Welcome back to Letters to the Telegraph, the weekly series in the spirit of Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America. Each episode takes one of my letters to the editor, sometimes published, sometimes not, and walks around the story behind it. This episode is built around a letter on a subject that is hard to escape at the moment, the state of British defence, and one document in particular that was promised a year ago and has still not appeared. A letter can only assert. It has room to say that the war in Ukraine has changed the character of land warfare, and to reach back to the Spanish Civil War for a warning, but it has no room to show why any of that is true, or what it costs. So this episode does what the letter could not. It begins in Washington, with a story a Ukrainian general told against his own allies, and it ends with a young man who told me why he would not join the Army. In between, the Phoenix drone, nineteen years in the making and nine in service, Northern Ireland, and Munich. The letter ran as follows.Sir,A year on from the Strategic Defence Review, the Defence Investment Plan that was supposed to give it teeth has yet to appear. The conventional reading is procrastination.There is a more generous one. The war in Ukraine has demonstrated a transformation in the character of land warfare. Persistent drone surveillance has made the battlefield transparent. One-way attack drones at a few hundred pounds apiece are doing the work of guided missiles costing many times as much. The innovation cycle now runs in weeks, not years; a Russian electronic warfare adaptation is met by a Ukrainian software counter within days. Authority over drones now extends from purpose-built command centres running coordinated strikes down to platoon operators acting in minutes. These are not features of one theatre. They are how land warfare now works. If the Plan has been delayed to absorb that, the delay is well spent.The historical parallel is instructive. The Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1939 was the Wehrmacht's laboratory, and the Germans entered the Second World War three years ahead doctrinally. Britain and France watched the same war and drew few practical conclusions about combined arms. By June 1940, France had fallen.The Defence Investment Plan, whenever it arrives, will tell us which lessons we have drawn. The harder question is not the equipment list but whether the procurement cycle, the command authorities and the relationship with industry have been redesigned for an environment in which capability is updated in weeks. If the answer is yes, the optimist will be vindicated. If the Plan is a shopping list issued on the customary timetable, the historical parallel will be the other one.Yours faithfully,David McCreadieIn the episode I take its claims one at a time and put the evidence underneath them. Why the innovation cycle now runs in weeks rather than years, and what that has done to the battlefield. Why a country that has understood battlefield drones since 1964, and flew its first that year, still cannot field them on a sensible timescale. What the Phoenix, nineteen years in the making and nine in service, tells us about how we buy our equipment, and why Spain in the 1930’s and Munich in 1938 are the parallels that matter now. It runs to a little over twenty minutes, and it ends, as these things should, not with a document but with a person, a young man who told me why he would not join the Army. I hope you will listen. This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to David McCreadie at davidmccreadie.substack.com/subscribe
