest these two men have got their comeuppance, blundering into an ill-considered war. I’ve seen this myself in the clicks that my YouTube videos for the Times or Fourcast Indicators podcasts on the same platform get when they are posted with the hook of just how badly wrong Trump in particular has got things.

Since I have been saying from the outset that the operation started on 28^thFebruary was a huge gamble based on facile or flawed assumptions, it’s not like my own work has been so different from that of the journalistic or analytical pack. But I think it’s worth winding in some caveats here.

Firstly, and most obviously, the active phase of hostilities is not over yet. When Trump started the war on 28^th February he told the people of Iran, “don’t leave your home… when we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations”.

Evidently there was a hope, particularly on the Israeli side, that starting this war by killing the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, would trigger an immediate regime collapse. And we know that not only did it fail to do so, but empowered elements who were harder line and less cautious than the octogenarian cleric.

Evidently the Iranian people were very unlikely to revolt while the war was on; January’s massacres were fresh in their minds and the regime response likely to be draconian if they tried anything while the country was being attacked. But we don’t know when the discontent crushed at the start of the year, exacerbated by the economic damage done during the bombing, will burst out again. If there was a coup or the country descended into civil war during the coming months, would we still think the Israelis and US were so naïve in their assumptions?

The Islamic Republic is evidently desperate for cash to alleviate these internal pressures, placing a high priority in negotiations on funds frozen in Arab states, relief of the sanctions related to its nuclear programme, and trying to use the ‘Hormuz tollbooth’ to raise more funds in the form of ‘reparations’ for war damage. Their control of the Strait, and intimidation of Arab neighbours means they will succeed in getting some of this cash – but the lifting of sanctions will be slow and conditions-based, doing little to alleviate rapidly the economic damage suffered in recent months.

Another area where we need to tread carefully analytically is the nuclear programme. Trump’s most ardent critics argue both that the Administration was lying about Iran being close to a nuclear weapon and that last June’s twelve day war did little damage to their nuclear programme.

Yes, the idea that Iran might have been close to getting the bomb in February this year was a nonsense. But that’s in large degree, to quote Raphael Grossi, boss of the International Atomic Energy Authority, because last year’s, “Twelve Day War was, in that sense, quite effective… one cannot deny that this has really rolled back the program considerably”.

What Grossi also knows is that the ongoing suppression of that programme will require onsite inspection under agreements to ensure that Iran does not simply build new centrifuges and research labs to replace the ones destroyed. It is reasonable to suppose that this year’s bombing did additional damage to the Iranian nuclear and ancillary facilities.

The outcome here is still in the balance, but a solution that removed Iran’s 400+kg of highly enriched uranium to Russia or China, or downgraded it inside the Islamic Republic under international supervision, then added regular inspections to prevent the re-establishment of the programme would be a positive one. Taking what Trump calls the ‘nuclear dust’ to America is neither necessary nor likely.

And what of the ballistic missile arsenal or network of allies, the ‘Axis of Resistance’ that Iran uses to project influence across the Middle East? Here we are in muddier waters.

As a result of its battering of Hezbollah in the autumn of 2024 (remember the exploding pagers), and its ability to withstand Iranian missile barrages in April 2024 and June 2025, Israel had appeared to demolish the entire Iranian system of deterrence constructed over many years. And indeed, we know from Netanyahu’s former defence minister and others that following the October 2023 Hamas assault, that he was petrified of the destruction that might be unleashed on Israel by Hezbollah or even Iran itself.

I can testify to the fear that existed among Israeli securocrats – it’s one of the main reasons they hadn’t tried to stop the Iranian nuclear programme by direct military action sooner. But Iran’s Operation True Promise, when it fired 120 ballistic missiles, 30 cruise and 170 drones at Israel in April 2024 (after the IDF bombed a key meeting at the Iranian embassy in Damascus) undermined the Islamic Republic’s deterrence rather than affirming it.

Having caused almost no damage to Israel, the fear among securocrats there began to dissipate. Their anti-missile defences were good, and Iran’s weaponry often inaccurate. In August that year, the IDF carried out its own retaliation, peeling back the Islamic Republic’s air defences, operating freely across its skies.

By the time of the June 2025 Twelve Day War Netanyahu and his people had swung from fear of Iran and its proxies to, if anything, an over-estimation of what could be achieved against them by military means.

He thus encouraged Trump to strike again this year. And the results, again, have been of grossly disproportionate damage in Israel’s favour, with 550 Iranian ballistic missiles and more than 1,000 drones doing little lasting harm.

But here of course is where the outcome gets very tricky for both the US and its Arab allies in the Gulf: America used up hundreds of scarce interceptors defending Israel; while Iran’s longer-range weapons had been blitzed by Israel previously, supplies of shorter range missiles, able to hit the nearby sheikdoms were largely intact; over shorter ranges Iranian attacks were more accurate; and by throttling the Strait of Hormuz, Revolutionary Guard diehards could exert regional and global economic effects.

So where does the region end up, if a deal is indeed now coming together and momentum can be maintained over the coming weeks?

Israel faces ongoing attritional battles with Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. In both places though the consequences of war have been so dreadful that if whoever wins September’s Israeli elections has the sense to engage in diplomacy, not least to staunch the slow but constant drip of IDF casualties in those places, some stability might be achieved.

With Iran too, there must surely be a desire for a period of quiet with Israel. Of course, Netanyahu’s promises of resounding victory have proven chimerical from Gaza, to Lebanon or Tehran and his pursuit of war deeply damaging to Israel’s broader international image. But he has created a situation, particularly with Iran, where their ability to wage war on Israel has been significantly diminished and at the very least a long period of re-building and rethinking is necessary.

For the Gulf states though it is a more dismal panorama. Israel’s gain may be good for a few years, but the same could be said of the pain in those monarchies. There are no quick fixes.

Iran has demonstrated its willingness and ability to destroy its neighbours’ economies in order to save itself. The mitigations – from big defence build ups to new pipelines by-passing Hormuz – will take years.

Some might hope for regime change in Iran but a popular rising there could be very unpredictable. It could dispose of a malign regime – but equally given the strength of regime support, it could result in a civil war with further evil consequences for the region.

And as all of this unfolds, belief in the USA, as a guarantor of regional security has been severely undermined, leaving the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia or the emirs of Gulf neighbours with little choice but to work their diplomatic channels with Iran.

And this brings us to the consequences of all this for America and its ability to project military power. Undoubtedly its image has suffered here – but how far this is due to the peculiarities of this Trump administration and how far it tells us about a deeper decline will be the subject of my next blog.

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The BBC gets a new Director General today, ex-Google exec Matt Brittin. His arrival has triggered an avalanche of ‘mission impossible’ pieces about the challenges faced by our venerable public broadcaster.

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Having spent 34 years working there, inevitably, I have views. But today I want to focus on the baleful effects that decades of cuts has had on the people who still work there.

Because as Matt Brittin arrives, BBC is braced for another round of cuts. It’s been estimated that 10% of the 21,000 staff will lose their jobs, though there are also reports that it will fall particularly heavily on the News Division, which could see 15% losses.

It’s been described as the biggest drawdown at the Corporation in 15 years. But go back a bit further and it’s been a long story that has had a significant impact on the organisation and its internal health.

I still recall the first round of Newsnight reporter redundancies when two out of the 15 of us were going to be shown the door. Inevitably, you think about whether it will be you and what you might do if it was. That was in 1995.

There were three further swings of the axe during my subsequent years on the programme, culminating in 2024 with the one that cut all but one of the remaining reporters/correspondents/editors, whatever you wanted to call us. I was pleased to go and had in fact been turned down for redundancy when I applied for it the previous year, but let’s pause that thought for the moment and in any case the feelings of this old timer are irrelevant to the many people who will want to stay at the Corporation but will not now get the chance.

My point here is that I have seen close up the effect that this slow death has had on BBC journalism over decades. And of course, it is why I now empathise with those whose jobs are on the line.

The first and most obvious point, if you’re thinking about the mortgage, providing for your kids, whatever else, is that this atmosphere undermines the willingness to take risks. Those who play it safe tend to survive, and as those with flair as well as a greater appetite for editorial danger often chose to leave you are left with an increasingly timid newsroom, risk averse in its output.

All of those with an axe to grind, from the government of the day to pressure groups or ego-mad commentators have learned that in this atmosphere if you make enough fuss, you can bend the BBC’s editorial process your way or at least make them reluctant to cover certain stories. It was evidently the case that Boris Johnson’s Downing Street media operation kept up a caustic running commentary but equally so that this kind of head-butting by the government of the day was sufficiently long established to produce hollow laughter in the newsroom when Alastair Campbell complained about Boris doing it.

Of course this doesn’t just apply to politics. This weekend my former colleague Rob Burley dropped a really important long read about how this loss of confidence (as well as generational changes among the staff) was exploited by the trans lobby, drawing the BBC to one side of the ‘who is a woman’ issue, creating great difficulties for those in the newsroom who questioned that.

The second effect of this long decline is that as you cut your editorial workforce, your ability to find things out, to be places, diminishes. Naturally enough, as foreign bureaux close, and specialist staffs at home reduce, your editors and therefore consumers become less well informed. The people who do the primary news gathering roles – going to the scene of a plane crash or ringing the emergency services to fact check – are surprisingly few.

Long years in the field breed expertise, and as that cadre gets cut time and again, it further undermines the confidence and distinctiveness of the Corporation’s journalism. That I can make my way to the Sunday Times and elsewhere post-BBC is due in no small part to the decades of knowledge accumulated on the license-payers’ dollar. But fewer and fewer specialist correspondents are being nurtured there.

It’s not just the BBC cutting those posts but some other big players too. The Associated Press, an American news agency, is currently in the process of laying off 5% of its people, and this has a disproportionate effect, since their service feeds so many news organisations globally.

As the reach and knowledge of an organisation diminish, they become more dependent on social media and PR handouts for content and funnily enough, since the punters can read (and interpret) Donald Trump’s posts for themselves, authority diminishes. In the case of the BBC the long process of cutbacks makes them ever more reliant on those two fire hydrants of the news flow, Westminster and the Washington Bureau.

Inevitably this means a news agenda that is more about political argument – less about data, expertise or life as the typical viewer lives it. There are some ways to compensate for this, which is why sporting news, royalty, showbiz, or scientific breakthroughs can still make it on.

There’s one more negative effect that the long saga of cuts has had at the BBC. It doesn’t just make managers risk averse, it also produces some very negative competitive behaviour.

Talking to another ex-Newsnight person at one of the places I’ve recently worked since leaving the BBC they said that what they didn’t miss was, “people who spend their days trying to fuck you over”. In the struggle for survival, unscrupulous tactics can be used.

On a few occasions I found that our attempts to deploy to cover overseas stories were thwarted by the foreign news desk, often citing safety concerns. You can’t deploy unless you have an armoured vehicle, and we control the armoured vehicles, was one approach.

Editorial meetings, long a place for editorial backstabbing at the Beeb, thus become the forum for sledging the competition. Pointing out another bulletin or programme’s error becomes a tactic in defence of your own budget. The team spirit so essential in broadcasting gets undermined by this.

That makes people even more defensive and programmes constantly trying to justify their existence often become reluctant to share information, something that contributed to Newsnight’s disaster 14 years ago when it broadcast smears about the late Lord McAlpine. Doubts elsewhere in the organisation about the person making the allegations went undiscovered because our people kept to themselves what Newsnight was working on.

These days the battle for survival centres on clicks. And in a way, why shouldn’t it? Nobody’s going to pride themselves on getting really low numbers on YouTube or TikTok.

Again, though there are downsides, not least that if the BBC is playing the same game as all the other content creators, how does it justify its own special funding arrangements? As a viewer this tactic also leads them to follow the commentariat herd rather than lead it.

Like many others wishing Matt Brittin success in his new job, I value the BBC’s pivotal role in our cultural and political life, hoping that it thrives as well as survives. But I do worry about another round of cuts and how it contributes to the long erosion of Auntie’s self-confidence.

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I’m going to be honest about this, Britain’s political crisis of the last few days arouses only a glimmer of interest in me. Until we get a leader and government prepared to confront the country’s big underlying problems, I think that the Westminster battle will only be relevant at the margins.

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This is not to say that the current manoeuvring by those trying to topple Keir Starmer is not entertaining. It has power as a political drama, not least because scheming leadership contenders or their friends who constantly brief the press have not yet (writing on Wednesday afternoon) had the backbone to confront Starmer openly.

And it’s true also, that while I can be critical of the way politics is reported in this country and often occupies too big a place in the news agenda, what’s going on now is certainly ‘a big story’. The people have spoken in recent local elections, it’s an inflection point in terms of our democracy, exposing many big questions, not least what Labour is for now and how two legacy parties that have dominated political life for decades deal with the Reform and Green insurgencies.

But what leaves me cold is the reluctance of politicians to confront those big underlying questions about what our government can and cannot achieve. I don’t think the current Labour leadership ructions will produce a prime minister who is any more willing to do that.

And in the absence of such discussion, the gap between what the country wants and what it is willing to pay for is filled by ever more debt, the servicing of which now consumes more taxpayers’ money (£111bn in 2025-26 or 8.3% of government spending) than defence and education combined.

The popularity of Reform and the Greens suggests, if anything, an even greater retreat from reality, with a drift towards magical thinking in a ‘sod the bond markets’ sort of way. This, and the current uncertainty in Downing Street are making it harder for the British state to finance its debt, nudging up the reward (ie the interest rate) needed to attract buyers of government bonds to its highest level in nearly 30 years.

So given that it’s King’s Speech day, when the party in power sets out its programme for the coming months, here are some suggested alternatives.

- End the triple lock on pensions. As a financially comfortable 65 year old, that means I’ll take a hit, but that’s OK if it’s an investment in the future, by which I mean education, infrastructure or defence.

- Comprehensive welfare reform, curbing the unsustainable growth in benefits such as Personal Independence Payments and reducing the entitlements of those who’ve just arrived in the country.

- A Royal Commission on the future of the NHS, safeguarding the principle that it should be free at the point of delivery but re-examining all other aspects of it in terms of delivering better outcomes and cutting bureaucracy.

- A specific tax or insurance scheme for social care, to remove this burden from the NHS.

- A commitment to get defence spending to 3% of gross domestic product by 2030, 5% by 2035, with legally binding spending increases in each year along that pathway until the end of this Parliament.

I could go on – but I expect you will be relieved that I haven’t! My point is that we must fix the fundamental problems in the public finances as we go on to the other really big questions, even the existential ones, such as finding the right approach to Artificial Intelligence or climate change.

Instead we have a political class that believes that tackling these issues is too electorally risky and media commentary that makes this a self-fulfilling prophecy. And yes, I can see that grasping these issues means people like me will pay more tax, and squeeze those who may be struggling on benefits. A formula of ‘equal misery’ might seem an obvious electoral liability - but Lord we need someone who can articulate it in terms of a time limited commitment to turn the country around, requiring commitment from all rather than the ‘soak the rich’ or ‘hit the benefits cheats’ options of class-based politics.

Instead, each of us will have our own milestones in thinking ‘this is no longer a serious country’. I would cite: the failure to have a proper conversation about the cost of social care, derided as a ‘dementia tax’ when Theresa May attempted it; the refusal of all parties to drop the triple lock on pensions; Keir Starmer’s u-turn on benefit reform; and the failure of both the Sunak and Starmer governments to fund defence adequately at a time when they have adopted the rhetoric of putting the country on a war footing.

Our politicians and commentators have fallen into a consensus that creates an ever-smaller Overton Window about what policies are ‘politically acceptable’. That means avoiding certain issues, which in turn drives a disaffection from politics, a drift to extremes and draws us step by step closer to a financial crisis. So unless a Burnham, Miliband or Streeting has a substantially different approach to leadership, I cannot see that we will get anything more than a different brand of sticking plaster for a broken system.

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French and British warships are making their way into Middle East waters, raising an expectation that action may soon be joined. And if the rumours about diplomacy to end the Iran war gathering pace are true, we may indeed see a plan coming together.

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It would be easy to be cynical because we’ve seen this movie before. Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron promised to lead an international force to secure a deal in Ukraine too. And of course despite the elegant phrasemaking and flag-decked summitry in Paris or London that hasn’t happened.

What the two missions have in common is a desire to be seen as ‘doing something’ but a great aversion to doing anything that might lead to their armies or fleets having to fight. I don’t want to sound too jaundiced because after all as the downstream consequences of the Gulf conflict, from galloping oil prices to an inflationary bounce, reach European shores, citizens may well be wondering why their governments seem captured by events rather than having any ability to alter them.

Evidently European leaders don’t want to be seen as piling in to Donald Trump’s war. That would be politically toxic as well as rather dangerous, running the risk of exposing the limits of their military capability.

So back in mid-April when the Anglo-French initiative was launched, the two leaders stressed, they were intent on “establishing an independent and strictly defensive multinational mission to protect merchant vessels, reassure commercial shipping operators and conduct mine clearance operations as soon as conditions permit following a sustainable ceasefire agreement”.

If this kind of peace deal doesn’t happen in the near term, then the European naval force will be paused and it will all feel much like what has happened with Ukraine. In both cases one gets the feeling that London and Paris get spurred on by Trump’s happy talk about imminent deals, rather than having reliable independent intelligence upon which to base their decisions.

As the warships, led by French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle, get closer we should expect more huffing and puffing from Iran designed to intimidate the Europeans. Indeed today (Sunday) it has already started, with Iran’s deputy foreign minister posting on X, “the presence of French and British warships, or those of any other country potentially accompanying the illegal and internationally unlawful actions of the United States in the Strait of Hormuz, will be met with a decisive and immediate response from the armed forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran”.

In announcing the decision to send HMS Dragon, an air defence destroyer, into the Red Sea, the UK Ministry of Defence announcement emphasised, the ship’s, “potential role in a strictly defensive and independent future multinational mission to safeguard freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz when conditions allow”. Gosh, well they managed to load, ‘potential’, ‘strictly defensive’, ‘independent’ and ‘when conditions allow’ into a single sentence. The emphasis is very much ‘don’t confuse us with Trump and Netanyahu’ rather than ‘we are doing this because Iran’s use of force to dominate a vital international waterway is unacceptable’.

So, parking the language for a moment, let’s be optimistic and assume that peace moves do gather momentum and that the US and Iran find a path to some kind of outline agreement. What then for the European naval force?

Dragon’s role could be to provide air defence to the Charles de Gaulle task group or to escort ships through the Strait of Hormuz. Why would that be necessary if they aren’t going to deploy without a peace agreement in place?

We’re hearing the word ‘reassurance’, which is familiar from the numerous Anglo-French false starts in Ukraine; we’re not going there to fight but to reassure. One can see masters of merchant vessels might be grateful for that, if they don’t entirely trust a ceasefire, but in Gulf waters as in the possible ‘Ukraine Reassurance Force’ robust rules of engagement will be necessary for this to project the necessary aura of confidence.

And if, by another bit of positive thinking, a ceasefire solidifies, then the Franco-British task group will be calling for the assistance of mine hunting vessels. For the Royal Navy, following the embarrassing disbandment of its Gulf mine hunting squadron earlier this year, that would likely mean calling up Royal Fleet Auxiliary Lyme Bay which has been standing by in the Mediterranean in recent weeks.

In that scenario it would act as a mothership for robotic mine clearance boats and submersibles. Some other nations, including Germany and possibly Japan, could also be expected to contribute specialist vessels to this task, sweeping the Strait clear of explosive devices.

Writing on Sunday though the news is hardly encouraging. A merchant vessel has reported being hit just off the coast of Qatar (likely by an Iranian drone), and in recent days US Navy ships have battled Revolutionary Guard speedboats in the Strait itself.

It’s easy to understand why other nations that have promised to contribute to the European Hormuz task force have not yet despatched their ships and are awaiting before they do so for more solid news of a US/Iranian agreement to halt the fighting. If the force will only deploy in the event of robust deal, why put to sea at all?

But the Charles de Gaulle, a supporting frigate, and HMS Dragon are on their way, cutting along while spokespeople back in London talk about a ‘potential’, ‘strictly defensive’, ‘independent’ mission when ‘conditions allow’. If we are being charitable we might speculate that Macron and Starmer just want them to be on scene as soon as possible. But experience of their approach to Ukraine leads me to worry it might be more cynical than that, and largely about appearances.

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The Americans are challenging Iranian control of the Hormuz Strait. The question is whether this is a direct attempt to break the Islamic Republic’s hold on this waterway or something more nuanced, possibly an attempt to work out new ground rules between the key players.

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What we know:

- During the night of 3/4^th May, US destroyers transited the Strait, escorting two US-flagged merchant vessels out of the Gulf;

- Shortly after that happened, the US declared that its new regime, Project Freedom, had come into force, that other vessels should make their way through, and Iranian forces that tried to stop them could be engaged;

- On Monday, a UAE tanker was hit by two drones (suffering no casualties) as it made its way towards the Strait;

- Reports also suggested a fire on a Korean ship in the area, likely due to Iranian action.

- later Centcom commander Admiral Brad Cooper said that US forces had responded to Iranian attacks by engaging six of their small attack craft.

There’s been one other interesting development over the weekend, which is an announcement by Pakistan that 22 Iranian mariners from the ship Touska, boarded a fortnight ago as it made its way towards the Islamic Republic were released by the US to Pakistani custody and were on their way home. So it’s quite possible that was a deal: if the US let the Iranian crew go home (and have promised to deliver the Touska itself to a Pakistani port) then the Iranians would allow the two US flagged ships to transit Hormuz unmolested.

Now we might have seen that as a positive outcome – a sign that the US and Iran are starting at least to talk things through, de-escalate, getting ships, cargos, and sailors moving again. Or we could surmise that it’s very limited in scope, recognises de facto the right of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or IRGC to ‘coordinate’ who uses the Strait, and has done little to stem the growing possibility that the ceasefire will break down as US forces engage the Iranians in defence of some other vessel using the waterway.

But now we know that shots were fired by both sides on Monday. The question is whether it will be contained now or escalate into a general resumption of fighting.

In terms of those that succeeded in passing through, vessels sailing under a US flag are a very small proportion of the hundreds stranded in the Gulf. Since US Central Command has made clear it is not convoying other people’s ships through, their overnight success is hardly evidence that the Iranian dam has been broken.

Instead, the Americans have said they will tell mariners where the Iranian mines have been laid, urge them to use Omani waters to transit the Strait and threaten to engage the IRGC if it tries to impede the process. Not for the first time then the question for ship owners is how much risk are they prepared to take, and generally we know the answer is ‘not very much’.

If more are prepared to chance it, then in the hours ahead we should see two things: whether the US will continue to engage Iranian forces threatening shipping, and how capable American forces are of defending free passage. We may also get a glimpse of whether the Iranians are prepared to enforce their control of the Gulf outlet on a sustained basis even at the expense of the wider ceasefire collapsing.

Iranian news agencies claimed they had hit two US Navy vessels overnight but this has been denied by the American side. There’s no doubting the importance for the IRGC and leadership more generally of exerting this control, since they hope to extract millions in shipping ‘tolls’, a revenue stream they desperately need.

So we will see whether Project Freedom causes the whole ceasefire to crumble, there will be periodic flare ups, or ship owners will take today’s exchanges of fire as a sign that the risk of transiting the Strait remains too high. There are dilemmas on both sides - and it’s clear since both the IRGC and US forces held back to some degree today, that neither side has yet given up entirely on the ceasefire.

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So it’s full speed ahead for the British Army’s new Ajax armoured vehicle – the Ministry of Defence having announced today that the process of bringing it into service, suspended after 35 soldiers who were operating the vehicle fell ill last November, will resume. There had been talk of cancellation, but that’s now been ruled out.

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There’s a lot riding on the vehicle – not least £6bn invested, 700 jobs directly dependent, as well the Army’s ability, after so many false starts, to deploy a (reasonably) modern fighting vehicle. It is buying 589 of them, and it’s a family of vehicles covering reconnaissance, command, engineer, recovery, and troop carrying tasks.

There may be another variant in the pipeline too, something to replace the Army’s fleet of ageing Warrior infantry fighting vehicles. In January, when I visited the factory on South Wales where they’re being built, I was also shown a prototype of a variant that would carry eight troops.

Nobody emerges well from the saga so far: the Army kept changing its mind and created so many specifications for it to meet (1,318 to be exact) that the producer of a rival vehicle this week said they were glad they didn’t get the contract; the Ministry of Defence procurement people were castigated by an inquiry for their dysfunctional processes; and the winning contractor, General Dynamics Land Systems or GDLS, has tried to force through problems as well as being exposed on social media for delivering to shoddy standards.

Since my history of the tank is out in paperback next week, I’m bound to reflect that many of the vehicles in there suffered from developmental problems of varying severity, of which more later. Earlier this year I investigated the vehicle for the Sunday Times and for a video for the Times.

I focused in particular on the vibration issues that caused testing to be suspended in 2019. When the experts at DSTL conducted tests a couple of years later, after modifications to the vehicle and crew helmets, they came to the conclusion that the problem was acceptable and Ajax comparable with other vehicles in the fleet such as Warrior.

Having ridden in it for 20 minutes on the GDLS test track I can’t say it vibrated any more than the other armoured vehicles I’ve experienced, and certainly less than those I served in 40+ years ago. But of course that’s a superficial judgment and the acid test will be with regular users.

Although there are plenty on social media ready to excoriate the vehicles and GDLS, I’ve not seen anyone produce information that undermines those 2021-22 test results and proves that it cannot be brought into service. The inquiry into how soldiers got ill last November now suggests some were affected by engine fumes. There were also problems of motion sickness caused by the fact that crew members spend so much time looking at screens, and that’s a problem in moving vehicles.

My instinct earlier this year, after long conversations with GDLS management, the MoD, and soldiers who’d worked on it, was that Ajax would not be cancelled. Around 200 of the vehicles have already been delivered to the Army, with a production rate of twelve a month.

To have ditched it and started again from scratch would have meant spending billions and accepting another 3-5 years delay. And given the importance government now sets on rebuilding military production in this country, isn’t having a plant producing 140+ tanks a year something you’d be very reluctant to give up?

Now of course if those vehicles are turkeys the whole exercise is futile. The long and tortured Ajax saga is full of ironies in this sense.

Originally intended as a replacement for Scimitar and Scorpion reconnaissance vehicles, Ajax weighs nearly three times as much and is huge by comparison. These days drones have come to the forefront for discovering where your enemy is on the battlefield in any case.

Ukraine has shown us that tanks in the full-on sense of the word – vehicles even bigger and with the primary role of engaging other armoured vehicles with direct fire – are less useful now. They quickly become drone magnets and where used at all, it’s generally as mobile guns in support of the infantry.

What we have seen in Ukraine though is that general purpose armoured vehicles able to carry soldiers for various missions (including the Swedish CV-90 that lost out to the GDLS bid for Ajax and the American Bradley) are more popular. If they are heavily protected there are still situations where a soldier faced with a dangerous mission prefers to ride in them rather than work unprotected across the Donbas killing fields.

That would be my attitude now too, if I faced a dangerous trip close to the frontline. Wouldn’t you want the protection? And compared to the recce vehicles or infantry fighting vehicles currently in British Army service, Ajax has far better armour.

And its remaining problems? We will just have to trust they are fixed swiftly and recall that many an armoured vehicle has matured after suffering birth pangs.

Britain’s Centurion tank had an engine so thirsty that in early trials it ran out of fuel after as little as 50 miles. America’s M1 was a decade late into service and also sucked down fuel like nobody’s business.

As for the Chieftain tank on which I served, even ten years after entering service, needed a replacement engine after 250 miles on average. Of course we should want something better for our soldiers, particularly after paying £6bn for it.

But with the government having decided to press on with Ajax, the Army, MoD, and GDLS will have to turn a page, developing it into a truly impressive vehicle. That may sound like a triumph of hope over experience but the critics have I think overplayed the catastrophising.

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