Articles

Iran has miscalculated disastrously

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 2 April 2026. © Richard Kemp

Iran’s entire defensive strategy has been upended by the current campaign. The ayatollahs never expected to find themselves in a sustained, direct, high-intensity war with the US and Israel. Their thinking had been based on gaining ascendancy in the Middle East by proxy groups and ultimately by nuclear weapons.

The rulers of Iran spent billions of dollars building a series of terrorist networks that would do their dirty work for them both for offensive action and defence. They expected retaliation against their belligerence would be limited to containable clandestine operations and cyber attacks, as they had experienced for many years.

But had they come under direct attack from either the US or Israel, they had some not-so-secret weapons up their sleeves: Hezbollah, Hamas and – very much in third place – the Houthis. These groups would simultaneously bombard Israel with many thousands of missiles, overwhelming IDF air defences and inflicting intolerable damage. That would have forced the US to back down in traditional fashion.

It didn’t work out like that. All three terror proxies have been very severely handled by Israel (and in the case of the Houthis, the US) since the brutal and ill-judged Hamas offensive on October 7, 2023. Their combined contribution to the defence of Iran over the last few weeks has consequently been strategically negligible.

So when the war came to Iranian territory, the ayatollahs had to find another way of making the US back down. That wouldn’t be achieved by striking Israel alone: the 12-day war last June showed that Israel is able to bat off most of the missiles and drones and in any case would never have stopped fighting or appealed to the US to do so.

But in the minds of the ayatollahs, attacking their Arab neighbours would achieve what they wanted. Fearing political and economic instability, the Gulf states would pressure Trump to call off the war.

In fact it had the opposite effect. Behind the scenes, both Saudi Arabia and the UAE have reportedly urged the president to keep attacking until the job is done. Whatever they might say in public, the Arab states’ true position can be seen by the continued US use of bases in the region.

Indeed, Iran’s actions have further underscored a threat that Arab countries long feared, and consequently increased their reliance on protection from the US and Israel, especially in intelligence and air defence. Even those states that had long sought to stay neutral, such as Qatar and the UAE, both previously acting as mediators, have been forced to pick sides. A strategy that was meant to divide has instead consolidated opposition to Tehran.

Another strategic miscalculation has been the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. As a global economic attack, it gives further justification for the US and Israel to continue the war, including potentially widening strikes against Iranian energy infrastructure. It also reinforces the narrative that Iran is a worldwide threat and Continue reading →

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Trump can still topple the Iranian regime – if he is prepared to gamble

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 27 March 2026. © Richard Kemp

Donald Trump is saddling up thousands more ground forces for the Middle East. Despite what some over-excited analysts and commentators might say, we are not about to see a re-run of the Iraq quagmire – at least, not by design.

The main force package seems to be a large special forces group and elements of the renowned US 82nd Airborne Division, the US Army’s paratroop formation. They will join US Marine amphibious assault forces already in the region or en route.

It might be that this build-up is intended to apply psychological pressure to the regime while Trump speaks of negotiations. Or it could be for real, with intent for ground forces to go in if the Iranians refuse to buckle to his demands.

Whatever the plan, these newly-deploying US troops are not there to launch a major ground offensive to invade and occupy the country. For that, a far larger and more powerful force would be needed, including heavy armour and artillery. We don’t know what Trump has in mind, and nor should we, but these forces are most likely to be used in short-term, precise operations to achieve specific military objectives.

These could include securing Iran’s stockpiles of highly enriched uranium, or seizing critical energy-related facilities such as Kharg Island. It could also include taking key pieces of territory which would make an attempt to re-open the Strait of Hormuz easier.

A more significant prize, however, would be toppling the regime. The US and Israel have already achieved spectacular success in severely degrading the ayatollahs’ ability to continue their aggression against the US, Israel and their Arab neighbours. That has been their central focus since the Islamic Revolution.

But what can be demolished can also be repaired, even if doing so takes decades. And we can be sure that this regime, while it remains in power, will remain hell-bent on exactly that, with the assistance of Russia and China. They might wait until Trump leaves office to start in earnest. But if they remain, we can be sure that eventually they will have to be revisited. Continue reading →

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Too many armchair foreign policy ‘experts’ seem to want Iran to win

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 13 March 2026. © Richard Kemp

Trump Derangement Syndrome, often with a comorbidity of Israel Derangement Syndrome, plays a major part in many supposed ‘expert’ opinions on the progress of this conflict. Symptoms include a suicidal glee at any sign the war isn’t going well. Intent on contorting Operation Epic Fury into the Iraq war that began more than 20 years ago, many seem desperate for Donald Trump to fail and Iran to succeed. Only these all-knowing academics, journalists and other keyboard warriors have absorbed the lessons of Iraq while Pentagon planners and battlefield commanders, they think, remain blissfully ignorant.

A defeatist outlook also results from a track record of predicting that the Tehran regime cannot be defeated and jihadists will have to be accommodated rather than vanquished. ‘I told you so’ is the refrain when those ayatollahs that are still alive open up on a few tankers in the Strait of Hormuz and fire rockets and drones at their regional neighbours as oil prices spiral and American troops take casualties. The BBC’s Jeremy Bowen could not restrain his schadenfreude at reports that a US missile had tragically hit a school in Tehran.

All of this was bad and all eminently predictable, but not only by the armchair generals. All, and much worse, was factored in by political leaders and war planners in Washington and Jerusalem. It would be nice to be able to deal with the depredations of despotic regimes without breaking any eggs, but that is not possible outside of Hollywood. Nor is it pleasant to say that the end result is worth the pain when human life is lost and the cost of living spirals. But unfortunately that’s what it takes.

And the Iranian regime’s growing aggression certainly had to be faced head-on. The stars were aligned with an American president and an Israeli prime minister sufficiently courageous to seize the moment against a recently weakened Iran. Headlines like ‘a war without a strategy’ simply twist reality to fit the straitjacket eagerly donned by the submissive. To think that a war leader should publish his plans for all to read while battles are being fought betrays both arrogance and an ignorance of conflict. Continue reading →

Articles

The 4-letter word that sums up Labour’s Iran war stance – it’s not complimentary

Article published in The Daily Express, 8 March 2026. © Richard Kemp

One word sums up the Labour Government’s policy on the war in the Middle East: fear. It’s not even fear of sending British troops into battle, and it’s certainly not fear among our forces, who will fight whenever and wherever they are sent.

Many have suggested a failure of strategic planning in the Ministry of Defence accounts for the absence of any British naval assets in the Middle East. I doubt that’s the case. The PM and Defence Secretary would have been given options long ago, as soon as potential hostilities appeared on the horizon, which goes back many weeks.

Those options would have been quite limited given the extent to which our army, navy and air force have been starved for decades.

There must have been a political veto on deploying warships to the region, otherwise how could it have taken so long for HMS Dragon to be readied for action?

If a green light had been given, she could have been fixed up and patrolling in the Mediterranean long before an Iranian-made Shahid drone exploded at RAF Akrotiri.

This whole episode does however illustrate the disgraceful state of the armed forces today.

More than seven days have passed since the drone strike on British sovereign territory. Remember that back in 1982, a naval task force of some 40 warships was bound from Britain to the South Atlantic just four days after the Falklands were invaded.

But Britain’s abject failure to join a just, defensive war against the Iranian terror regime, which threatens the world as well as its own people, is not about lack of military capability.

We even refused to allow the US use of British military bases that America has paid for for decades. It comes back to fear. Fear of losing even more political backing from the Muslim and hard left supporters on which Labour relies. The very idea of joining in or even facilitating a US-led attack on a Muslim country would have filled Starmer with horror.

He might just have mustered the stomach for that, but to take part in an offensive alongside the hated Israel? Impossible. He spent the last two years vilifying Israel, but even the partial arms embargo, sanctions on political leaders and recognition of ‘Palestine’ failed to satiate the anti Israel mobs, as we saw in Labour’s defeat at Gorton and Denton.

Not only that, but his own leadership of his party would be at even graver risk had he joined Operation Epic Fury. Don’t forget there are even greater opponents of Israel waiting to pounce.

Not least Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary. A decades long supporter of Labour Friends of Israel, he sensed the way the wind was blowing and recently published his erroneous view that Israel had been committing war crimes and the whole country should be sanctioned, not just political leaders.

The upshot of all this internal Labour politicking is that our national security has been sacrificed on the altar of party interests. The ‘special relationship’ with the US has been shot away, a long standing alliance which has strengthened our defences and given Britain greater authority on the world stage.

We have undermined whatever remnants remained of any ability to deter our foes.

In short, Britain is now a military laughing stock, standing by wringing our hands even while British sovereign territory is under attack. I have spoken to several US military officers in the last few days. They are all utterly bewildered by how far their once most dependable ally has descended into irrelevance.

Articles

How long will we let Israel and the US fight our battles for us?

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 8 March 2026. © Richard Kemp

The recent strike on the runway at RAF Akrotiri was delivered by an Iranian-made Shahed – the same type of suicide drone that has been supplied to Putin’s forces to strike military and civilian targets in Ukraine. It has been assessed that it was fired from Lebanon by Hezbollah, a key Iranian proxy, designated a terrorist organisation by the UK.

RAF Akrotiri is not just another military base on foreign soil. It is British sovereign territory, one of two areas retained by the UK under the 1960 Treaty of Establishment that created the independent Republic of Cyprus.

What was our response to a direct attack on British sovereign territory? Defence Secretary John Healey claimed that this was an ‘indiscriminate’ strike which it clearly was not. His apparent attempt to deny that British territory had been deliberately attacked by the Iranian axis was akin to Keir Starmer’s desperation to distance himself from the joint US-Israeli strikes against Iran when he plaintively insisted right at the start that Britain played absolutely no role.

He reinforced that stance by denying US use of British bases in the UK and Diego Garcia. Furthermore Starmer has done his best to avoid saying one way or the other whether his government supported the US-Israeli operation. He desperately clung to a threadbare cloak of international law even as left wing leaders in Australia and Canada came out backing Trump against a terrorist state that has brutally murdered thousands of its own people, perpetrated violence across the region for decades and is actively pursuing nuclear weapons.

While Britain stands idly by, Greece dispatched frigates to help defend Cyprus and even France has promised warships and air defence systems. The appalling state of our armed forces has been illustrated by the Royal Navy’s failure so far to get even one warship ready to sail to the Middle East. This, despite weeks of gathering war clouds as US forces steadily built up in the region. Contrast that with 1982, when a task force of 40 ships left Britain for the South Atlantic within just four days of the Argentinian invasion of the Falklands.

Meanwhile Israel is doing our fighting for us by going in against Hezbollah. Israel is defending its own citizens of course but it’s expanding assaults against the terrorists in Lebanon will also be protecting us. Can we expect to see a word of thanks to a country that is putting its own soldiers’ lives on the line and has consistently supported Britain with life saving intelligence and defence technology over many decades?

No of course not, quite the opposite. What we can expect as fighting intensifies in Lebanon is more hand-wringing about de-escalation, negotiation and compromise together with Starmer’s habitual finger-pointing at Prime Minister Netanyahu, one of only two world leaders today (the other being Trump) who has the courage to stand up in defence of his own country and of Western values. Continue reading →

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Jack Lopresti is a rare example of a politician who puts his money where his mouth is

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 1 March 2026. © Richard Kemp

At a time when the misdemeanours of so many current and former politicians has dragged public esteem for British politics to record lows, it is gratifying to find a long-serving ex-MP putting his money where his mouth is by signing up for war service in Ukraine.

Jack Lopresti, who represented Filton and Bradley Stoke for the Conservatives from 2010 until he lost the seat in 2024, joined the International Legion – a formation of the Ukrainian armed forces – in November 2024. And more recently, just last month, it was announced he is serving with the Azov Brigade, a volunteer force that attracted controversy due to its far-Right origins, but is now understood to be fully integrated into Ukraine’s armed forces.

Lopresti, who was a reservist with the Royal Artillery, was vocal in parliament about defence spending, Nato commitments and the need to deter Russian aggression. He has been a strong advocate for supporting Kyiv in its fight against Putin since the full-scale invasion began four years ago this week.

The Ukrainian war has seen no shortage of statements of solidarity from European capitals; but comparatively few elected politicians have been prepared to share the burdens borne by soldiers on the frontline in that or any other war.

There are exceptions. Remarkably, Charles Goodson-Wickes, the former Conservative MP for Wimbledon, fought with the 7th Armoured Brigade in the 1991 Gulf War while still in office, the only MP to have done so since the Second World War.

Only a handful of current MPs, including Labour’s Mike Tapp and Dan Jarvis, saw regular military service before getting elected. That is hardly surprising given the minuscule size of the armed forces today.

But perhaps our national defences would be in a less parlous state if the number of veterans that reached the top end of government came somewhere close to the tally of human rights lawyers, life-long political groupies and financiers.

Of course, that was once the case. Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee, Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan, Jim Callaghan and Edward Heath all saw combat. Margaret Thatcher did not, but by her side was a man who had: her husband Denis.

All of them maintained strong defences, which then began a long and disastrous downward spiral under John Major and his successors as prime ministers, none of whom served in the armed forces, and the same is true of most of their cabinet ministers, which may help account for the wilful neglect of our nation’s defences.

This is not just about starvation of funding and strategic ineptitude, but also the abject failure to protect serving soldiers and veterans from predatory lawyers who have repeatedly sought to hound them through the courts. Continue reading →

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The US is powering up production of its best missiles. The British cupboard is bare

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 11 February 2026. © Richard Kemp

America is going into ‘burst mode’, seriously ramping up production of vital missile stocks. Recent commercial framework agreements with the Department of War for ground attack systems and interceptors aim to increase output up to four times current rates to meet global demand unprecedented since 1945.

According to a recent contract announcement, the US will raise production of the well-known, very powerful Tomahawk cruise missile to ‘more than 1,000’ per year. Output of the Amraam beyond-visual-range weapon, America’s premier air-to-air missile at the moment, will rise to ‘at least 1,900’ annually. Manufacture of the SM-6, one of the few defensive weapons able to shoot down hypersonic threats, will rise to ‘more than 500’ annually. Production of the complex SM-3, able to engage ballistic missiles or even satellites flying outside the atmosphere, will also rise.

Meanwhile Britain is taking its customary plodding approach to the same problem. Knowledgeable observers have suggested that our munitions stocks – from rifle bullets and artillery shells to long range missiles and drones – would see out only about a week of intensive fighting. That’s even taking account of the fact that our Armed Forces are now very small, having been repeatedly hollowed out by successive governments. Even the handful of soldiers and tanks we could put into the field would be out of ammo in a matter of days.

We haven’t been firing a lot ourselves in recent years, but we have given much of the little we had to Ukraine, with the cupboards now worryingly bare.

How did we get into this parlous condition in the first place? The answer is that after the Cold War ended, Britain – like the rest of Western Europe – did not expect any more large-scale state-on-state wars. Our generals planned only for short-term limited overseas conflicts. Our Armed Forces were sized and stocked for counter terrorism, Afghanistan and Iraq style conflicts and limited precision strikes. That meant lean stockpiles rather than warehouses full of shells and missiles.

To save money we also shifted to just-in-time manufacturing which Continue reading →

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I served in Afghanistan, Mr Trump, and I know that American generals value Britain

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 24 January 2026. © Richard Kemp

Of course those of us who served alongside the Americans in Afghanistan are going to get defensive when hearing President Trump’s harsh accusations against our forces and those of our other Nato allies. And there has already been a torrent of outrage. But more instructive are American reactions to his suggestion that European forces in Afghanistan ‘stayed a little back, a little off the front lines’.

For example General Ben Hodges, who was commander of the US Army in Europe, said: ‘This is about as angry as I’ve been for quite some time. … There’s no American soldier that believes what our president just said’.

Trump’s views are contradicted also by what other senior Americans have said before. At the height of the Afghanistan war, General James Mattis, who commanded US forces in Afghanistan and later served as defence secretary in Trump’s first term, said of the British: ‘I can assure you that it is a delight, if we must go into a brawl, to do so alongside your competent, valiant troops.’ And last year the vice-president, JD Vance, who served with the US Marine Corps in Iraq, said that British forces ‘have fought bravely alongside the US for decades’.

Actually it’s rather more than decades. The first time British and American troops were in action together was in 1859 in China when the US Navy came to the assistance of British forces, breaching American neutrality in the Second Opium War. Our unbreakable military partnership – the backbone of the special relationship – continued through the First and Second World Wars, in Korea, the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq. In fact the only major American conflict we did not join was the Vietnam War.

Pondering whether other Nato countries would step up to the plate if required, Trump said: ‘We’ve never needed them.’ That, too, is far from reality. US General David Petraeus, who commanded American and coalition troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, was quite clear: ‘As was Continue reading →

Articles

Donald Trump has one big job to do to finish off Hamas which nobody is talking about

Article published in the Daily Express, 14 October 2025. © Richard Kemp

Hamas would never have given up one of their two most important assets, the hostages, unless they recognised their own defeat.

That defeat was achieved by the might and courage of the Israel Defence Force in Gaza. It was also achieved by Israel’s assault on Iran and the strike against Qatar, both of which decisively undermined and isolated Hamas.

All of this was due to the remarkable leadership and tenacity of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in the face of the most tremendous resistance both internationally and even at home.

Nevertheless we are far from the end of the road.

Hamas will not go quietly and, since Israel’s withdrawal from parts of Gaza, we have already seen widespread murders and assaults against their opponents.

They have also been reinforced by the release of some 250 convicted terrorists.

Whether Hamas is disarmed and Gaza demilitarised will depend on how the remaining elements of Trump’s 20 point plan unfold, including governance, security and rebuilding. That will be down to how much international players, especially in the Arab world, are actually willing to put their money where their mouth is.

Israel will be watching this very closely, and preparing for further intervention in Gaza if necessary. It can never again take the kind of risks that led to October 7.

The extent to which Hamas’s feet are held to the fire is also in the hands of the West, whose lily-livered appeasement has for decades served to encourage the jihadists.

The condemnations of Israel in Western capitals, the weekly hate marches and the incessant anti-Israel media bias have been Hamas’s second most important asset, next to the hostages. Continue reading →

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For ‘march for Gaza’ read ‘march against Jews’

Article published in the Daily Express, 9 October 2025. © Richard Kemp

For ‘march for Gaza’ read ‘march against Jews’. That is the reality of these incessant protests with their screams of the Hamas slogan ‘from the river to the sea’ and demands to ‘globalise the intifada’. For those who don’t understand these battle-cries, they call for annihilation of the Jewish state through the kind of terrorist violence seen in the murderous intifadas in Israel from 1987-1990 and 2000-2005. Chillingly, globalising the intifada means spreading terrorism against Jews beyond Israel. We saw how that became a tragic reality in Manchester on Yom Kippur last week.

Flaunting their Jew hate in the immediate aftermath of Manchester and again on the second anniversary of Hamas’s orgy of murder, rape, torture and kidnap starkly exposes the protesters’ true objective of intimidating Jews in this country. Some have rubbed this in by destroying yellow ribbons and posters supporting the hostages that still languish in Hamas’s dungeons.

That is bad enough, but the protests here and around the world do not go unnoticed by Hamas. They have become part of a wide range of signals that encourage and give the terrorists hope that Israel will be pressured into halting its defensive war in Gaza. That hope is strengthened by endorsement among international bodies, including the UN, of Hamas’s fabricated claims of genocide and famine. And don’t forget our own government’s ‘recognition’ of a Palestinian state, so warmly welcomed by Hamas as approbation of their bestial assault on 7th October.

Indeed the Labour government has Jewish blood on its hands. They have not only tolerated the non-stop hate speech at weekly protests; they have also failed to counter the torrent of lies and distortions propagated in this country. No one expects the government to be spokesmen for Israel, but they do have an unequivocal duty to get the truth out to help protect our own Jewish people. Instead they have poured fuel onto the flames by unjust condemnations of IDF action, imposing arms embargoes and even threatening to arrest the Israeli prime minister.

The government knows the truth only too well, but rather than counter the lies, they have shamefully prioritised appeasement of their hard left and Islamist supporters over the safety of British Jews.

Image: Guy Hurst