Nato powers say they will sharply increase their military spending to 5 per cent of GDP, but few have thought seriously about the complications of modern warfare, which has become even more dangerous in recent years.
Politicians and the public are convinced that spending more money on weaponry automatically raises an army’s effectiveness on the battlefield, though recent wars in Ukraine and the Middle East tell a contrary story.
In 2023, the US sent Abrams M1A1 heavy tanks, costing $10m (£13.7m) each, to Ukraine where they were supposed to pierce the Russian front line in a summer offensive. The UK and Germany sent their own Challenger-2 and Leopard-2 tanks, whose deployment was likewise portrayed as changing the military balance of power in Ukraine’s favour.
Yet only a year later in 2024, Ukraine quietly pulled the Abrams tanks out of the front line because they were too vulnerable to cheap Russian surveillance and attack drones. “There isn’t open ground that you can drive across without fear of detection,” said a senior US military official.
Drone attack
In common with other technical innovations in time of war, the Ukrainians speedily emulated the Russians. Soon neither side could drive a vehicle within five miles of the front line without risking drone attack. Infantrymen complained that they were having to walk about nine miles to reach their frontline positions.
Both armies introduced measures to jam wireless signals controlling the drones, but early in 2025 the Russians started to use unjammable, hair-thin fibre optic cable between drone and operator, an innovation again swiftly copied by the Ukrainians.
The defence has gained supremacy over the attack in the Ukraine war, producing a stalemate with the drone playing a role in stopping offensives similar to that of the heavy machine gun in the First World War. Almost overnight, all those vastly expensive armoured vehicles in which modern armies had expected to move their troops have become obsolete, like horse cavalry waiting to take part in the battle of the Somme.
The drone war in Ukraine is the latest example of how armies ceaselessly try to give the enemy a nasty surprise: other examples include poison gas in the First World War and massed tank blitzkrieg attacks in the Second World War. Temporarily, these seemed war-winning tactics, but invariably those targeted found an antidote.
The Ukraine war started 40 months ago on 24 February, 2022 with the Russian invasion, and Israel’s Middle East wars began 20 months ago with the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October, 2023, which provoked a multi-front Israeli offensive. The two wars have combined to destabilise the world to a greater degree than is generally appreciated.
Vladimir Putin’s largely abortive invasion of Ukraine overtaxed Russia’s military and political resources so the country could no longer – along with Iran – prop up the then Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, whose fall in December 2024 cut the supply lines to Iran of Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Too complicated for politicians
The disappearance of the Russian air force from Syrian skies opened a corridor for Israeli planes to fly unimpeded to and from Iran this month, establishing Israel as the dominant power in the region.
But I want to make a broader point, which is that politicians the world over seldom know what they are getting into when they go to war or threaten to do so – and the same is true of military leaders.
square PATRICK COCKBURN Trump is now embroiled in a religious war – and a forever one
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The French First World War prime minister, Georges Clemenceau, famously said that “war is too important to be left to the generals”, but it is also too complicated and unpredictable to be left to politicians.
In the dozen or so wars that I have reported on, political leaders have repeatedly proved cavalier and ill-informed about the dangers they face, getting mired in conflict they had sworn to keep out of.
By my count, five British prime ministers were destroyed or fatally weakened by foreign wars, most of them in the Middle East, since 1900, while in America the political casualty list over the past half century includes four US presidents.
Despite these grim precedents, smart British politicians from David Lloyd George to Sir Tony Blair have stumbled self-destructively into avoidable conflicts – and Sir Keir Starmer, who is probably not as smart as either of his predecessors, sounds as overconfident as they did when he threatens military action.
Until recently, he was speaking bizarrely of British and other Nato countries sending “boots on the ground” to Kyiv to enforce a ceasefire in the war, though Russia says it is fighting to prevent Ukraine from joining Nato. Perhaps political leaders more than most people have “an inner Napoleon” trying to fight his way out.
For all his long-cultivated reputation as a peacemaker who started no wars, Donald Trump greeted Israeli and US attacks on Iran with jubilant war whoops.
Command wire
The furious dispute about the efficacy, or lack thereof, of the B-2 bombers dropping 30,000lb (13,608kg) bombs on Iranian nuclear facilities in “Operation Midnight Hammer”, which sounds like the name of a pornographic movie, reflects a very human desire to reduce the complexities of war to the possession of a single war-winning super-weapon. As these are always gigantically expensive, defence ministries and companies are enthusiastically keen on them, ignoring cheaper weapons as ineffective.
In Iraq after the American invasion, I met a member of a US army bomb disposal team that dealt with the improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that were causing massive American casualties.
Consisting of old artillery shells, or explosives made out of fertiliser, they would be buried beside the road or hidden in a house, and would be detonated by a wireless signal or a lengthy command wire.
Eager to rebut any suggestion of a parallel between the Iraq and Vietnam wars, the US army had withdrawn a military manual issued during the Vietnam War on how to defuse an IED or dismantle a booby trap. The soldier I spoke to complained that he had to buy one of these old manuals in a second-hand bookshop. The Pentagon was ultimately to spend $40bn developing an IED-proof armoured vehicle.
The effectiveness of IEDs is one reason why Israel has wanted to rely on air power to win its wars in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran, using precision-guided munitions. This works well against identifiable targets, but air force commanders know that destroying these alone does not win decisive victories: Hamas still controls Gaza despite 57,000 Palestinian dead.
Civil society as a whole becomes the target: homes, shops, schools, hospitals, electricity and water supplies are systematically destroyed, so even if Hamas or Hezbollah are still in charge, they preside over ruins and cemeteries.
Contradicting saccharine rhetoric by air forces about how hard they try to avoid civilian casualties, this is always a lie. The US air force mercilessly pounded Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria in 2016-17, and Russian warplanes did the same to the rebels in Idlib province in northern Syria. In one small town outside Mosul, where the US admitted to killing one civilian, subsequent investigation revealed that the real number of fatalities to be 43, of whom eight were women and 16 were children.
Despite the shaky ceasefire, the same fate now threatens Tehran and other Iranian cities.
Further Thoughts
During the 12-day Israel-Iran war, Israel killed over a dozen senior Iranian generals and about 10 top nuclear scientists.
This was certainly an intelligence coup for Mossad – probably helped by the US – though the Israeli foreign intelligence agency was evidently assisted by huge security lapses on the part of Iran. Most of those who died should have guessed that they were marked for assassination, yet some were staying in their own homes, or those of relatives, or in buildings associated with their work. Even on the last day of the war, a nuclear scientist was killed in his father-in-law’s house after his own had been attacked earlier, killing his 17-year-old son.
The assassination of so many high-profile targets will presumably affect the Iranian nuclear programme, but since nobody knows exactly what that programme consists of, the precise impact of the killings will be impossible to quantify.
Much also depends on how far Iran foresaw the possible elimination of its scientists and senior military commanders, making sure that none of them were irreplaceable. Obvious though this precaution should have been, the fatal sloppiness of Iranian security suggests that they repeatedly allowed themselves to be caught by surprise. The same pattern was evident in Damascus on 1 April, 2023, when eight top Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officers (IRGC) were killed in an Israeli strike on the Iranian embassy complex in Damascus.
A more competent IRGC would have had a higher survival rate – suggesting that their deaths may not be a great loss to Iran. Their vulnerability to attack can be explained by hubris and over-confidence stemming from past operational success in the so-called proxy wars fought by Iran in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen between the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979 and about 2019.
But then there seems to have been a turning point in 2020, when the head of the IRGC Quds force, Maj-Gen Qassem Soleimani, was killed by an American drone in Baghdad. Since then, the Iranian leadership has been repeatedly caught by surprise and looked as if it did not know how to respond to increased Israeli aggressiveness. This bafflement increased with the start of the US-backed Israeli offensives in Gaza, the occupied West Bank, Lebanon and Syria, sparked by the 2023 Hamas attack.
On the other hand, the death of generals too long in post may actually be to the advantage of their own military machine, as history has often shown. Stalin’s ferocious purge of the commanders of the Red Army in 1937-38 may have contributed to initial Soviet military disasters in 1941, but overall senior Red Army generals were of high quality. The French army in 1940, by way of contrast, was poorly led by officers like the chief of staff, General Maurice Gamelin, who owed his high rank to his supposed achievements in the First World War two decades previously.
Possibly the IRGC and Hezbollah were misled by hubris stemming from earlier successes, explaining why they were so often caught by surprise.
As a rebellion by Labour MPs forces Sir Keir Starmer to U-turn on his welfare cuts, more and more people are wondering what “makes him tick”. In Parliament, in interviews, and when he speaks ex tempore, he comes across as robotic and with a cold unappealing personality, whose core beliefs are indeterminate. This may be fair or unfair, but there is no question that Starmer is poor at communicating and comes across as wooden and unspontaneous, or as what used to be called “a dull dog”.
The most penetrating and well-informed insight into the Prime Minister that I have seen comes in an article about him in the New Statesman by Tom McTague, the magazine’s new editor, who spoke repeatedly to Starmer formally and informally over a period of months.
Many heavyweight profiles of political leaders are overlong and do not quite get to heart of the matter, but I found this one intelligent, balanced, not too gossipy and asking the right questions throughout – though not always finding a complete answer.
Starmer’s dullness is in part a reflection of him presenting himself as a calm and pragmatic manager, working on behalf of the British people “to clear up the mess” left by the Tory government. He wants to make the existing system work better, approaching problems like the competent civil servant that he used to be as head of the Crown Prosecution Service. The difficulty is that the electorate expects more than this, and just running the country a bit better than Boris Johnson or Liz Truss is not going to deliver enough. McTague concludes that Starmer may be a normal person “but these are not normal times”.
Yet there is something abnormal about the political summersaults that Starmer has performed on his way to the top.
McTeague writes: “The biggest failure of all – according to the most influential aides in No 10 – has come over the winter fuel benefit, because its cut became a proxy for deeper questions of purpose. ‘Rachel [Reeves] goes in and the Treasury tells her the taps have been turned on and you need to get a grip,’ says one adviser. ‘Rachel gets a grip, but voters conclude we’re not on their side.’ Having failed to tell a story [about what Labour wants to do], in other words, voters do not know what the adviser calls ‘the most fundamental question in politics’: whose side are you on?
“Part of Starmer’s problem is his own political shapeshifting: once a pro-immigration, soft-left, Corbyn-light left-winger; now a tough-talking, ‘hard Labour’ immigration sceptic overseeing cuts to welfare, international aid and government spending to balance the books. A man once seen by the Tory press as a dangerous radical who is now labelled ‘Keir Powell’ for his stark warnings about the damage caused by the Conservative Party’s ‘one-nation experiment in open borders’.”
Clunky opportunism like this deepens popular cynicism about Starmer and the Government, and is at odds with his image “as a dry, mechanical technocrat”. Asked what he considers sacrosanct, he answers “human dignity”, which is as nebulous as expressing strong support for “motherhood”, and as a core principle is contradicted by welfare cuts now being curtailed which pushed 250,000 people into poverty.
McTague says: “He promises change, but offers conservatism.” Which is about right.
Cockburn’s Picks
It is some time since I read Primo Levi’s great memoir If This is Man, and I owe this horribly apposite quote to Jeffrey St Clair in Counterpunch:
“Everybody must know, or remember, that when Hitler and Mussolini spoke in public, they were believed, applauded, admired, adored like gods. They were ‘charismatic leaders’; they possessed a secret power of seduction that did not proceed from the soundness of things they said but from the suggestive way in which they said them, from their eloquence, from their histrionic art, perhaps instinctive, perhaps patiently learned and practised.
“The ideas they proclaimed were not always the same and were, in general, aberrant or silly or cruel. And yet they were acclaimed with hosannas and followed to the death by millions of the faithful.”
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