Wings Over Scotland | His Majesty’s Loyal Sabre

Funny how people change, isn’t it?

That sounds a lot to us like “Bombs Not Bairns”.

We watched the first episode of “The Wargame” at 2am this morning (it’s toe-curlingly bad, shot like a soft-focus corporate promo with constant dramatic music and the politicians delivering wooden press-conference soundbites rather than any sense of what an actual high-tension COBRA meeting would sound like).

And one of the things that leaps right out at you is how much Sturgeon yearns to control armed forces, rather than just piddling around with schools and hospitals and potholes in a devolved administration. She’s clearly thrilled to even be PRETENDING to be in the British government with the boys and girls from the big school.

But her remaining diehard fanbase in the SNP will surely be at least a little disturbed to hear her talk in the interviews for the show.

Firstly, this isn’t actually true. The incident in June involved a Russian frigate firing WARNING shots NEAR a yacht. (It was only 500 yards away, so it was unlikely to have missed if it had been firing ON them.)

But we digress.

When UK politicians regularly bleat that we need to spend more money on defence – and we’re currently in the middle of one such propaganda onslaught, of which “The Wargame” is a part – they’re never very clear on precisely who or what it is that the country needs defending AGAINST.

Russia clearly isn’t mounting a land or sea attack on the UK any time soon. It’s been stuck in a stalemate against Ukraine for almost half a decade, at a catastrophic cost in lives and materiel, and as a result is very poorly-placed to be attempting to advance any further west. Nobody sane expects any sort of definitive military outcome to the war in the foreseeable future.

Nevertheless, Sturgeon warns that “the UK’s conventional defences” are lacking, and she’s clear to draw a distinction between those and its nuclear ones.

But if you’re going to have a war with Russia, mass destruction is the only kind of destruction that’s any use. “The Wargame” itself makes the point very early on that the UK’s conventional forces would be burned up in a matter of days in a shooting war with the Russians. (Ukraine’s military is 6-8 times larger than the UK’s.)

In WW2 the Soviet Union absorbed unimaginable losses during Operation Barbarossa. At its peak the Nazi invasion occupied almost 700,000 square miles of Soviet territory, and around 7 million Soviet troops were killed or captured from the start of the invasion in June 1941 to the German surrender at Stalingrad in February 1943.

And as the USSR eventually won that battle, it follows that you need to hurt Russia more than that if you want to win a war against it, and nuclear weapons are the only way you even have a chance of achieving that aim, or of dissuading them from trying in the first place.

(For the avoidance of doubt, Wings is very much NOT advocating a nuclear war, or any other kind of war, with Russia – merely pointing out that if you’re saying Russia is your military enemy, “conventional” forces aren’t going to cut the mustard.)

But then Sturgeon says something really weird.

The only possible rational interpretation of that paragraph is that she’s talking about “covert” warfare here – cyber attacks and so on. But an aircraft carrier is no more use against a cyber attack than a nuclear submarine is, so why’s she rattling on about conventional armed forces?

In truth Sturgeon is just saying what she’s been told to say to please the right-wing militarist lobby that’s currently demanding a big hike in defence spending – and, since government funds are finite, usually a corresponding reduction in welfare spending.

You can’t spend the same money on bombs AND bairns, after all.

The SNP has always had a hawkish faction, usually personified by former Glasgow MP Stewart McDonald.

But Sturgeon always shunned it publicly, leaning on the SNP’s well-worn slogan.

Now that she’s left office under something of a cloud without securing the grand European quango job she hankered after, though, and needs a source of income until her chunky First Minister pension kicks in, all that’s out the window and it’s “Britain needs more tanks and fighter jets and battleships, actually”.

But then, we suppose all that high-level protection comes at a price.