The UK’s Standing Joint Force Headquarters was established in 2016 to provide a deployable headquarters to fight a war. I was its first legal adviser. I joined in its first days as we built a headquarters which combined military, cross government and partner nation capabilities in all domains of land, sea, air, space and cyber. I still wear the tie with a sense of achievement having belonged to something I thought was very special.
Joining that headquarters was a continuation of what I was already doing. I started on a Monday morning in the spring of 2016. The previous Friday night I had flown back to the UK from the Middle East where I had been deployed. A couple of weeks before that deployment I was working in the NATO headquarters in Kabul. I was continually ready for war, as were thousands of others in 2016. I made significant sacrifices. There was nothing else for it.
Given my experience, I was concerned to hear that ten years later in 2026 we need to be ready for war in 1,000 days. Someone has dropped the ball. We surely need to be ready at all times. It seems obvious that we have lost something over these ten years. We have become complacent, self-indulgent and obsessed with societal fads and opinions which have diverted our attention from what our Armed Forces ultimately exist for: the capacity to rapidly project lawful violence to defend us and our allies. A career in the Armed Forces is now increasingly looked upon as a job. Once that mentality creeps in, failure follows. We end up in this position. That is the retired military officer speaking.
Speaking now as a military lawyer, I have this advice to offer to the government: if there is a real sense that war is looming, we need our best war fighters in uniform. With that in mind, I seek an urgent review of the number of discharges of personnel through administrative processes for misdeeds. War fighters are not necessarily the perfect employees. We should not tolerate poor conduct in the Armed Forces, but there are many options short of discharge available when the primary purpose of our Armed Forces is to safeguard the freedoms and even the very existence of our nation.
Allan Steele WS, Liberal Party Defence Spokesperson