Military Policy

Military policy is the set of choices a state makes about the size, structure, funding and employment of its armed forces. Conservatives place it first among the duties of government. A state that cannot defend its people has no claim on their allegiance, and every other good the political order protects — property, worship, commerce, family life — rests on that capacity. The argument runs from Hobbes through Burke to the Anglo-American right of the twentieth century, and it holds that peace is the product of strength rather than of good intentions.

The conservative quarrel with progressive defence thinking is not about whether war is terrible. It is about what prevents it. Where the disarmament tradition treats armaments as the cause of conflict, conservatives treat visible weakness as the invitation to it. Britain in the 1930s supplied the case study that shaped the modern right: successive governments held to the Ten Year Rule through the 1920s, began rearmament in 1934 at a pace set by Treasury caution rather than by German output, and reached adequate fighter production only in 1939.

Key Takeaways

• Defence is the first charge on the public purse. Conservatives rank it above discretionary domestic spending because it is the condition of everything else.
• Deterrence rests on capability plus credible will. Declarations without hardware deter nobody.
• Alliances multiply strength, but only where members carry real weight. Free-riding hollows them out.
• Civilian control of the military is a conservative commitment, rooted in the English constitutional settlement of 1689.
• Procurement failure is political failure. Money spent badly buys no security at all.

History And Context

The English-speaking debate over military policy begins with a suspicion of standing armies. Parliament’s quarrel with the Stuarts produced the Bill of Rights of 1689, which barred the Crown from keeping an army in peacetime without parliamentary consent, and the Mutiny Act of the same year, which put military discipline on a statutory footing that Parliament thereafter renewed annually. The conservative settlement was neither pacifism nor militarism: a professional force, funded by elected representatives, subordinate to civil authority.

Hobbes had already supplied the underlying logic in 1651. Absent a power able to overawe rivals, life is a condition of mutual fear in which industry, arts and letters cannot take root.¹ Burke applied the same reasoning to foreign policy in his Letters on a Regicide Peace of 1796, arguing that a revolutionary power with universal ambitions could not be appeased by treaty, only checked by arms.

Clausewitz gave the nineteenth century its governing formula. War is the continuation of policy by other means, which makes military planning subordinate to political purpose and makes wars fought without political definition unwinnable in principle.² That insight cuts against both the general who wants a free hand and the politician who commits forces without stating an object.

The postwar order was built on alliance. Twelve nations signed the North Atlantic Treaty in Washington on 4 April 1949, binding themselves to treat an attack on one as an attack on all. NATO held for four decades because American capability made the guarantee credible. Ronald Reagan’s buildup between 1981 and 1985 raised US defence outlays sharply and pressed the Soviet economy at the point where it was weakest. Margaret Thatcher’s recovery of the Falklands in 1982, launched some 12,800 kilometres from home, demonstrated that political will and deployable force are one package.

The decade after 1991 brought the peace dividend and a long decline in European capability. NATO members agreed at the 2014 Wales summit to move toward spending two per cent of GDP on defence. Most missed the target for the following decade, and the gap became a standing source of transatlantic friction.

The Conservative Position

Conservatives argue that defence spending is not one claim among many on the budget but the prior claim. Welfare programmes, infrastructure and cultural institutions all presuppose a country secure enough to have them. A government that funds every domestic ambition while letting its air defences age has inverted the order of goods.

Deterrence is the working doctrine. Its logic is that an adversary calculates before acting, and that the calculation turns on what he expects to lose. Capability without will deters nobody, and will without capability is bluff. Both halves have to be visible, which is why conservatives care about exercises, munition stockpiles, shipyard capacity and readiness rates rather than headline budget figures.

Alliances are treated as instruments, not as ends. The conservative test of an alliance is whether it produces net strength. Partners who spend nothing and contribute nothing convert a mutual guarantee into a subsidy, and the guarantee loses credibility with the adversary it was meant to impress.

On the use of force, the tradition counsels restraint about objectives. Russell Kirk built his political thought on prudence, and warned that grand schemes to remake foreign societies by arms are ideological projects wearing military dress.³ The realist strand within conservatism — Colin Gray’s work on strategy is representative — insists that force serves defined national interests and that strategy is the bridge between the two.⁴ This is the fault line between conservative realists and the interventionist right, and it has been the sharpest internal argument on the American right since 2003.

Differing Positions

The strongest case against the conservative position begins with the security dilemma. Measures one state takes for defence read as threats to its neighbours, who arm in response, leaving everyone less secure at higher cost. On this account the 1914 mobilisation schedules and the Cold War nuclear buildup were not products of weakness but of spirals that no participant wanted.

Critics add an opportunity-cost argument. Defence budgets absorb engineers, capital and public money that would yield more security through education, public health and economic strength, and a country with a decaying industrial base cannot sustain military power regardless of what it spends today. A third line holds that alliance commitments risk entrapment, dragging members into conflicts they would not have chosen, and that arms control treaties have a record of verified reductions that unilateral strength cannot match.

Conservatives answer that the security dilemma describes relations among status quo powers and explains little about states with revisionist aims, and that the arms control record depends on the underlying balance of power rather than replacing it. The disagreement is empirical as much as moral, and it turns on how much weight one gives to the 1930s against the case of 1914.

References

1. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Andrew Crooke, 1651), ch. 13.
2. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton University Press, 1976), bk. 1, ch. 1.
3. Russell Kirk, The Politics of Prudence (Bryn Mawr, PA: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1993), ch. 1.
4. Colin S. Gray, Modern Strategy (Oxford University Press, 1999), ch. 1.