Preparing for war: What we didn’t learn from the pandemic
The health service may not have been ready for the pandemic, but the rest of government was even less prepared. As we brace for a potential war, it’s time policy makers listen to that warning, says Joe Hill
Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian general, famously asserted that war was the “continuation of politics by other means”. But while talking about war is often good politics, the genuine preparation for war rarely is. Which can make it a hard sell, even though preparation for war is the best way to avoid one in the first place.
Unfortunately Britain’s history of crisis preparation is poor. Almost five years ago, the country was plunged into the first national lockdown in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. A viral pandemic had topped the government’s National Risk Register as the highest “non-malicious” risk for several years in the run up to 2020. But planners in government hadn’t considered the risk of non-influenza pandemics (like Covid-19). They thought the realistic death toll would be in the hundreds, when the excess death toll was over 200,000. And Exercise Cygnus, a test of our preparation in 2017, concluded that the country was not prepared for a flu pandemic, but the work to prepare it was halted in 2019.
Even though the health system was clearly unprepared for a crisis at that scale, the most relevant lesson for the current defence crisis is that the rest of the government was even less prepared. Whitehall operates a “lead department” model for national risks like pandemics and the Department for Health was in charge of pandemic preparation. That meant all the focus was on the NHS leaving the country under-prepared for the wider economic and social impacts of the pandemic, particularly when it came to national lockdowns and how to keep crucial public services like schools working.
Britain is not taking the lessons of Covid seriously
Fast forward five years, and the Covid Inquiry is still barely getting started. But you have to wonder if policymakers are taking the lessons of the pandemic seriously, and working out how to make us resilient against the next major risk on the horizon – an expansion of armed conflict in Europe. Given the Prime Minister’s ambitions for Britain to step in with security guarantees for a peace deal, or to back Ukraine in the event the Trump administration withdraws US support, we are standing up to be a key military partner in a continent which hasn’t been at war in a long time.
Unfortunately, budgeting for spending more money on defence (to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2027) is both hard to do, and also the easiest part. Rather than focusing on the scale of the challenge, we should be worried about the complexity. We risk focusing all our preparation on the armed forces themselves, and not enough on the wider social and economic resilience needed for conflict.
The government should start by asking the key question: who will fight? Half of Gen Zers polled by The Times said they wouldn’t defend their country if asked. And endemic economic inactivity, often fuelled by mental and physical health issues in the wake of the pandemic, should give pause to policymakers operating under the assumption that we will be able to recruit or conscript as needed.
And more urgently, what will they fight with? Defence procurement in Britain is a shambles, replete with high-profile failures. Years of neglect, compounded by complex planning permission and incredibly high energy costs, have whittled down our industrial capacity to build anything to the bare minimum. The Defence Committee believes it will take ten years to replace the munitions already sent to Ukraine and rebuild our current stockpiles to an acceptable level.
The challenges which leave all three branches of the armed forces below target levels, weapons inventories dangerously low and key capabilities degrading at port, won’t be fixed without government using the other levers of the state to fix them. Planning and energy policy, schools and the health service, all need to work together to build resilience
Treating these as defence issues is vital, but leaving them to the ministry of defence to fix is missing the point. The challenges which leave all three branches of the armed forces below target levels, weapons inventories dangerously low and key capabilities degrading at port, won’t be fixed without government using the other levers of the state to fix them. Planning and energy policy, schools and the health service, all need to work together to build resilience.
Kate Bingham, Chair of the UK Vaccine Taskforce, spoke about how unprepared the state was for the pandemic in her 2021 Romanes lecture at Oxford. She urged leaders to use the “peacetime” after the pandemic to prepare for the risk of another one, saying “we must act now to build our defences against a future catastrophe. Another war is coming, let’s make sure we have the right people, with the right skills to fight it”. With another war looking more likely than ever, we would do well to have listened to the lessons from the pandemic.
Joe Hill is policy director at Reform think tank