Statecraft. Margaret Thatcher
that are the focus of their lives. This is why the military life is rightly considered a noble vocation, and also why over the years many of those who leave it for civilian careers find it difficult to adjust.
Soldiers also generally need to be physically strong. It is not enough to be clever – though to be cunning is certainly useful. No front-line forces can afford to have even a small proportion of their number who are not up to whatever tasks they may be called upon to perform.
So I am opposed to current attempts to apply liberal attitudes and institutions developed in civilian life to life in our armed forces. Programmes aimed at introducing civilian-style judicial systems, at promoting homosexual rights, and at making ever more military roles open to women are at best irrelevant to the functions that armies are meant to perform. At worst, though, they threaten military capabilities in a way that is actually dangerous.
The feminist military militants are perhaps the most pernicious of these ‘reformers’. The fact that most men are stronger than most women means either that women have to be excluded from the most physically demanding tasks, or else the difficulty of the tasks has to be reduced – something that is evidently easier in training than in combat. But it is, of course, this second course which the feminists demand should be adopted. And all too often their agenda is being accepted.
When it was recognised that women cannot throw ordinary grenades far enough to avoid being caught in the explosion, the answer was not to let men take over but rather to make lighter (and less lethal) grenades. When it was discovered that women on board warships require facilities that men do not, the US Navy had to ‘reconfigure’ their ships to provide them – on the USS Eisenhower alone that cost $1 million. And when most women (rightly in my view) choose not to take combat roles, the answer, according to one professor at Duke University, is for the military to get rid of traits like ‘dominance, assertiveness, aggressiveness, independence, self-sufficiency, and willingness to take risks’.* Women have plenty of roles in which they can serve with distinction: some of us even run countries. But generally we are better at wielding the handbag than the bayonet.
And warfare will always involve the use of bayonets, or their equivalents. It is unrealistic to expect that wars will ever be fought without physical contact and confrontation with the enemy at some stage.
With these considerations in mind, our political and military leaders should:
Show some backbone in resisting the lobbies of political correctness that are out to subvert good order and discipline in our armed forces
Make it plain that life in the services cannot take as its model the behaviour, legal framework, or ethos that prevail in civilian life
Refuse to put liberal doctrine ahead of military effectiveness
Demonstrate a little commonsense.
RMA
That said, we have reached one of those points in military history when the role of technology in fighting wars has taken on an altogether new importance. The Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) is a real revolution. The term refers mainly to two developments: the power of instantly available, networked information, and the large-scale use of precision firepower. One of the foremost experts on the strategic implications of RMA, Professor Eliot Cohen, has graphically described its reality:
Satellites beaming fresh pictures of targets to pilots in jet aircraft, tanks communicating their locations to computerized command posts, generals peering remotely over the shoulders of company commanders through the cameras of orbiting unmanned aircraft – these are all phenomena of today, not the military dreams of tomorrow.*
America is and will remain far ahead of any of her rivals in the use of these technologies – as long as she keeps on investing in them.
But RMA is not without its drawbacks. I have already referred to one of these – a feeling that technology can make war casualty-free. A more tangible danger is what (in the jargon) are called ‘asymmetric threats’. By these are meant threats posed by powers which, although generally lagging well behind America militarily, are able to concentrate their resources upon and exploit American vulnerability in one particular aspect of warfare. Thus China has on its own admission been developing plans to use networks and the Internet to cripple America’s banking system and disrupt its military capability.* Information- or Cyber-warfare has leapt from the television screen to the centre of the Pentagon’s preoccupations. That is absolutely right. It is a rule as old as warfare itself that every advance in military technology provokes counter-measures. And history is full of rich and technologically advanced civilisations which fell before a more primitive enemy who had seen and exploited a systemic weakness.
That is why we have to:
Give top priority to investing in and applying the latest defence technologies
Be alert to the dangers that America’s technological sophistication could be undermined by asymmetric threats from a determined enemy
Never believe that technology alone will allow America to prevail as a superpower.
‘REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR’
Before, during and after my time as Prime Minister I have paid many visits to American military bases and other sites, but none like that which I made to the USS Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor on the morning of 11 May 1993. A tender took us out to the ship, upon whose shattered hull a special structure has been erected. For the last forty years, the colours have been raised and lowered each day in honour of the 1177 members of the Arizona’s crew who died in the Japanese air force’s attack of 7 December 1941. Some of the bodies were recovered, but the remains of nine hundred still lie in the depths of the water that now fills the ship. Standing over a square opening that leads down to the ocean, I lowered a bouquet of flowers. The petals drifted across the surface and I thought about the sailors who died in such terrible circumstances so that the rest of us could live in peace and freedom.
The USS Arizona should not only, however, be a place of pilgrimage: it should be a place of reflection. The immediate consequence of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor was, of course, to bring America into the Second World War. So it was, in that sense, the day the Axis powers began to lose. The circumstances of the attack swung an earlier sceptical American opinion behind the war effort. ‘Remember Pearl Harbor’ became the title of America’s most popular war song. Those words should also serve as a warning to us.
On that Sunday morning sixty years ago, just before eight o’clock, 353 Japanese aircraft began their devastating attack. Some three thousand military personnel were killed or wounded, eight battleships and ten other naval vessels were sunk or badly damaged, and almost two hundred US aircraft were destroyed in the space of just three hours. What made the attack on Pearl Harbor so shocking was the fact that it was entirely unexpected. Tension between America and Japan had been rising. But there was no suspicion of what the Japanese were planning and there had been no declaration of war. The inquiries launched after the event found that errors had been made by the US naval and army commanders in the Hawaii region. But the fact remains that what happened at Pearl Harbor reflected far more broadly on the unpreparedness of America for an attack coming (literally) ‘out of the blue’.
The colours raised over the Arizona on the day of my visit were given to me when I left by the Commander-in-Chief of the US Pacific Fleet. They are now framed in my office in London. They serve as a constant reminder. What troubles me, however, is that America and her allies now face a similar threat, and we have been doing too little to guard against it.
MISSILES AND MISSILE DEFENCE
The lessening of superpower rivalry in the final stage of the Cold War also resulted in a loosening of superpower disciplines. On the one hand, Soviet political satellites were released