THE GREAT and the good of modern European defence and foreign affairs are yapping like a roomful of Chihuahuas confronted by a bear. Their general chorus is along the lines of ‘Putin must be stopped, Zelensky supported. If Trump won’t do it, we can.’ With the notable and praiseworthy exception of Italy’s Georgia Meloni, they continue, ‘It’s our moral duty to put in a peacekeeping force and we’ll build a coalition of the willing.’
Willingness is one thing; ability is quite another. While Two Tier seeks to insert himself as a key link in American foreign policy, it is time for a reality check.
The Facts
Firstly, despite all the Western firepower, technology, information and knowhow that has been made available, Ukraine is losing. It’s imposing a terrible blood price, but the Russians are inexorably advancing. The Ukrainian armed forces are being pushed back by old school artillery and infantry assaults which drone technology, so admired by Western defence writers (who should know better), is unable to prevent. The F16s and Mirage 2000 fighter aircrafts haven’t transformed the battlespace, although they have shot down a fair few incoming cruise missiles. Wealthy Ukrainians avoided the fight by paying bribes and fleeing to tax havens – Ukrainians call them the Monaco Division.
The Ukrainians do not have the military strength to push the Russians back, let alone liberate the 20 per cent of Ukraine that Russia has occupied. Their Kursk escapade has pretty much ended, and it achieved little more than being a diversion. The thinking behind it was never clear; now, it’s irrelevant. There’s not much sign that the Russians can achieve a decisive break through either. Their strategy seems to be to continue to apply pressure across the front and wait for the Ukrainians to collapse.
That collapse came closer when Zelensky made the colossal error of trying to bounce America into more than it was prepared to give on live TV. The Western chatterati seemed to think Trump a bully. I thought Zelensky recklessly impertinent. Whatever, he learned the crucial lesson; Trump feels no obligation to arm him, nor to risk starting World War Three over a former Soviet republic. In turn, that means the chance of Ukraine recapturing the Russian occupied areas is less than zero. To stay in the fight, they must agree to Trump’s ceasefire without preconditions.
Russia’s slow victory comes at horrendous human and economic cost. Those who predicted the collapse of the Russian economy under the twin pressures of Western sanctions and military expenditure were wrong. Russia can pay the price of victory because it must. It saw a West-leaning Ukraine as an existential threat, so it acted. There is no point in Russia ceasing offensive operations, giving Ukraine a pause to regroup, unless its preconditions are accepted, chief among them being that Ukraine is never part of NATO (or its successor).
Yet, the geo-political pygmies of Europe insist that Trump is wrong, and that Ukraine must survive. They have decided to rearm, increase their support to Ukraine and prepare a peacekeeping force. To support that, the EU has cooked its books to enable €800billion of military spending (note that bending the accounting rules is not the same thing as actually having the ready cash, which can only come from EU taxpayers).
Instant Sunshine From 2035
Macron has gone further, pledging that the French will extend their nuclear umbrella to cover Europe. This is pure sophistry. His proposal is to buy some more nuclear-missile-toting Rafale fighters and keep them on an existing base in France, to be operational by 2035. The complexities of the nuclear umbrella are arcane, and the real information is highly classified. However, the French ASMP missile is far from invincible. It flies at a leisurely (in missile terms) Mach 3 for around 200 miles and delivers a warhead with the power of about 10 to 15 Hiroshimas. The replacement, the ASN4G is faster and will have a 600-mile range. It’s been in development for a decade and might be in service for Macron’s extended umbrella in a decade’s time.
France also has a submarine-based nuclear deterrent, broadly equivalent to the British one, but with the important distinction that the French make the missiles and the warheads as well as the submarine. The UK makes the submarines and the warheads, but the missiles are of US origin. Pick your conspiracy theory as to whether the UK can launch without US consent. Macron hasn’t said much about that.
Getting from Willing to Able
Modern weaponry is complicated. Ramping up the production of existing weapons takes time: the supply chain for the NLAW anti-tank rockets in Belfast includes five factories in four countries. Even simple artillery shells take time to manufacture, and increasing manufacturing capacity is not straight forward. Some of the materials required are rare in the UK, be it Germanium for thermal imager lenses or high-carbon steel for armoured vehicles. Rearmament of the UK is possible, but it won’t be instant or cheap.
This means that Starmer’s ‘coalition of the willing’ has problems. Some of the willing countries lack key military capabilities. The British have few tanks. Spare parts for them are rare as going to Ukraine, which is where all our self-propelled artillery went. We bought 18 Archer guns to cover the capability gap, but that’s not enough artillery for a single brigade.
Reality is no challenge for the chatterati. They suggest that a composite multinational organisation can cover all the necessary capabilities. They say that the UK has always fought as part of a coalition and other parties bring the bits that the UK doesn’t have. The other party is usually the United States and, as the British Armed Forces (and the Army in particular) have slumped from Tier One, the US has become increasingly irritated at having to support the British, whose presence in any war undermines their own in-theatre capability by requiring more support: the US Army is Tier One – and then some.
This has already become apparent in the Starmer-Macron ‘plan’ to provide air cover for their putative peacekeeping force. The RAF does not have an airborne early warning capability. The Air Marshals scrapped it to save money to buy the F35, thinking that they would replace the aging Boeing-707-based E3 Sentry AWACS with the Boeing-737-based E7 Wedgetail. Unfortunately, it made a hash of the order and is purchasing just three, the first of which has arrived, and the initial operating capability is slated for next year. Any air cover will be dependent on the four French E3 Sentry aircraft. Four airframes are just about enough to keep one aloft (and working) all the time, which means that any other operation or training cannot be given AEW support by the French.
This article appeared in Views From My Cab on March 21, 2025, and is republished by kind permission.
