Article published in The Daily Express, 5 June 2024. © Richard Kemp

On Tuesday bidding was opened by the British government to provide drones to Ukraine that might have a major influence on the course of the war.

The UK and Latvia are leading nine other states in a programme to supply large numbers of ‘first person view’ (FPV) drones to Ukraine, leveraging Western industrial capacity. These are small quadcopter drones controlled directly by an operator using the system’s camera to hit the target with explosives.

FPV drones have had a major impact on the battlefield in this conflict and have been used to target armoured vehicles, defensive bunkers, infantry soldiers and ships. The Ukrainian Army now has a dedicated drone force, and most frontline units have specialist operators assigned to carry out surveillance of enemy forces and strike them with explosives.

Ukrainian drones have played a significant role in slowing the current Russian offensive in the Kharkov area, which now appears to be bogged down. I observed them in action at Bakhmut last year and saw first hand their remarkable accuracy and killing power against Russian troops, as well as their ability to coordinate with other combat forces to help direct artillery and armour against the enemy.

Drones are of course used by the Russians as well, and are notoriously hard to defend against. We have seen the devastating effects of Hizballah drones in northern Israel only this week, against a country that probably has the best air defences in the world.

Stopping them before they go into action is therefore extremely important, including in manufacturing, transportation and storage facilities.

The Pentagon recently lifted restrictions against using US supplied weapons against Russian territory, but only in specific areas. Continue reading →

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 4 June 2024. © Richard Kemp

You might think in the run up to the general election Labour would be able to get its act together on one of the areas where many voters have traditionally trusted the party the least. But as Keir Starmer tries hard to burnish his credentials on defence and to distance himself from Corbyn, his deputy, Angela Rayner, comes out with an opposing view.

To much fanfare, Starmer announced his ‘triple lock’ commitment on nuclear defence, which in reality seems no different to current Tory policy of maintaining the nuclear deterrent, building four new subs and making upgrades when necessary. But shortly after he claimed his commitment to the nuclear deterrent was ‘absolute”, Rayner announced she wants to rid the world of it. She said she seeks multilateral disarmament but has never supported unilateral disarmament. History tells a different story. In 2016 she, and many other members of her party, voted not to renew Britain’s nuclear deterrent, which very much amounts to unilateral disarmament.

In the face of this Labour record, Starmer was forced to flex his muscles, insisting that as prime minister he would be calling the shots on the nuclear deterrent. That might not be so easy, with a dozen other members of his current front bench team among those who voted the same way as Rayner over renewing the deterrent, including his shadow foreign secretary. David Lammy claims to have changed his mind after seeing how Ukraine got invaded by Russia. That’s a somewhat curious justification for his u-turn given that Putin first invaded Ukraine in 2014, two years before Lammy was voting in parliament for unilateral disarmament of our own country.

With the eye-watering sums needed to maintain the deterrent into the future, can we really believe that a government with so many ministers seemingly ready to change tack on such a fundamental issue as nuclear defence will stick by it at the expense of other spending demands to which they are much more ideologically attached? Rayner herself tweeted about the vote to renew the Trident nuclear capability in 2016: ‘Amazed we can find money for this but we steal £30 a week off disabled people.’ Continue reading →

Article published by Ynetnews.com,  14 May 2024. © Richard Kemp

Biden’s cynical obsession with preventing Israel from finishing off Hamas in a major offensive in Rafah will have the opposite effect from the one he intends. His analysis of US electoral projections has convinced him that he must be seen to stand against Israel as the voting intentions of some of his supporters, especially young people, will be damaging to his prospects for a second term unless there is a course correction.

Thus we have seen direct public attacks on Netanyahu and his cabinet by Biden and his supporters such as Chuck Schumer, outrageously calling for replacement of the democratically-elected government of an allied country. There was the failure in March to veto UN Security Council Resolution 2728 demanding a cease-fire without linkage to hostage release.

Then there have been repeated false accusations of Israel blocking aid into Gaza and creating famine. We have seen Biden’s unfounded and unsubstantiated allegations of the IDF going ‘over the top’ in attacks against Hamas in Gaza.

The Biden administration has threatened to sanction an IDF unit on the basis of information supplied by a hostile American NGO with connections to the Muslim Brotherhood of which Hamas is an offshoot. There are even suspicions that Biden encouraged an International Criminal Court plan to issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu, his defense minister and military chief of staff.

In the last couple of days, the State Department reported to Congress its suspicions that Israel has breached the laws of war in Gaza, while stopping short of making any conclusive accusation. Such a public attempt to vitiate a close American ally at war must be almost unprecedented.

Most damningly of all is Biden’s withholding supplies of some armaments to Israel, including precision-guided munitions. This from a man who said in 2019 that any such action would be ‘absolutely preposterous’ and ‘beyond comprehension’. Continue reading →

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 7 May 2024. © Richard Kemp

Hamas’s agreement on Monday to a ceasefire deal that was never on the table was yet another ruse to buy time and build international pressure to halt a major IDF operation in Rafah. It was a sign of the terrorists’ desperation to prevent the destruction of their final stronghold. An IDF move into Rafah has been delayed far too long. It is the result of months of fruitless negotiations over release of hostages that never showed any sign of materialising. Yet Israel had little option than to play along while even the smallest glimmer of hope existed.

The delay was also brought about by unbearable pressure from the US and other Israeli allies, with Biden repeatedly forbidding an attack on Rafah without what he called a ‘credible and executable plan’ to protect or evacuate the civilian population there. Similar demands were recently parroted by Lord Cameron during a visit to Jerusalem. No plan the IDF drew up ever met Biden’s stipulations, but then no plan could have done so if his real intention was to block the final destruction of Hamas amid growing concerns about adverse effects on his own electoral prospects. Of course one credible plan would have been to allow civilians to take temporary refuge through the Egyptian border into Sinai. Biden could have brought that about by pushing Cairo to agree but neither he nor any other international leader ever even raised a finger to do so. That unforgivable failure, which played right into Hamas’s hands, has contributed to many of the civilian deaths during this war and will likely lead to many more.

Now the IDF has been making preliminary moves against Rafah on the ground and from the air. Quite rightly, Jerusalem has not signalled its immediate intentions. Those may be to shape the battlefield for future large-scale operations, including spurring the civilian population to evacuate Rafah to designated humanitarian zones and adding pressure on Hamas to free the hostages. Nor is it impossible that an apparently inevitable push into Rafah might impel elements of the Hamas leadership to make good their escape from Gaza while Continue reading →

Article published by Ynetnews.com,  29 April 2024. © Richard Kemp and Rafael Bardaji

Is the International Criminal Court about to issue arrest warrants for top-level Israeli political and military leaders? That is certainly the view of some legal professionals in the court’s Hague ecosystem — and perhaps as early as this week. Any indictment for international crimes within the ICC’s jurisdiction cannot possibly be made with a solid legal basis in wartime.

The court has not been able to carry out any investigations on the ground in Gaza and will not be able to do so for perhaps many months. That means any such move would be politically motivated, intended to undermine Israel’s ability to defend its citizens from terrorist violence.

Given the high stakes in the region, and the direct involvement of the US in the conflict, it is inconceivable that ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan would issue indictments without the approval and maybe even the active encouragement of the White House.

With the presidential election approaching and a desire to gain votes from both supporters and opponents of Israel, Biden has been trying for months to restrain Jerusalem’s legitimate self-defense while at the same time backing its war effort. That amounts to disgraceful duplicity at a time when America’s closest ally in the Middle East needs full-throated support.

Members of Biden’s administration and his political allies have also shown extraordinary hostility to the democratically-elected prime minister of one of America’s closest allies, going back well before this war began. What better way now of heaping pressure on Israel and trying to drag down its prime minister than having the ICC-level charges at Netanyahu directly as well as his defense minister and military chief of staff?

Just the threat of such a highly dangerous move also opens up other duplicitous opportunities for Biden to coerce Israel. He can perhaps Continue reading →

Article published in The Sunday Telegraph, 27 April 2024. © Richard Kemp

It may sound counter-intuitive, but Donald Trump has probably done more to strengthen Nato than any other political leader in recent years. While he was president, he berated European members of the alliance for failing to pay what he called their ‘dues’, accusing them of freeloading on the US.

Earlier this year, he seemed to go even further by suggesting at an election rally, not only that he would not bring America to the defence of ‘delinquent’ Nato members, but would encourage Russia to attack them. Cue a predictable international outcry, led by Nato secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg, who accused him of undermining ‘all of our security’. Joe Biden, of course, waded in, saying Trump’s remarks were ‘appalling and dangerous’ and would give Putin ‘a green light for more war and violence’.

Both of them were wrong. Anyone who has the slightest understanding of Trump’s negotiating techniques knows that he is unlikely to have meant what he said literally; it was a rhetorical device to emphasise his entirely valid point about recalcitrant Nato members. As for a green light, it was Biden who flashed that at Putin with his disastrous retreat from Kabul in 2021, which can only have contributed to Moscow’s calculations on invading Ukraine the following year.

Trump’s presidency was in fact a red light against Putin’s aggression, largely because of his unpredictable nature. And that same unpredictability has now rattled many Nato leaders into recognising that they need to step up their defence efforts for fear that he might abandon Nato in a second term.

Poland, now with the largest defence spending by percentage of GDP in the whole of the alliance, has bolstered its military out of fear of Russian invasion. But do we really think that the likes of Germany would finally have started to get their act together without genuine concern over a second Trump presidency? It doesn’t seem to have been Putin’s invasion that spurred them into action. We’ve had two years of heel-dragging and inadequate military support to Kyiv on the part of France and Germany. Britain, meanwhile, has been inexplicably continuing to reduce the size of its Armed Forces. Continue reading →

Article published in The Daily Express, 24 April 2024. © Richard Kemp

Grant Shapps has achieved something no Defence Secretary has managed since the end of the Cold War, a historic increase in defence spending to 2.5% of GDP.

Many will argue that, given the increasingly dangerous world, even this is not enough. But realists understand that, with so many demands on the public purse, it was the best that could reasonably have been hoped for.

It is particularly striking at this range from a general election, with defence never traditionally seen as a vote winner in peace time.

Some will complain that part of the increased budget will be spent on support for Ukraine. But helping defend Ukraine is also helping defend the UK, by enabling Kyiv to fight against a despot that, as part of the Russia-China-Iran axis, threatens the whole of the Western world.

After decades of hollowing-out by successive governments, our armed forces are in dire need of this uplift. We have a wide range of military capabilities, many highly sophisticated, but in almost every category, we simply don’t have enough – not enough tanks, artillery, planes, ships, missiles.

A key focus should be on expanding existing forces as well as developing new weapons. Recent defence thinking has leaned towards technology over hard fighting power. That was always mistaken, and has been demonstrated recently by the World War 2 style battles in Afghanistan and bitter street by street warfare in Gaza.

The truth is you need both, and that is very expensive.

We also don’t have enough manpower to fly our planes or crew our ships, while the Army has been leaching its soldiers and is unable to recruit enough replacements.

Some of the money needs to be spent on better pay and improved conditions for our troops. Continue reading →