The UK’s defence system suffers from deep structural inefficiencies and lack of both political and military continuity – yet the public is kept largely in the shadows, and has developed a general apathy towards the capacities and priorities of our country’s armed forces.
Britain prides itself on ceremonial parades and polished pageantry, and yet is unfit to deliver in many more practical ways. As put by RN ret. Christopher Samuel from the defence research group Defence Synergia, a former Lieutenant Commander RN who has spent over half a century working in the defence sphere: “We all know the system is only as good as the weakest link”.
In fact, structural dilemmas and an inflexible bureaucracy permeate every layer of the defence system in this country. Senior officers frequently cycle out of top roles after just four years, which, Samuel notes, “is crazy because you don’t get any corporate memory, and, as a result, there is no continuity”. Short-term tenures thus make long-term planning almost impossible, a concern which is further compounded by the sheer size and complexity of the Ministry of Defence, where questions from organisations like Defence Synergia vanish into a bureaucracy of over 56,000 civil servants, and return with answers so garbled that “the MP didn’t understand […] because they haven’t got the background”. In the armed services particularly, Samuel argues that “we’re recruiting people almost just to give them letters after their names. And all that doesn’t really help when you want to fight. And God knows none of us want to fight, but that’s what we’re paid to do.” For a nation facing uncertain global threats, the absence of institutional memory and the fog of excessive bureaucracy are not just administrative problems, they are vulnerabilities.
If Britain’s defence establishment suffers from fragmentation at the top, it faces an even more corrosive problem at the bottom, namely deep seated public detachment and apathy. As Samuel bluntly stated, “up until recently, and even now, defence is not really of interest to anybody. I mean, it won’t affect me, will it?” This detachment has roots in both policy and culture. While the individual subsections of the Ministry of Defence compete with each other for limited financial resources, “they’re too busy fighting amongst themselves to be bothered to tell anybody”. Instead the public is, for one, reassured by pageantry – the sight of “gaps in red uniforms rushing up and down” – which works to mask deeper vulnerabilities. The result is a dangerous cycle: a government unwilling to explain defence policy, and a public unwilling to ask.
As such, Britain’s defence debate is trapped between a system too fragmented to act coherently and a public too disengaged and unaware to demand better. These failures are further reinforced by a culture of complacency within the state itself, as Samuel argues: “there is a bit of self satisfaction in the civil service overall; ‘we know best and we’re not prepared to have a discussion with you because you might be right’”. Insecurity thrives in silence, and right now Britain’s defence debate is marked by precisely that silence.
Quotations used are the opinion of the interviewee, all other opinions are those of the author. Thank you to Christopher Samuel and Defence Synergia for their contributions.