If we are to take one lesson from the British government’s defence car crash of the past week it is that the battle to reverse this country’s long term decline as a military power is over. Faced with the prospect of trying to switch billions from benefits to rebuild our national security, they have buckled, and barring an existential 1939-style crisis, this discussion is now over for the foreseeable future.

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As historical setbacks go, what has happened is as significant as the 1956 Suez Crisis. Certainly, the deal that Keir Starmer offered John Healey – of increasing defence spending to 2.68% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by 2030 was so bad that it triggered his resignation, and renders Britain’s Nato pledge to get it to 3.5% of GDP by 2035 a near impossibility.

The ‘back loading’ of the spend needed to reach that target was flagged up in Healey’s resignation letter. It means you need to find so much more cash during 2030-35 that it’s hard to see any government, whether Labour, Tory, or indeed Reform, managing it.

To add insult to injury, Downing Street continues to insist that it was an amazingly generous offer that could only be achieved by strong-arming other government departments. And because of this, it is also suggested by No10 briefing, Dan Jarvis, Healey’s successor as defence secretary, could not plead for more as a condition of taking the job, the decision is settled.

There is a chance, in an attempt to avoid the disastrous implications of such an outcome, that the service chiefs may go to Andy Burnham, if he comes the next PM, threatening resignation. Given that he has shown a tendency to make policy on the basis of the last person he listened to (note his flip-flop over the ‘Waspi’ pensions case, something that could have added billions a year to the benefits bill) perhaps it’s worth a try.

But smart people who know the defence world – like former National Security Adviser and Cabinet Secretary Lord Mark Sedwill, have already been thinking through the implications of Starmer’s settlement, and projecting the loss of one of Britain’s major defence roles: strategic nuclear weapons; a navy capable of operating against peer adversaries in the North Atlantic; air forces able to support our allies in northern Europe; and an army that can be deployed on the Continent in support of Nato. Hinting that this last capability is now unaffordable (bad news for the Army in other words), Sedwill posted on social media this weekend, “Britain can’t sustain a ‘balanced force’, we need integrated forces to protect the North Atlantic and High North against Russian aggression and hold their Arctic bases at risk”.

That brings us back to the reality of that slo-mo spending timeline approved by the Treasury, estimated to yield £13bn more for defence over the next four years rather than the £28bn service chiefs wanted. It means that instead of glimpsing the sunlit uplands, as last year’s Strategic Defence Review encouraged us to do, with its talk of putting the country back on a footing where it could defend this country against the forces of another state, we are now back to ‘painful choices’ and likely losing a major capability even though the money is still going up a little.

If you believe the counter-briefing we’ve heard from Labour figures hostile to Healey, this is because the Ministry of Defence is so useless at running its projects that it will waste any more money it’s given. Well, yes, there’ve been some stinkers, project-wise, over the years, Healey can be criticised for being too slow to reform the department and not going far enough in his re-think of procurement.

That said, the emphasis on projects that have gone wrong is usually a distraction by those who don’t want to spend the money on defence at all. Is the record of other departments – from HS2, to nuclear power, or NHS IT systems – really so different, if you cherry pick the worst examples?

In fact, the reason that the hitherto modest increases in defence spending have yielded so little up to now is because it is a system that was broken by successive governments that mouthed glib nonsense about war between states being a thing of the past, chosing to save money by kicking vital programmes into the long grass. If you don’t order a new frigate for 17 years or skimp on Trident by shutting maintenance facilities and postponing refits, while repeatedly dodging decisions about new facilities for manufacturing nuclear warheads, then correcting these problems will cost you tens of billions.

Prevarication and a pretence that all was still well was the only way to balance the books ten years ago, when it was already quite clear that the post-Cold War peace dividend was over and the taps would have to be turned back on. Britain did spend 3.5% of its GDP on defence back in the Eighties – go back to 1961 when I was born and it was 6%!

Please forgive me for reproducing my favourite graph – that of declining defence spend. There are others that show the steadily rising cost of entitlements.

Nobody would suggest a 6% defence spending effort now – instead we have a country that has stumbled when asked to aim for half of that. And all at a time when it has become crystal clear that the United States’ willingness to defend Europe is vanishing.

In the space of a few years, Britain’s ability to lead that rebuild of European defence has ebbed away too. It is tumbling down the league table as a proportion of GDP spent (UK was 3^rd highest in Nato in 2014, 12^th in 2025), or deployable forces. The total spent is still high, but that brings us again back to the huge costs of maintaining nuclear weapons status.

So you hear the barbs about ‘Belgium with nukes’ and grumbling from the Nordic and Baltic countries that Britain is no longer fit to lead the Joint Expeditionary Force. And even if the current attempts to recapitalise the armed forces go well, things may not yet have bottomed out.

We may go down to a couple of frigates in commission during the next year or two. Even the ability even to maintain Trident nuclear submarines patrols may falter before the replacements are fit for service. Changing that outlook would require a spending commitment this government is evidently unwilling to make.

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Over the past year the Treasury, Ministry of Defence and Downing Street have been locked in a three-way battle about how best to bolster national defence. But having talked the talk in last year’s Strategic Defence Review, with lots of ideas about what’s needed to get us to a ‘war footing’, they have had the greatest difficulty walking the walk, ie working out pay for it.

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The problem was there from the outset, with the Treasury trying to avoid committing itself to anything more than a modest rise across a three year public spending horizon and it persists now, all these months later, as we await word of how much money is on its way. So, with one leak following another recently about the Defence Investment Plan, some suggesting it will be published before this week is out, those who deal with national security for a living are marvelling at the dysfunctionality of it all. With all this briefing going on we are certainly on a jaw jaw footing if not the war kind.

Nothing could better prove the emptiness of those phrases about a war footing than the bureaucratic fighting we’ve seen across Whitehall. It suggests that if anything it’s worse than business as usual, due to the parlous state of Britain’s public finances.

So what kind of announcement should we be looking for?

Timing: there’s been lots of set dressing about something coming on Thursday and some suggesting it will slip to Friday. But with leak and counter-leak still going on, demonstrating the participants are still fighting over the money, it may be that it will take longer and the real imperative will be getting it out before the Nato Sumit in Ankara in early July.

Name: is it going to be the Defence Investment Plan (DIP) or isn’t it? There still seems to be complete uncertainty about this in Whitehall. In the dreams of senior officers, the DIP was going to be a seamless design for what was needed, who would make it, how much it would cost, and how that spending would be structured over the coming years.

But a good deal of the leaking has implied that we will not get the DIP as such but a government commitment to boosting defence spending between now and the end of this Parliament (2030). What to call it then? When will the actual DIP with its elements of industrial strategy appear? Today’s situation bears a strong resemblance to one following the defence review of 2015 which was soon found unaffordable leading to various financial bandaids, a further quasi-review in 2018 and a feeling after years of fretting that the comprehensive solution had never been found. Perhaps it will be different now and we will actually get the Defence Investment Plan, Lord knows everyone has been working on it for long enough, but ultimately many will judge any announcement by the numbers in it.

How Much: whatever this new package is called people, particularly Westminster journalists, will be looking for the numbers. Many will measure it against the defence chiefs’ hopeful plea for another £28bn for defence between now and 2030. Today we are seeing figures of £13.5bn and £15bn being bandied about, so we can see expectations are being managed.

As so often with government announcements, political correspondents will get briefed in headline terms by spin doctors trying to avoid small print that might spoil the headlines. But I think we can guess in advance what those might be, depending on the partisan affiliation of those reporting it.

It will be critical to see whether the Treasury really binds itself to these increases up to 2030 or whether it sidesteps such commitments, which are precisely what the forces and manufacturers are looking for. Alas there are still plenty of people in government who hope that peace in Ukraine and Donald Trump leaving office might mean that our commitment to rearmament might be softened later on in this Parliament.

Whose Money: joy last year at the Strategic Defence Review’s spending promises was quickly tempered by the realisation that £6bn of the ‘extra’ cash was meant to come from ‘economies’ within the MoD and much of the rest from the Overseas Aid budget. Now it is reported that some other departments, including Health, have had their capital spending plans trimmed in order to pay for the new defence uplift.

This gives rise to many questions ranging from how much of the spending increase might have to come from cuts to whether it will be money committed to short term capital costs (like buying new munitions) rather than underwriting the long term resource or running costs of new defence capabilities.

Priorities: it’s another constant of British defence rows that we hear of ‘tough choices’ between the services and their preferred new weapons. If we hoped that his might become a thing of the past once the long decline in post-Cold War defence spending was reversed, we’ve learned to think again; the tendency of our armed forces to want more than they can afford continues.

So we face a situation where there will inevitably have to be trade-offs between the new nuclear system replacing Trident, plans to rebuild the surface fleet, the new GCAP fighter (pictured above) jet being developed jointly with Japan and Italy, and the ongoing rebuilding of the armoured fleet with Ajax and other vehicles. Each is a multi-billion, decades-long, business and given the issues in many of these projects further overspends are all but inevitable.

It helps that heavy spending on re-building the army is happening currently, whereas GCAP won’t peak for a few years but there are still many big challenges. Some of these will be dealt with by budgetary ‘moving to the right’, delaying the spend or stretching things out.

In my view we are likely to see the government commit itself to GCAP and move some of the ship building to the right. People are already talking about delays to the Type 26 frigate.

But it may also mean some cancellations, for example reducing the numbers of new warship classes or cancelling the new Type 83 destroyer altogether. It might also mean freezing some of the army’s vehicle projects.

So much of what I’ve described here, of spending trickery, political mis-selling, mismanagement of defence projects or turf fights between the services is so wearily familiar that the promise of last year’s defence review, to reset the whole system, has been exposed as hollow. There is even some talk going around today of another review because last year’s will soon be out of date. As if to underline the absurdity, Shashank Joshi the Economist’s stellar outgoing defence editor posted the AI created (humorous) graph below – of a system so consumed by increasingly frequent exercises of this kind that it achieves a singularity, ending up doing nothing else. One can only guess what they make of this in Moscow or Beijing

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Last week I wrote about the ending of the Iran war – or at least this phase of it – and what that meant for the protagonists in the region. It was unwise perhaps to do so ahead of the US and Iran agreeing some kind of formal Memorandum of Understanding to bring the whole sorry business to a close, but I think even now we’ve got a good grasp on what has happened, even if it stutters in some more.

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So now I wanted to address the broader global dynamics of where this leaves the US. It is clear to me, even if many in political life there don’t see it, that it marks another milestone in the decline of that great power even if the question of whether America can indeed be made great again remains open.

Evidently there are implications for the USA’s Russian and Chinese rivals, as well as some of the emerging lesser powers. There are no prizes for guessing that a war embarked upon over-confidently, without the forces in place at the outset to challenge any Iranian blockade of Hormuz or impose a blockade on the Islamic Republic’s shipping, will have harmed America’s standing as the world’s leading military power.

Donald Trump created so much static with his overconfidence and constantly changing positions about the war and its purpose that it’s hardly surprising that so many opinion formers around the world have reacted with unalloyed schadenfreude. But it’s important to understand that today’s situation has resulted from decades of underinvestment, and decisions taken by other presidents too.

In The Edge, a short book I published eleven years ago, I looked at the falling indices of Western military power and the rising ones of challenger states, examining the effects these combined trends would have. My chapters took in everything from US under-investment in missile stocks, as well as other advanced weaponry needed to fight state adversaries (as opposed to insurgencies in Iraq or Afghanistan) to the embrace of emerging technologies such as drones by countries like Iran.

Pointing out that even at the time The Edge was published (2015), the US military had lost the capability to deploy the kind of forces, including six aircraft carrier groups and several armoured divisions it had at the time of its 1991 campaign against Iraq, we could draw certain conclusions. Such was the reduction in American power, I wrote, that, “even a conventional military campaign against Iran could be a real challenge”.

So here we are, more than a decade on, seeing the outcomes, both in terms of Iran’s ability to strike its neighbours with a family of long range weapons and America’s military limitations. As I’ve noted recently, the US Navy currently struggles to sustain more than two aircraft carriers in the region or to provide a viable system for escorting merchant ships out of the Strait of Hormuz.

It is true, in an all-out war, the US could mobilise hundreds of thousands more troops, dozens of warships and scores more combat aircraft for these tasks. But evidently Trump is not ready politically to commit the country to such a struggle and even if he was there would be many limitations imposed upon such a force by the long under-investment in munitions and support for advanced equipment.

The other point not to lose sight of is that the US military, being highly professional, has demonstrated some advanced capabilities that to some extent mitigate its loss of numbers or mass. Noteworthy for me:

- Use of a large air tanker force to produce strike numbers almost as great as those in 1991 when the US had five times as many combat aircraft in the region;

- The effectiveness of some of those very expensive ‘exquisite’ weapons both in bringing down incoming Iranian missiles as well as suppressing their air defences;

- Relatively low losses in combat aircraft compared to 1991, critically denying the Islamic Republic its chance to parade captured pilots;

- Similarly, US Navy warships have successfully withstood attacks from a variety of Iranian weaponry, protecting their sailors and (so far) preventing the image of a blazing US warship from defining the conflict.

On the other side of the ledger though there are enough negatives to cause many to declare that Trump’s failure to bend Iran to his will, while protecting Arab allies in the Gulf, mark a major defeat for America. Quite a few professional weaknesses have been exposed from the poorly protected nature of US bases in the region to an aircraft loss rate that is unmistakeably higher than that of Israel, that flew almost as many missions.

Perhaps more importantly, in terms of the historical ebb and flow or great powers, the US has been unable to break Iran’s hold over Hormuz, upholding the principle of free navigation that is so important for everything from the global economy to international security.

Furthermore, US military performance even against the more limited yardstick set at the beginning by the Pentagon, of neutralising Iran’s forces has been mediocre. Early claims of having destroyed the great majority of Iran’s missiles or drones have been tempered by more sober analysis over time. Having prepared for this contest for decades, the Islamic Republic have developed whole families of long range weapons, some very cheaply produced, as well as dozens of bunkers, deep underground, in which to store them.

Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee recently, Centcom commander Admiral Bradley Cooper gave an insight into lessons learned by US forces. Asked to list what US forces need to prioritise he replied, “I’d put three things: more electronic warfare, keep counter-UAS [ie anti-drone defences] on the leading edge—tactics change very quickly—and we need to invest more in hard and deeply buried targets”.

On this last question, it has been reported that a couple of years ago the US Air Force had a stock of just 40 of its most powerful bunker-busters the so-called Massive Ordnance Penetrator. Fourteen were used during the June 2025 raids against Iranian nuclear sites.

As for the expenditure of scarce munitions during the latest round of fighting, the Talon interceptor used by the THAAD anti-missile system stands out. The total stock was thought to be about 600 two years ago, 150 were fired in defence of Israel during Iranian attacks of October 2024 and June 2025, now around 200 more have been launched since February this year meaning more than half the national stockpile is gone. Furthermore, Iran has succeeded in damaging some of the radars and launch vehicles used by THAAD batteries sent to the Middle East.

The implications of this for any conflict against China, which, if it goes to war, plans on launching thousands of ballistic missiles against US bases in the Pacific are obvious and grim. There is no rapid fix or easy blame game here: just 73 Talon missiles were manufactured during Joe Biden’s presidency, and although there is now an imperative to boost production by a big margin, the line is not expected to gear up until next year.

Similar stories can be told for the offensive stockpile; more than 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles have been fired in this year’s campaign, and almost the full 400 unit inventory of the new PrSM strike missile. In both cases production is being stepped up but it will take years to replace lost stocks, let alone supply the Gulf allies who need replenishment, particularly of items like the Patriot, and, at the back of the queue, the Europeans.

So there is a window of vulnerability here for the next year or two, precisely what General Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned Trump about in February, before the war started. That is particularly relevant to the Chinese, with their timetable of readying the People’s Liberation Army by 2027 for possible operations to take Taiwan.

Longer term, the Trump Administration plans big defence spending increases in order to modernise elements of the US military that fell behind during the long ‘procurement holiday’ of the Clinton, Obama, and Bush years. There are one or two stars here, like the new B-21 bomber prototypes of which are now flying, with reports suggesting development is going very well.

The American military therefore, to use the cliché, stands at a crossroads. It is possible that the recapitalisation planned with Trump’s big increases will turn things around. For both Chinese and Russian leaders this might create a temptation to go sooner rather than later with any military adventures.

But there are other possibilities, not least that a Democratic Party president of a very different hue may replace Trump in 2028, leading to a scaling back or even reversal of Pentagon spending plans. There are also some signs in key areas, that regardless of intent or budget, a future president may be unable to win back US dominance.

That China is building warships at a frantic rate is only too well known in Washington. The Biden Administration began, and Trump has continued, attempts to rectify this.

Despite years of attention to the problem in Washington DC however, little improvement has been achieved, with the construction of nuclear submarines in particular remaining stubbornly slow. Many reasons have been cited, but the loss of critical skills, for example in specialist welding, is key.

Frustration with the lack of progress caused Trump to sack his navy secretary recently. Increasingly, the Pentagon is search for ways to boost its naval strength with construction in Japanese and South Korean yards.

Looking more broadly at the economy, and the struggle for dominance in AI and advanced electronics, attempts that started under first term Trump and Biden to onshore production of the most advanced microchips have so far delivered little despite billions invested. During last year’s tariff war, America received a salutary lesson in its continued dependence on Chinese rare earths and magnets.

Progress by the People’s Republic on everything from shipbuilding to missile stocks, space warfare, to advanced computing may now mean that its rise to dominance is unstoppable. It even outstrips the US in nuclear warhead production, another area where the Americans are struggling with crumbling, long neglected, infrastructure.

So the chances are significant that the late Iran war may be seen not just as an example of presidential hubris or miscalculation, but of underlying realities and the humbling of a great power.

With rumours, leaks and briefings aplenty, the arguments are already raging about ‘who won’ the Iran war. And of course with this week’s strikes against Iranian ships suspected of laying mines in the Strait of Hormuz and of Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, we’re not there yet.

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For me, trying to distil the realities of who gained what is made all the harder by the distortions and disinformation broadcast from all sides. Of course, Iranian media will proclaim it as a glorious victory, and those close to Donald Trump insist that he has gained things that the Obama-era nuclear deal (the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) never could.

There’s a further issue, which is that the largely progressive journalistic mindset of our British coverage causes them to be reluctant to admit that military solutions in general can ever work or that Trump or Benjamin Netanyahu have ever done a wise thing. There’s another reason to adopt their analytical line which is that there’s a big public appetite for takes that suggest these two men have got their comeuppance, blundering into an ill-considered war. I’ve seen this myself in the clicks that my YouTube videos for the Times or Fourcast Indicators podcasts on the same platform get when they are posted with the hook of just how badly wrong Trump in particular has got things.

Since I have been saying from the outset that the operation started on 28^thFebruary was a huge gamble based on facile or flawed assumptions, it’s not like my own work has been so different from that of the journalistic or analytical pack. But I think it’s worth winding in some caveats here.

Firstly, and most obviously, the active phase of hostilities is not over yet. When Trump started the war on 28^th February he told the people of Iran, “don’t leave your home… when we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations”.

Evidently there was a hope, particularly on the Israeli side, that starting this war by killing the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, would trigger an immediate regime collapse. And we know that not only did it fail to do so, but empowered elements who were harder line and less cautious than the octogenarian cleric.

Evidently the Iranian people were very unlikely to revolt while the war was on; January’s massacres were fresh in their minds and the regime response likely to be draconian if they tried anything while the country was being attacked. But we don’t know when the discontent crushed at the start of the year, exacerbated by the economic damage done during the bombing, will burst out again. If there was a coup or the country descended into civil war during the coming months, would we still think the Israelis and US were so naïve in their assumptions?

The Islamic Republic is evidently desperate for cash to alleviate these internal pressures, placing a high priority in negotiations on funds frozen in Arab states, relief of the sanctions related to its nuclear programme, and trying to use the ‘Hormuz tollbooth’ to raise more funds in the form of ‘reparations’ for war damage. Their control of the Strait, and intimidation of Arab neighbours means they will succeed in getting some of this cash – but the lifting of sanctions will be slow and conditions-based, doing little to alleviate rapidly the economic damage suffered in recent months.

Another area where we need to tread carefully analytically is the nuclear programme. Trump’s most ardent critics argue both that the Administration was lying about Iran being close to a nuclear weapon and that last June’s twelve day war did little damage to their nuclear programme.

Yes, the idea that Iran might have been close to getting the bomb in February this year was a nonsense. But that’s in large degree, to quote Raphael Grossi, boss of the International Atomic Energy Authority, because last year’s, “Twelve Day War was, in that sense, quite effective… one cannot deny that this has really rolled back the program considerably”.

What Grossi also knows is that the ongoing suppression of that programme will require onsite inspection under agreements to ensure that Iran does not simply build new centrifuges and research labs to replace the ones destroyed. It is reasonable to suppose that this year’s bombing did additional damage to the Iranian nuclear and ancillary facilities.

The outcome here is still in the balance, but a solution that removed Iran’s 400+kg of highly enriched uranium to Russia or China, or downgraded it inside the Islamic Republic under international supervision, then added regular inspections to prevent the re-establishment of the programme would be a positive one. Taking what Trump calls the ‘nuclear dust’ to America is neither necessary nor likely.

And what of the ballistic missile arsenal or network of allies, the ‘Axis of Resistance’ that Iran uses to project influence across the Middle East? Here we are in muddier waters.

As a result of its battering of Hezbollah in the autumn of 2024 (remember the exploding pagers), and its ability to withstand Iranian missile barrages in April 2024 and June 2025, Israel had appeared to demolish the entire Iranian system of deterrence constructed over many years. And indeed, we know from Netanyahu’s former defence minister and others that following the October 2023 Hamas assault, that he was petrified of the destruction that might be unleashed on Israel by Hezbollah or even Iran itself.

I can testify to the fear that existed among Israeli securocrats – it’s one of the main reasons they hadn’t tried to stop the Iranian nuclear programme by direct military action sooner. But Iran’s Operation True Promise, when it fired 120 ballistic missiles, 30 cruise and 170 drones at Israel in April 2024 (after the IDF bombed a key meeting at the Iranian embassy in Damascus) undermined the Islamic Republic’s deterrence rather than affirming it.

Having caused almost no damage to Israel, the fear among securocrats there began to dissipate. Their anti-missile defences were good, and Iran’s weaponry often inaccurate. In August that year, the IDF carried out its own retaliation, peeling back the Islamic Republic’s air defences, operating freely across its skies.

By the time of the June 2025 Twelve Day War Netanyahu and his people had swung from fear of Iran and its proxies to, if anything, an over-estimation of what could be achieved against them by military means.

He thus encouraged Trump to strike again this year. And the results, again, have been of grossly disproportionate damage in Israel’s favour, with 550 Iranian ballistic missiles and more than 1,000 drones doing little lasting harm.

But here of course is where the outcome gets very tricky for both the US and its Arab allies in the Gulf: America used up hundreds of scarce interceptors defending Israel; while Iran’s longer-range weapons had been blitzed by Israel previously, supplies of shorter range missiles, able to hit the nearby sheikdoms were largely intact; over shorter ranges Iranian attacks were more accurate; and by throttling the Strait of Hormuz, Revolutionary Guard diehards could exert regional and global economic effects.

So where does the region end up, if a deal is indeed now coming together and momentum can be maintained over the coming weeks?

Israel faces ongoing attritional battles with Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. In both places though the consequences of war have been so dreadful that if whoever wins September’s Israeli elections has the sense to engage in diplomacy, not least to staunch the slow but constant drip of IDF casualties in those places, some stability might be achieved.

With Iran too, there must surely be a desire for a period of quiet with Israel. Of course, Netanyahu’s promises of resounding victory have proven chimerical from Gaza, to Lebanon or Tehran and his pursuit of war deeply damaging to Israel’s broader international image. But he has created a situation, particularly with Iran, where their ability to wage war on Israel has been significantly diminished and at the very least a long period of re-building and rethinking is necessary.

For the Gulf states though it is a more dismal panorama. Israel’s gain may be good for a few years, but the same could be said of the pain in those monarchies. There are no quick fixes.

Iran has demonstrated its willingness and ability to destroy its neighbours’ economies in order to save itself. The mitigations – from big defence build ups to new pipelines by-passing Hormuz – will take years.

Some might hope for regime change in Iran but a popular rising there could be very unpredictable. It could dispose of a malign regime – but equally given the strength of regime support, it could result in a civil war with further evil consequences for the region.

And as all of this unfolds, belief in the USA, as a guarantor of regional security has been severely undermined, leaving the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia or the emirs of Gulf neighbours with little choice but to work their diplomatic channels with Iran.

And this brings us to the consequences of all this for America and its ability to project military power. Undoubtedly its image has suffered here – but how far this is due to the peculiarities of this Trump administration and how far it tells us about a deeper decline will be the subject of my next blog.

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The BBC gets a new Director General today, ex-Google exec Matt Brittin. His arrival has triggered an avalanche of ‘mission impossible’ pieces about the challenges faced by our venerable public broadcaster.

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Having spent 34 years working there, inevitably, I have views. But today I want to focus on the baleful effects that decades of cuts has had on the people who still work there.

Because as Matt Brittin arrives, BBC is braced for another round of cuts. It’s been estimated that 10% of the 21,000 staff will lose their jobs, though there are also reports that it will fall particularly heavily on the News Division, which could see 15% losses.

It’s been described as the biggest drawdown at the Corporation in 15 years. But go back a bit further and it’s been a long story that has had a significant impact on the organisation and its internal health.

I still recall the first round of Newsnight reporter redundancies when two out of the 15 of us were going to be shown the door. Inevitably, you think about whether it will be you and what you might do if it was. That was in 1995.

There were three further swings of the axe during my subsequent years on the programme, culminating in 2024 with the one that cut all but one of the remaining reporters/correspondents/editors, whatever you wanted to call us. I was pleased to go and had in fact been turned down for redundancy when I applied for it the previous year, but let’s pause that thought for the moment and in any case the feelings of this old timer are irrelevant to the many people who will want to stay at the Corporation but will not now get the chance.

My point here is that I have seen close up the effect that this slow death has had on BBC journalism over decades. And of course, it is why I now empathise with those whose jobs are on the line.

The first and most obvious point, if you’re thinking about the mortgage, providing for your kids, whatever else, is that this atmosphere undermines the willingness to take risks. Those who play it safe tend to survive, and as those with flair as well as a greater appetite for editorial danger often chose to leave you are left with an increasingly timid newsroom, risk averse in its output.

All of those with an axe to grind, from the government of the day to pressure groups or ego-mad commentators have learned that in this atmosphere if you make enough fuss, you can bend the BBC’s editorial process your way or at least make them reluctant to cover certain stories. It was evidently the case that Boris Johnson’s Downing Street media operation kept up a caustic running commentary but equally so that this kind of head-butting by the government of the day was sufficiently long established to produce hollow laughter in the newsroom when Alastair Campbell complained about Boris doing it.

Of course this doesn’t just apply to politics. This weekend my former colleague Rob Burley dropped a really important long read about how this loss of confidence (as well as generational changes among the staff) was exploited by the trans lobby, drawing the BBC to one side of the ‘who is a woman’ issue, creating great difficulties for those in the newsroom who questioned that.

The second effect of this long decline is that as you cut your editorial workforce, your ability to find things out, to be places, diminishes. Naturally enough, as foreign bureaux close, and specialist staffs at home reduce, your editors and therefore consumers become less well informed. The people who do the primary news gathering roles – going to the scene of a plane crash or ringing the emergency services to fact check – are surprisingly few.

Long years in the field breed expertise, and as that cadre gets cut time and again, it further undermines the confidence and distinctiveness of the Corporation’s journalism. That I can make my way to the Sunday Times and elsewhere post-BBC is due in no small part to the decades of knowledge accumulated on the license-payers’ dollar. But fewer and fewer specialist correspondents are being nurtured there.

It’s not just the BBC cutting those posts but some other big players too. The Associated Press, an American news agency, is currently in the process of laying off 5% of its people, and this has a disproportionate effect, since their service feeds so many news organisations globally.

As the reach and knowledge of an organisation diminish, they become more dependent on social media and PR handouts for content and funnily enough, since the punters can read (and interpret) Donald Trump’s posts for themselves, authority diminishes. In the case of the BBC the long process of cutbacks makes them ever more reliant on those two fire hydrants of the news flow, Westminster and the Washington Bureau.

Inevitably this means a news agenda that is more about political argument – less about data, expertise or life as the typical viewer lives it. There are some ways to compensate for this, which is why sporting news, royalty, showbiz, or scientific breakthroughs can still make it on.

There’s one more negative effect that the long saga of cuts has had at the BBC. It doesn’t just make managers risk averse, it also produces some very negative competitive behaviour.

Talking to another ex-Newsnight person at one of the places I’ve recently worked since leaving the BBC they said that what they didn’t miss was, “people who spend their days trying to fuck you over”. In the struggle for survival, unscrupulous tactics can be used.

On a few occasions I found that our attempts to deploy to cover overseas stories were thwarted by the foreign news desk, often citing safety concerns. You can’t deploy unless you have an armoured vehicle, and we control the armoured vehicles, was one approach.

Editorial meetings, long a place for editorial backstabbing at the Beeb, thus become the forum for sledging the competition. Pointing out another bulletin or programme’s error becomes a tactic in defence of your own budget. The team spirit so essential in broadcasting gets undermined by this.

That makes people even more defensive and programmes constantly trying to justify their existence often become reluctant to share information, something that contributed to Newsnight’s disaster 14 years ago when it broadcast smears about the late Lord McAlpine. Doubts elsewhere in the organisation about the person making the allegations went undiscovered because our people kept to themselves what Newsnight was working on.

These days the battle for survival centres on clicks. And in a way, why shouldn’t it? Nobody’s going to pride themselves on getting really low numbers on YouTube or TikTok.

Again, though there are downsides, not least that if the BBC is playing the same game as all the other content creators, how does it justify its own special funding arrangements? As a viewer this tactic also leads them to follow the commentariat herd rather than lead it.

Like many others wishing Matt Brittin success in his new job, I value the BBC’s pivotal role in our cultural and political life, hoping that it thrives as well as survives. But I do worry about another round of cuts and how it contributes to the long erosion of Auntie’s self-confidence.

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I’m going to be honest about this, Britain’s political crisis of the last few days arouses only a glimmer of interest in me. Until we get a leader and government prepared to confront the country’s big underlying problems, I think that the Westminster battle will only be relevant at the margins.

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This is not to say that the current manoeuvring by those trying to topple Keir Starmer is not entertaining. It has power as a political drama, not least because scheming leadership contenders or their friends who constantly brief the press have not yet (writing on Wednesday afternoon) had the backbone to confront Starmer openly.

And it’s true also, that while I can be critical of the way politics is reported in this country and often occupies too big a place in the news agenda, what’s going on now is certainly ‘a big story’. The people have spoken in recent local elections, it’s an inflection point in terms of our democracy, exposing many big questions, not least what Labour is for now and how two legacy parties that have dominated political life for decades deal with the Reform and Green insurgencies.

But what leaves me cold is the reluctance of politicians to confront those big underlying questions about what our government can and cannot achieve. I don’t think the current Labour leadership ructions will produce a prime minister who is any more willing to do that.

And in the absence of such discussion, the gap between what the country wants and what it is willing to pay for is filled by ever more debt, the servicing of which now consumes more taxpayers’ money (£111bn in 2025-26 or 8.3% of government spending) than defence and education combined.

The popularity of Reform and the Greens suggests, if anything, an even greater retreat from reality, with a drift towards magical thinking in a ‘sod the bond markets’ sort of way. This, and the current uncertainty in Downing Street are making it harder for the British state to finance its debt, nudging up the reward (ie the interest rate) needed to attract buyers of government bonds to its highest level in nearly 30 years.

So given that it’s King’s Speech day, when the party in power sets out its programme for the coming months, here are some suggested alternatives.

- End the triple lock on pensions. As a financially comfortable 65 year old, that means I’ll take a hit, but that’s OK if it’s an investment in the future, by which I mean education, infrastructure or defence.

- Comprehensive welfare reform, curbing the unsustainable growth in benefits such as Personal Independence Payments and reducing the entitlements of those who’ve just arrived in the country.

- A Royal Commission on the future of the NHS, safeguarding the principle that it should be free at the point of delivery but re-examining all other aspects of it in terms of delivering better outcomes and cutting bureaucracy.

- A specific tax or insurance scheme for social care, to remove this burden from the NHS.

- A commitment to get defence spending to 3% of gross domestic product by 2030, 5% by 2035, with legally binding spending increases in each year along that pathway until the end of this Parliament.

I could go on – but I expect you will be relieved that I haven’t! My point is that we must fix the fundamental problems in the public finances as we go on to the other really big questions, even the existential ones, such as finding the right approach to Artificial Intelligence or climate change.

Instead we have a political class that believes that tackling these issues is too electorally risky and media commentary that makes this a self-fulfilling prophecy. And yes, I can see that grasping these issues means people like me will pay more tax, and squeeze those who may be struggling on benefits. A formula of ‘equal misery’ might seem an obvious electoral liability - but Lord we need someone who can articulate it in terms of a time limited commitment to turn the country around, requiring commitment from all rather than the ‘soak the rich’ or ‘hit the benefits cheats’ options of class-based politics.

Instead, each of us will have our own milestones in thinking ‘this is no longer a serious country’. I would cite: the failure to have a proper conversation about the cost of social care, derided as a ‘dementia tax’ when Theresa May attempted it; the refusal of all parties to drop the triple lock on pensions; Keir Starmer’s u-turn on benefit reform; and the failure of both the Sunak and Starmer governments to fund defence adequately at a time when they have adopted the rhetoric of putting the country on a war footing.

Our politicians and commentators have fallen into a consensus that creates an ever-smaller Overton Window about what policies are ‘politically acceptable’. That means avoiding certain issues, which in turn drives a disaffection from politics, a drift to extremes and draws us step by step closer to a financial crisis. So unless a Burnham, Miliband or Streeting has a substantially different approach to leadership, I cannot see that we will get anything more than a different brand of sticking plaster for a broken system.

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French and British warships are making their way into Middle East waters, raising an expectation that action may soon be joined. And if the rumours about diplomacy to end the Iran war gathering pace are true, we may indeed see a plan coming together.

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It would be easy to be cynical because we’ve seen this movie before. Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron promised to lead an international force to secure a deal in Ukraine too. And of course despite the elegant phrasemaking and flag-decked summitry in Paris or London that hasn’t happened.

What the two missions have in common is a desire to be seen as ‘doing something’ but a great aversion to doing anything that might lead to their armies or fleets having to fight. I don’t want to sound too jaundiced because after all as the downstream consequences of the Gulf conflict, from galloping oil prices to an inflationary bounce, reach European shores, citizens may well be wondering why their governments seem captured by events rather than having any ability to alter them.

Evidently European leaders don’t want to be seen as piling in to Donald Trump’s war. That would be politically toxic as well as rather dangerous, running the risk of exposing the limits of their military capability.

So back in mid-April when the Anglo-French initiative was launched, the two leaders stressed, they were intent on “establishing an independent and strictly defensive multinational mission to protect merchant vessels, reassure commercial shipping operators and conduct mine clearance operations as soon as conditions permit following a sustainable ceasefire agreement”.

If this kind of peace deal doesn’t happen in the near term, then the European naval force will be paused and it will all feel much like what has happened with Ukraine. In both cases one gets the feeling that London and Paris get spurred on by Trump’s happy talk about imminent deals, rather than having reliable independent intelligence upon which to base their decisions.

As the warships, led by French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle, get closer we should expect more huffing and puffing from Iran designed to intimidate the Europeans. Indeed today (Sunday) it has already started, with Iran’s deputy foreign minister posting on X, “the presence of French and British warships, or those of any other country potentially accompanying the illegal and internationally unlawful actions of the United States in the Strait of Hormuz, will be met with a decisive and immediate response from the armed forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran”.

In announcing the decision to send HMS Dragon, an air defence destroyer, into the Red Sea, the UK Ministry of Defence announcement emphasised, the ship’s, “potential role in a strictly defensive and independent future multinational mission to safeguard freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz when conditions allow”. Gosh, well they managed to load, ‘potential’, ‘strictly defensive’, ‘independent’ and ‘when conditions allow’ into a single sentence. The emphasis is very much ‘don’t confuse us with Trump and Netanyahu’ rather than ‘we are doing this because Iran’s use of force to dominate a vital international waterway is unacceptable’.

So, parking the language for a moment, let’s be optimistic and assume that peace moves do gather momentum and that the US and Iran find a path to some kind of outline agreement. What then for the European naval force?

Dragon’s role could be to provide air defence to the Charles de Gaulle task group or to escort ships through the Strait of Hormuz. Why would that be necessary if they aren’t going to deploy without a peace agreement in place?

We’re hearing the word ‘reassurance’, which is familiar from the numerous Anglo-French false starts in Ukraine; we’re not going there to fight but to reassure. One can see masters of merchant vessels might be grateful for that, if they don’t entirely trust a ceasefire, but in Gulf waters as in the possible ‘Ukraine Reassurance Force’ robust rules of engagement will be necessary for this to project the necessary aura of confidence.

And if, by another bit of positive thinking, a ceasefire solidifies, then the Franco-British task group will be calling for the assistance of mine hunting vessels. For the Royal Navy, following the embarrassing disbandment of its Gulf mine hunting squadron earlier this year, that would likely mean calling up Royal Fleet Auxiliary Lyme Bay which has been standing by in the Mediterranean in recent weeks.

In that scenario it would act as a mothership for robotic mine clearance boats and submersibles. Some other nations, including Germany and possibly Japan, could also be expected to contribute specialist vessels to this task, sweeping the Strait clear of explosive devices.

Writing on Sunday though the news is hardly encouraging. A merchant vessel has reported being hit just off the coast of Qatar (likely by an Iranian drone), and in recent days US Navy ships have battled Revolutionary Guard speedboats in the Strait itself.

It’s easy to understand why other nations that have promised to contribute to the European Hormuz task force have not yet despatched their ships and are awaiting before they do so for more solid news of a US/Iranian agreement to halt the fighting. If the force will only deploy in the event of robust deal, why put to sea at all?

But the Charles de Gaulle, a supporting frigate, and HMS Dragon are on their way, cutting along while spokespeople back in London talk about a ‘potential’, ‘strictly defensive’, ‘independent’ mission when ‘conditions allow’. If we are being charitable we might speculate that Macron and Starmer just want them to be on scene as soon as possible. But experience of their approach to Ukraine leads me to worry it might be more cynical than that, and largely about appearances.

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The Americans are challenging Iranian control of the Hormuz Strait. The question is whether this is a direct attempt to break the Islamic Republic’s hold on this waterway or something more nuanced, possibly an attempt to work out new ground rules between the key players.

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What we know:

- During the night of 3/4^th May, US destroyers transited the Strait, escorting two US-flagged merchant vessels out of the Gulf;

- Shortly after that happened, the US declared that its new regime, Project Freedom, had come into force, that other vessels should make their way through, and Iranian forces that tried to stop them could be engaged;

- On Monday, a UAE tanker was hit by two drones (suffering no casualties) as it made its way towards the Strait;

- Reports also suggested a fire on a Korean ship in the area, likely due to Iranian action.

- later Centcom commander Admiral Brad Cooper said that US forces had responded to Iranian attacks by engaging six of their small attack craft.

There’s been one other interesting development over the weekend, which is an announcement by Pakistan that 22 Iranian mariners from the ship Touska, boarded a fortnight ago as it made its way towards the Islamic Republic were released by the US to Pakistani custody and were on their way home. So it’s quite possible that was a deal: if the US let the Iranian crew go home (and have promised to deliver the Touska itself to a Pakistani port) then the Iranians would allow the two US flagged ships to transit Hormuz unmolested.

Now we might have seen that as a positive outcome – a sign that the US and Iran are starting at least to talk things through, de-escalate, getting ships, cargos, and sailors moving again. Or we could surmise that it’s very limited in scope, recognises de facto the right of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or IRGC to ‘coordinate’ who uses the Strait, and has done little to stem the growing possibility that the ceasefire will break down as US forces engage the Iranians in defence of some other vessel using the waterway.

But now we know that shots were fired by both sides on Monday. The question is whether it will be contained now or escalate into a general resumption of fighting.

In terms of those that succeeded in passing through, vessels sailing under a US flag are a very small proportion of the hundreds stranded in the Gulf. Since US Central Command has made clear it is not convoying other people’s ships through, their overnight success is hardly evidence that the Iranian dam has been broken.

Instead, the Americans have said they will tell mariners where the Iranian mines have been laid, urge them to use Omani waters to transit the Strait and threaten to engage the IRGC if it tries to impede the process. Not for the first time then the question for ship owners is how much risk are they prepared to take, and generally we know the answer is ‘not very much’.

If more are prepared to chance it, then in the hours ahead we should see two things: whether the US will continue to engage Iranian forces threatening shipping, and how capable American forces are of defending free passage. We may also get a glimpse of whether the Iranians are prepared to enforce their control of the Gulf outlet on a sustained basis even at the expense of the wider ceasefire collapsing.

Iranian news agencies claimed they had hit two US Navy vessels overnight but this has been denied by the American side. There’s no doubting the importance for the IRGC and leadership more generally of exerting this control, since they hope to extract millions in shipping ‘tolls’, a revenue stream they desperately need.

So we will see whether Project Freedom causes the whole ceasefire to crumble, there will be periodic flare ups, or ship owners will take today’s exchanges of fire as a sign that the risk of transiting the Strait remains too high. There are dilemmas on both sides - and it’s clear since both the IRGC and US forces held back to some degree today, that neither side has yet given up entirely on the ceasefire.

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So it’s full speed ahead for the British Army’s new Ajax armoured vehicle – the Ministry of Defence having announced today that the process of bringing it into service, suspended after 35 soldiers who were operating the vehicle fell ill last November, will resume. There had been talk of cancellation, but that’s now been ruled out.

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There’s a lot riding on the vehicle – not least £6bn invested, 700 jobs directly dependent, as well the Army’s ability, after so many false starts, to deploy a (reasonably) modern fighting vehicle. It is buying 589 of them, and it’s a family of vehicles covering reconnaissance, command, engineer, recovery, and troop carrying tasks.

There may be another variant in the pipeline too, something to replace the Army’s fleet of ageing Warrior infantry fighting vehicles. In January, when I visited the factory on South Wales where they’re being built, I was also shown a prototype of a variant that would carry eight troops.

Nobody emerges well from the saga so far: the Army kept changing its mind and created so many specifications for it to meet (1,318 to be exact) that the producer of a rival vehicle this week said they were glad they didn’t get the contract; the Ministry of Defence procurement people were castigated by an inquiry for their dysfunctional processes; and the winning contractor, General Dynamics Land Systems or GDLS, has tried to force through problems as well as being exposed on social media for delivering to shoddy standards.

Since my history of the tank is out in paperback next week, I’m bound to reflect that many of the vehicles in there suffered from developmental problems of varying severity, of which more later. Earlier this year I investigated the vehicle for the Sunday Times and for a video for the Times.

I focused in particular on the vibration issues that caused testing to be suspended in 2019. When the experts at DSTL conducted tests a couple of years later, after modifications to the vehicle and crew helmets, they came to the conclusion that the problem was acceptable and Ajax comparable with other vehicles in the fleet such as Warrior.

Having ridden in it for 20 minutes on the GDLS test track I can’t say it vibrated any more than the other armoured vehicles I’ve experienced, and certainly less than those I served in 40+ years ago. But of course that’s a superficial judgment and the acid test will be with regular users.

Although there are plenty on social media ready to excoriate the vehicles and GDLS, I’ve not seen anyone produce information that undermines those 2021-22 test results and proves that it cannot be brought into service. The inquiry into how soldiers got ill last November now suggests some were affected by engine fumes. There were also problems of motion sickness caused by the fact that crew members spend so much time looking at screens, and that’s a problem in moving vehicles.

My instinct earlier this year, after long conversations with GDLS management, the MoD, and soldiers who’d worked on it, was that Ajax would not be cancelled. Around 200 of the vehicles have already been delivered to the Army, with a production rate of twelve a month.

To have ditched it and started again from scratch would have meant spending billions and accepting another 3-5 years delay. And given the importance government now sets on rebuilding military production in this country, isn’t having a plant producing 140+ tanks a year something you’d be very reluctant to give up?

Now of course if those vehicles are turkeys the whole exercise is futile. The long and tortured Ajax saga is full of ironies in this sense.

Originally intended as a replacement for Scimitar and Scorpion reconnaissance vehicles, Ajax weighs nearly three times as much and is huge by comparison. These days drones have come to the forefront for discovering where your enemy is on the battlefield in any case.

Ukraine has shown us that tanks in the full-on sense of the word – vehicles even bigger and with the primary role of engaging other armoured vehicles with direct fire – are less useful now. They quickly become drone magnets and where used at all, it’s generally as mobile guns in support of the infantry.

What we have seen in Ukraine though is that general purpose armoured vehicles able to carry soldiers for various missions (including the Swedish CV-90 that lost out to the GDLS bid for Ajax and the American Bradley) are more popular. If they are heavily protected there are still situations where a soldier faced with a dangerous mission prefers to ride in them rather than work unprotected across the Donbas killing fields.

That would be my attitude now too, if I faced a dangerous trip close to the frontline. Wouldn’t you want the protection? And compared to the recce vehicles or infantry fighting vehicles currently in British Army service, Ajax has far better armour.

And its remaining problems? We will just have to trust they are fixed swiftly and recall that many an armoured vehicle has matured after suffering birth pangs.

Britain’s Centurion tank had an engine so thirsty that in early trials it ran out of fuel after as little as 50 miles. America’s M1 was a decade late into service and also sucked down fuel like nobody’s business.

As for the Chieftain tank on which I served, even ten years after entering service, needed a replacement engine after 250 miles on average. Of course we should want something better for our soldiers, particularly after paying £6bn for it.

But with the government having decided to press on with Ajax, the Army, MoD, and GDLS will have to turn a page, developing it into a truly impressive vehicle. That may sound like a triumph of hope over experience but the critics have I think overplayed the catastrophising.

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With US/Iranian talks deadlocked, the risks that the ceasefire frays and battle is joined again are all to evident. With that in mind analysts have noticed that the US Navy may soon have three aircraft carriers available in the region for the first time during this conflict.

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The USS Abraham Lincoln has been carrying out strikes since the outset, the Gerald Ford was involved at the start but left the line for a few weeks following a fire on board but is now rejoining, and the George Bush will soon reach the Central Command area of operations, having set sail from Norfolk Virginia. It’s an impressive armament, no doubt, but look a little more closely and you see the limitations that cause many seasoned officers to bemoan the state of the fleet.

If this war is lasting longer and has developed in ways its instigators did not expect, allowing Iran to take the initiative by exerting its control over the Strait of Hormuz, that is because of its flawed strategic premises. But it has also revealed some telling limitations to US military power, and particularly its naval clout, that have big implications for the future.

No wonder Admiral Samuel Paparo the commander of US forces in the Indian Ocean and Pacific said this week that succeeding against Iran would help to deter any Chinese assault on Taiwan. “There’s no substitute for prevailing on the battlefield”, he told the Senate armed services committee, saying he wanted Beijing to see, “that the United States employs capability and will in response to aggression, and I don’t want them to doubt that in any way”.

But inevitably there are doubts, notably that the American ‘capability and will’ to reopen the Strait of Hormuz by force has been shown to be lacking. Inevitably, people see how even the limited commitment to the Iran war has stretched American naval power.

Talking recently to Britain’s great naval historian NAM Rodger, he said, “the US Navy is still unquestionably the most powerful in the world but is in the most dreadful mess”, citing the disasters of the Littoral Combat Ship and Zumwalt classes, designs abandoned after billions were spent, leaving an ageing fleet with sharply declining numbers. Those who take for granted US naval supremacy often point to its maintenance of powerful aircraft carrier strike groups as a potent symbol of its might but in fact the readiness of this force is a telling indicator of the hollowing out of their fleet.

Bolstered by Top Gun movies and untold numbers of news reports the arrival of one of these big ships with a crew of more than 5,000 and up to 100 embarked aircraft in a war zone is often painted as the prelude to decisive action. Their symbolic importance is so great that in 2007 Congress signed into law the requirement that the US Navy maintain a force of at least eleven strike carriers.

But the real question is how many of those can be sent into operations with an embarked carrier air wing? During both the 1991 and 2003 wars against Iraq, the US Navy deployed six fully operational carriers but right now, the three that will soon be concentrated in the Centcom area represent the entire deployable force. That’s the key thing you should take from this blog - the halving of this capability during the past two decades.

So why this poor readiness? The first thing, revealed in the chart below is that the ships themselves are not in a great state. Indeed, it shows that six of the eleven are in dock for refits or long term repair.

This situation arose in part because the Gerald Ford, first of a new class, faced considerable teething troubles, entering service four years late and coming in nearly $3bn over budget. That’s had a knock-on effect, delaying the replacement of older ships, causing maintenance problems to multiply.

Then there’s the issue of carrier air wings. The number of flat tops may be mandated by law, but that of squadrons to embark on them is not, and during the long years in which they were bombing insurgents in Iraq of Afghanistan there were successive cutbacks.

So whereas a late Cold War carrier would embark 90+ jets, that was halved during tours in the early 2000s as types needed in the battle that never happened against the Soviet fleet – from F-14 Tomcat fighters for fleet air defence to S-3 Vikings for long range submarine hunting – were retired without replacement.

And just as the Ford Class proved an object lesson in the dysfunction of the American military industrial complex, so the new F-35C fighter turned out to be late in service and too expensive for the Navy, which cut its order. That meant more strain on an ageing fleet of F/A-18 Hornet planes

.During the War on Terror period the challenge was to maintain three air wings-worth of the Hornet force while wearing out the aircraft in successive operational tours. More recently that problem has eased a little, as money was ploughed into it, F35Cs arrived and so on but now that attention is shifting to the challenges of confronting China’s increasingly capable navy a whole new set of questions arises.

New types of planes will be needed for air defence and sub hunting – some will probably be uncrewed. But the really critical question will be how to protect the carriers themselves from China’s formidable arsenal of missiles, drones and submarines.

The force of escort ships (cruisers, destroyers, and frigates) needed to provide a protective ring around each carrier has fallen steeply, as explained above. In Cold War exercises up to a dozen of these ships defended each flat top but today, the number of carriers that could be defended against serious threats aligns with the availability of ships and air wings – they would struggle to form more than three carrier groups.

So there it is, the fleet gathering in the Middle East contains the entire deployable carrier strike force of the current US Navy. And it may well be that as Bush arrives, Ford which has been operationally deployed for nearly one year now, or Lincoln sail for home. This may prove to be a low ebb, as the Trump Administration’s big boost to defence spending starts to rebuild capability.

But for now, that’s how the eleven mandated by law becomes three in practice. In a general conflict – World War 3 – they could get another one or two carrier groups to sea. But then in that situation they would face far more serious threat of attack than they have in recent weeks off Iran, and the whole question of whether they are now too vulnerable to survive would come to the fore.

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What a mess the UK defence sector is in. It stems from the government’s inability to give financial substance to the ideas it’s committed to. In that sense these are unforced errors.

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So let’s park for a moment the big picture stuff about defence versus welfare or the state of our public finances and just focus on the fact that Britain’s government cannot show us how it will deliver last year’s Strategic Defence Review or SDR, despite saying it accepted all of its recommendations. Furthermore, it will not tell those it expects to do so – from the forces to industry – how it’s planning to build up to the 3.5% (of gross domestic product) spending target by 2035 that it adopted at a Nato summit last summer.

One vital missing piece of the jigsaw is the Defence Investment Plan (the DIP, sorry for another acronym). It’s supposed to put solid figures besides the various programmes outlined in the SDR so everyone understands the priorities and how the money is being lined up.

The government said the DIP would be published last October. Of course it’s nowhere to be seen. The latest rumour is that it will come this autumn, one year late, amid an ongoing three-way wrangle between the Ministry of Defence, Downing Street and HM Treasury.

Why adopt the rhetoric of putting the country on a ‘war footing’ or commit to a big spending target when you can’t manage the political consensus necessary to give those words meaning? Why get Lord George Robertson, Labour grandee, former defence secretary and boss of Nato to run an ‘epoch-defining’ review when his recommendations are regarded with apparent indifference?

This week the political ramifications of this yawning gap between language and behaviour blew up in the government’s face. Lord Robertson gave a speech criticising the, “corrosive complacency in Britain’s political leadership” on national defence at a time when the country is, “in peril”.

It was obvious that his anger was building. When we had Robertson on the Crisis Room podcast earlier this year, he told us, “I am very frustrated about it… we have to invest much more in defence of the nation”. Boiling over this week he blamed Treasury “vandalism” for the present state of affairs.

Why does this matter beyond the Westminster bubble? Over recent weeks I was the moderator at two conferences held in London – one, involving many senior officers – was of the Cyber and Specialist Operations Command of the MoD and the other, a more public event, the 4^th London Defence Conference.

During one panel discussion, at the LDC (last acronym, I promise) I asked General Onno Eichelsheim, Netherlands chief of defence staff, whether his government had laid out the pathway to that big Nato spending target? Yes indeed they have, he replied, detailing how much money they would be committing during each year of the coming decade.

In the UK, by contrast, an air of uncertainty hangs over defence. Serving officers attest to the corrosive effects of that, in terms of planning anything from training to maintenance, and those with wares to sell complain about the inability to invest in new capacity until the government gives a clear signal about whether it will be buying certain bits of kit.

When Iain Martin, director of the London conference, asked Secretary of State for Defence John Healey whether the British armed forces were ready for war today, he replied, “yes”. During the following days I was approached by around 20 conference participants complaining about that.

Almost all cited financial uncertainties in their criticism. I’m not sure I’ve ever known a presentation at one of these events go down so badly.

The government’s counter argument is that it has made “the largest sustained increase in defence spending since the Cold War, with a total of over £270bn being invested across this Parliament”. Yes, they have stemmed the long-term decline in spending, but they have started the process by penny pinching and given no idea how it will be funded beyond the current three-year public spending round.

So the increases of the next couple of years have been largely paid for by raiding the Overseas Development budget and require £6bn of ‘economies’ within defence itself. That nice warm feeling that ought to come with the funding boost has been dampened by the need for billions in cuts at the same time. As for what follows, a ten year perspective, that’s supposed to be in the Defence Investment Plan.

This dragging of heels presents a marked contrast with neighbours such as Denmark or Germany. The Danes have almost reached their Nato 3.5% spend already, the Germans committed €100bn in extra funding to the readiness race. Both countries used bond issues to supplement the normal spending process.

Uncertainty also brings out some of the worst tendencies of the British armed forces – notably their temptation to commit to more projects than they can afford. Word on the street is that Britain cannot finance both the new GCAP fighter jet it’s developing with Japan and Italy, and build the 24 warships that the Royal Navy says were signed off in 2021.

The result? Japan’s faith in Britain as a GCAP partner is faltering. And prior commitments on numbers of new Type 26 and Type 31 frigates are now regarded as, “bullshit”, one admiral told me last week.

These are multi-billion pound projects upon which the survival of many thousands of jobs depend. And that’s before we’ve even started on consequences such as whether, when faced with a crisis, this country can marshal enough ships, planes, or troops, to have a meaningful impact.

Finally, we must acknowledge the parlous state of government finances. That’s what leads to Treasury nervousness about extra borrowing (on German lines) to finance one off re-capitalisation of the armed forces and to make commitments beyond the current spending round.

There are plenty of people in Whitehall who deflect the arguments for greater spending by pointing to past MoD project mismanagement and quietly hope that the end of the Ukraine war might allow them to kick Britain’s Nato spending pledge into the long grass of the next Parliament. But that is to misread the seriousness of the international situation, and to play everyone from Lord Robertson to those shooting down Iranian drones in the Middle East for fools.

If war ends in Ukraine, Russia may look for pressure points elsewhere. And even if they don’t, the recent drone strikes on Akrotiri by Hezbollah show that even one of the more sophisticated non-state groups, let alone the Russians, can pose serious challenges for the armed forces in their present state.

It’s time to match cash to the government’s words and show how it will build over the next decade. That ought to be sufficient time to reassure the wider world that someone in Whitehall knows what they’re doing.

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It’s too early to draw definitive conclusions about the Iran war, not least because of the apparently irreconcilable nature of the US and Islamic Republic negotiating positions. Certainly, though things are becoming a little clearer.

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We are far enough along in this, firstly, to know that the US does not have the military forces in place to take control of the Strait of Hormuz or to develop large scale ground operations in Iran nor is there any prospect – in terms of units ordered to the region of them doing so.

The second thing that we know is that although the US and Israel have brandished the weapon of attacking the regime’s oil infrastructure, they have in fact held back from the wholesale destruction of its facilities at Kharg Island and elsewhere. This is logical enough given that the Trump Administration has been trying to limit the oil price shock, and taking 2m barrels per day of Iranian production out of the picture would only add to it, and that’s before even the promised retaliation against Gulf state oil infrastructure.

So, we are in a position where Donald Trump threatens escalation of various shocking kinds but cannot deliver it. Even so we have, since the bombing of the Pars gas field and Iranian retaliatory action against Qatar three and half weeks ago seen US and Israel trying to challenge the escalation dominance established back then by the regime.

It has been clear since the start that the Islamic Republic, engaged as it is in an existential battle, has been willing to use methods and suffer pain that Trump, launching an ill-considered war of choice, is not. That limits American options, less so those of Israel, with far more at stake, hence the possibility of tensions between them.

Since the abortive strike on the Pars gas field, these attempts to create greater pain for the Islamic Republic, while remaining within Trump’s limits, have seen multiple hits on Iranian infrastructure. Their steel mills have been targeted, as have chemical plants, railways, and some research institutes at universities.

The first thing to note, is that while these haven’t changed the war in any fundamental way, we cannot say conclusively that they failed either. It is evident that Iran has not been able to mete out the wholesale regional destruction it threatened if such targets were hit. That’s partly because of its own military limitations and may also reflect a nervousness on the part of some in the Iranian leadership.

After all, if regime survival is the core goal, they cannot remain indifferent to massive economic damage at home. The regime will blame their attackers, but that will only go so far with a restive population used to such messages. Taxing traffic in the Strait of Hormuz helps them pay for rebuilding, but none of that will happen overnight.

And just as the last weeks have exposed certain self-imposed American limitations, so we can see that Iran may also have sought certain types of de-escalation, despite its own threatening language. For week it shunned peace moves. but lately it has allowed (a few) more ships through the Strait, freed some foreign hostages and of course indulged Pakistani and other foreign mediators.

Yes, the Islamic Republic seeks through these negotiations to codify certain advantages it has gained but it would also like the destruction of its economic infrastructure to stop. If the current negotiations falter, and a full-scale exchange resumes, can the US and Israel raise the pain level?

Inevitably many in Europe balk at such tactics and point to the law of armed conflict. But infrastructure can be deemed part of Iran’s war-making potential from the mills rolling steel for missile launchers to the chemical plants making ‘energetics’ ie explosive or rocket fuel, or the bridges used by missile launchers as they deploy.

This was very well understood by western countries in the past. And we do not have to reach back to the Allied bomber offensives in the1940s, burning German or Japanese cities, in a way that many deemed morally unacceptable even at the time, to see this.

Consider Nato’s Operation Allied Force against Serbia and its forces in Kosovo back in 1999.

During that war, enthusiastically prosecuted by the UK and other European allies as well as the US and despite the absence of an enabling United Nations resolution, bridges were bombed, power stations put out of action, as was the TV station in Belgrade, and some prized examples of Yugoslav industry such as the Zastava car plant. These places were all signed off by the lawyers in Nato HQ as part of Yugoslavia’s war-making potential, and the outcome was successful coercion: Slobodan Milosevic agreed to withdraw his forces from Kosovo.

You might say it was ugly and cynical but if war is a battle of wills, states waging it must ultimately be willing to threaten the things their opponent holds dear. Western countries, after decades of ‘discretionary’ operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have perhaps forgotten that.

There are many differences between Operation Allied Force and today’s situation. The desire of some European leaders to see Trump get his comeuppance, and their amnesia about the legal pliability their predecessors were prepared to engage in over a war they felt a stake in, were all factors.

Critically though, Iran is a state with the will and capability to behave in quite a different way to Milosevic’s Yugoslavia, holding others to ransom. That can be the innocent foreign passport holders arrested on fabricated charges while travelling through their country, and it can be whole nations, their Gulf neighbours for example.

Iran attacked Dubai’s airport on the first day of the war and had hit Qatar’s key gas terminal as well as Saudi Arabia’s oil one within 72 hours of this starting. Having been struck by Israel and US, they demonstrated immediately a readiness to burn the whole region and never mind those Gulf emirs who had been trying to negotiate a peaceful outcome or stopped America using their bases to carry out attacks.

All of this happened before Trump or Netanyahu had hit Iranian infrastructure. It was only the Gulf states’ big investment in air defences that stopped it from being far more destructive at the get go.

Are there limits to Iran’s ruthlessness? Perhaps even the Islamic Republic recognises that wholesale strikes on desalination plants (there have been some, but to limited effect) in its Gulf neighbours would cross a line, potentially damaging them in the eyes of the Muslim world.

Engaged in an existential fight of its own, the Israelis have also been prepared to escalate beyond limits acceptable to most western countries. It was confidently asserted by many experts that Hamas would never handover the last Israeli hostages until their military had withdrawn from Gaza but that happened. Similarly, many Lebanese told me in September 2024 that Hezbollah would not stop firing rockets at Israel unless there was also peace in Gaza but it did after the battering it received.

If all of this caused widespread revulsion in democratic societies and a war crimes indictment from the International Criminal Court, that didn’t matter to Netanyahu as long as it worked, and Israelis could believe in a narrative of victory. But now in starting this battle with Iran, he may, as I wrote last week, have turned a war of choice into an existential one.

Whether or not you blame the Israeli PM for talking him into it (I prefer to think of POTUS as someone who makes his own mind up), Trump will certainly decide how the US is going to get out of this. If there is any positive, I hope it educates him and his successors in the dangers of picking such a fight unless vital national interests are really at stake. But I fear the negatives – that roiling instability will continue in the Middle East, and America’s enemies more broadly will have drawn conclusions, rightly or wrongly, about the USA’s political and military limitations.

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Marco Rubio kicked off. It wasn’t the first time that senior administration figures, and most obviously Donald Trump himself, have suggested that the job was nearly done. He listed the aims of Operation Fury as being the destruction of the Iranian air force and navy, severe diminution of their missile production capability and destruction of factories, “so they can’t make more missiles and drones to threaten us in the future”.

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Many observers point out that he hadn’t mentioned regime change or the nuclear programme, though Rubio did suggest that action against Iranian missile launchers and industrial capability would limit the danger of a hidden atomic weapons programme.

To me the more interesting point about Rubio’s relatively modest list of aims was how even this was a downgrade on the military aims set by General Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff at the outset. He spoke about protecting the US and together with regional partners, “prevent Iran from projecting power outside of its borders”. Evidently the Islamic Republic is still able to project power – hitting industrial areas in Israel, a desalination plant in Kuwait, and an aluminium smelter in the UAE in recent days to name but a few. They are still able to menace the region and close the Strait of Hormuz.

Estimates suggest 100+ ballistic missile launchers remain in action. And as for stocks of drones and naval mines they likely remain in the thousands.

Rubio conceded that the job had not been done yet, saying “we are going to achieve those things in a number of weeks”.

Pete Hegseth on Tuesday morning, possibly mindful that Rubio’s statement had left many questions, tried out the Administration’s new line on regime change. Saying that the Iranian leadership would ‘cut a deal’ he referred to, “this new regime, because regime change has occurred”. Trump has been toying with this formulation, but there it was. To anyone suggesting Rubio had forgotten the toppling of Iran’s governing system as a war aim, Hegseth said the job’s already been done.

Even leaving aside the analysis from many experts who suggest the position of Khamenei son is harder line than his father the late ayatollah, that is sleight of hand that many will find unconvincing to say the least. Gulf leaders, as they are being bombarded by Iran’s remaining military capability, will not have noticed any meaningful change for the better.

Hegseth said that operations would continue for as long as necessary and wouldn’t rule out, ‘boots on the ground’. But all of this seems like an attempt to buttress a negotiating position rather than change the military dynamics of the conflict. We know, after all, from the forces in place or on their way that an invasion of Iran as such is not possible, even if raids or boarding tankers could be.

As for the negotiations, he described them as “very real, active, and gaining strength” though of course Iran denies they’re happening. There’s no particular reason to believe the regime in this since, in the absence of face to face talks they may be working through intermediaries, hiding behind sophistry on what constitutes a negotiation.

Donald Trump himself also tried to echo the ‘we’re nearly through’ tone of his defence secretary this morning with a social media post that shrugged off responsibility for a looming shortage of jet fuel, telling allies to go get it for themselves. As for the business of waging war, he claimed, “Iran has been essentially decimated. The hard part is done”.

So the regime has been changed, opening the Strait is not an American war aim, and if bombing continues we may assume it’s because there has been no meaningful convergence with Iran yet on the terms for stopping it. But posts like this morning’s from the president leave many in the Gulf worrying that Trump could walk away once the really serious impacts of Gulf energy disruption start to be felt wordwide.

Benjamin Netanyahu meanwhile is a wily enough practitioner of Middle East politics not to look desperate for a deal. Perhaps mindful of the shifting language in Washington DC he told US news outlet Newsmax in an interview last night that the campaign was, “beyond the half way point in terms of mission success”. While it’s widely assumed that he would like to keep on hammering Iran for as long as Trump will let him, there are also limits to what Israel can do because its weapon stocks are not endless. Given that Israel’s intelligence analysts evidently don’t share the Hegseth line that regime change has ‘already taken place’, that means they will also be looking to the terms on which this ends.

Military correspondents were briefed on Tuesday, “the Israeli Air Force will complete targeting all of the ‘critical’ assets of Iran’s military production industries by tomorrow, according to the IDF”. So will they end their bombing on Wednesday? Not quite, the line was that they were now switching to “less critical” ones.

It’s easy to see that this briefing might be preparing the public for a sudden halt to hostilities, implying that come what may the Israeli military has done what it needs to. So while Netanyahu and the IDF might not exactly be longing for an exit ramp, they are anticipating that might be the direction of travel.

Of course none of these actors can mind read the Iranian leadership – in as much as there is a coherent body of opinion worthy of that name. Hegseth, when asked about various options said that was down to Trump and that only he will know, “when to cut that deal”. Well yes, on the US side, and if he doesn’t lose patience and walk away first.

Iran’s demands, such as they’ve been articulated are for: compensation for damage caused; some security guarantee to prevent them being bombed again in the future; and a continued civil nuclear programme. They have not engaged meaningfully with the demands that they limit their long range missile arsenal or cut off support to their regional ‘Axis of Resistance’ allies.

In as much as an easing of sanctions, or even an acceptance of the Strait of Hormuz toll system they wish to impose might deal with the financial side of it and a resumption of something resembling the old international inspection regime with the nuclear part, there might just possibly be a landing zone there. But the question is who in the Iranian system is still in a position to take the calculated risk inherent in any deal with Trump, given the outcome of previous negotiations? And won’t the apparent lessening of US war aims and signs of the administration seeking an off ramp just strengthen hardliners in the regime who want to hold out for maximal terms?

And who will make the final call in Tehran? Regime change, as Pete Hesgeth calls it, might make a ‘deal’ of any kind impossible in the near term.

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Having been outmanoeuvred by Iran by its attacks on Gulf Arab neighbours and weaponizing of the Strait of Hormuz, Donald Trump is in a dilemma. Some think he will seek an off ramp, and indeed may already be doing so, which will be seized upon gleefully by the Islamic Republic in order to proclaim victory while trying to create a new security order in the region, with dire consequences for his ally Benjamin Netanyahu.

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It’s possible Trump may go the other way, seeking to take Kharg Island or the Strait itself, and certainly military preparations are underway to give him some options of that kind. But if he’s also seeking to manage the oil price pressing ahead with such assaults could lead Iran to intensify the assault on its neighbours and close the Strait completely.

So Trump will have to consider whether, having launched this as a war of regime change, he really means it. I very much doubt he does, but that might be the only way to stop the regime from leveraging the advantage it has gained in recent weeks to set new rules for the region and conceivably press ahead with the development of nuclear weapons.

The way this is developing seems so dramatically different from the ’12 Day War’ of last June, or indeed Israel’s attack on Hezbollah during the late summer of 2024 that it is worth exploring the reasons how, having got those rounds of the conflict right in their terms, Israel and its US ally could have made such a mistake in launching a new war one month ago.

We remember the drama of the pager attacks on Hezbollah, the killing of its leader Sheikh Nasrallah, as well as the stripping away of Iran’s air defences, leading to the bombing of its nuclear plants nine months later. Both of these campaigns were initiated by Israel with well defined objectives: in the case of Lebanon it was to stop the Iranian-backed militia from firing into Northern Israel, and in Iran to set back their nuclear programme by a significant margin.

There was some hyperbole from Benjamin Netanyahu about destroying Hezbollah but these two campaigns did not develop into existential struggles.

In Sun Tzu’s much used formulation they were left a golden bridge across which to retreat. In Hezbollah’s case it was an internationally brokered agreement for the group’s removal from areas bordering Israel, and with Iran, despite the hitting of some symbolic targets, it was evident that the US would not only let the regime survive but return to negotiations with them, once Ayatollah Ali Khamenei judged the time was right.

Israeli securocrats doubtless calculated that this was a temporary fix in both cases, and that further military action might be needed, ‘mowing the grass’, as they sometimes term it. But with Hezbollah in particular there could have been a reasonable expectation, given the drubbing they’d had, that this wouldn’t be needed for years.

That all felt very different to Gaza - there the existential questions initially affected Israel. The 7^th October attack, with Hezbollah and others joining in did, did albeit temporarily excite fears that national survival could be in jeopardy. I heard them expressed at the time by senior figures, and though I didn’t find the idea credible, I don’t doubt that in the shock of that moment, many Israelis did.

Naturally, given the scale of intelligence and military failure that preceded Hamas’s attack, there was great public anger with Netanyahu. Certainly, then Hamas’s assault had created a political existential threat to him.

One of his responses was to promise the complete destruction of Hamas, and here once more we return to our theme of existential struggles and the abandoning of restraint that follows from them. Under Israel’s crushing bombardments the Palestinian group refused to countenance a surrender, and the people of Gaza were subjected to untold suffering.

And the utterances of Netanyahu’s extremist coalition partners, and many of his actions led much of the Palestinian people to support Hamas in its struggle, believing their national survival was at stake. And those who rejected the Hamas narrative and blamed them for that disaster, faced violent coercion.

For a time Israel’s campaigns against Hezbollah and Iran seemed contained and successful by comparison, but now of course we can see some elements of that were chimerical. The Lebanese group bided its time and was doubtless always intent on thwarting its national government and rebuilding its strength. Perhaps it would have waited many years before striking again, perhaps not, if activated by Iran.

After the ‘12 Day War’ Iran maintained its murderous hostility towards Israel, but then that has been a constant for decades. Whether it was back in the 1990s, happier times when there was a viable peace process or other moments of despair, the Iranian regime’s hatred towards the Jewish state remained undimmed. Even so they, like their proxies in Lebanon would have wanted a lengthy period of re-building before triggering another fight with Israel.

But in terms of bringing last June’s short war to an end on terms advantageous to Israel, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was risk averse and smart enough to take the golden bridge offered him. Removing him and threatening the whole system may therefore have proven a doubly disastrous step by Trump and Bibi.

Faced with an existential fight, the regime has reacted with great violence towards its Gulf neighbours and gripped the energy jugular of the Strait of Hormuz. It was reported that before the earlier rounds of conflict, Netanyahu had expressed apprehension at taking on Hezbollah and Iran, fearful of their capabilities, but following the operational successes of 2024 and 2025 he chose to exercise the military option one more time, this time in partnership with Trump and quite possibly to disastrous effect for Israel.

There are alternative futures now for Israel and the region. It is still possible that the war will tip the Islamic Republic into a period of internal power struggles or even civil war. There could also be an accelerated normalisation with Gulf states who, being left next door to an aggravated and newly empowered Persian enemy will deepen their strategic cooperation with Israel.

But at this point many other futures are possible too. It seems quite likely that Trump, anxious to end the war, might agree to something that not only entrenches the power of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps but has a radicalising effect on the region. After all, if Trump dips out like that, he will have proven the limits of American power.

After two years of humiliation at Israel’s hands, Iran could end up having demonstrated its resilience, humbled its Gulf neighbours, obtained sanctions relief from the US, retained its nuclear programme, and shown its power over the Strait of Hormuz. The war, as they say, may end up developing in ways that are not necessarily to Netanyahu and Israel’s advantage.

Indeed, having embarked at the end of February on a war of choice, albeit with the ambition of toppling the Iranian regime, he may end up with something that turns into an existential one for Israel.

Securocrats there insist that in the post-7^th October world they must adhere to a new security doctrine in which emerging threats are challenged by force. The Israeli public supports this, polls suggest.

But whatever claims Netanyahu may make when the current conflict ends, a situation short of regime change could make it feel like a setback. Trump will insist on their observing a ceasefire, as he did in Gaza, and with public support sliding in the US, Netanyahu and his successors will have to think very carefully about any more ‘mowing the grass’ campaigns.

Meanwhile their forces continue occupying half of Gaza, Hamas is busily restoring its power there, and doubtless will impose a cost in terms of Israeli casualties. And in southern Lebanon, it appears their military is preparing to occupy the south of the country – up to the Litani River in fact.

All of this gives me a strong sense of déjà vu – because from 1978 to 2000 they also garrisoned that part of Lebanon, back then initially with the aim of stopping Palestinian factions firing rockets into northern Israel. But latterly the Iranian backed Hezbollah movement emerged, fighting an effective guerrilla campaign against them.

As it happens I covered the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon twenty five years ago, and indeed reported their pull out from Gaza five years later in 2005. In both cases I can testify that the Israeli soldiers were thoroughly glad to be out of those places, and the Lebanese and Palestinians only too pleased to have them off their backs.

But here we are and Israel is again occupying parts of both places. How keen are their reservists to face the prospect of open-ended, dangerous tours in those occupied buffer zones? Tens of thousands of Israelis have left their country since 7^th October, and Netanyahu’s policies will likely compound the exodus. The head of Israel’s Defence Force has reportedly told Netanyahu that the army is exhausted and unable to sustain this level of operations, saying there are “ten red flags”

If we look at the other possible clouds on Israeli horizons we may have to add a resurgent Iran under a more extreme leadership and, post-Trump, an American ally ready to turn its back on more military adventures.

Much is at stake then in the Israeli elections that will come later this year. How can Netanyahu or another would-be leader offer something better than ongoing, and ultimately existential struggle?

Israelis might argue that they tried negotiated peace (the Oslo process with the Palestinians that began in 1993), they tried unilaterally giving up occupied territory (for example Lebanon in 2000 or Gaza in 2005) and they have tried coercion, but none of it has brought lasting peace.

Netanyahu may have bet the farm on the idea toppling the Iranian regime – and thereby cutting off its support to Hamas, Hezbollah and others – thinking this was a way to square that circle. But right now this gamble looks not to have succeeded.

Indeed there is now a risk that Iran may establish, through its leverage over the Strait of Hormuz and Gulf oil supply, new rules of the game and a new deterrence in the region. Far from toppling Khamenei’s successors, Netanyahu may have restored to them a regional role that they lost last June.

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If we didn’t understand it already the last 24 hours have made something painfully clear. Iran is now in the driving seat in this war.

A series of events starting with Israel’s strike on the Pars gas field yesterday afternoon, followed by retaliation strikes on Qatari and Saudi gas and oil installations and a late night social media post from Donald Trump have shown us this.

The president tried to deny he had authorised the strike on Iran’s gas field – something challenged by reliable reporters in the US and Israel – then said ‘no more attacks will be made’ on the Iranian gas field, unless the Islamic Republic continues to hit Qatar’s facilities.

He has therefore left the decision with them. And the signs are that Iran now has what the military call ‘escalation dominance’ because on Thursday morning it went ahead, flexed that muscle, and hit critical Saudi oil facilities on the Kingdom’s Red Sea coast. That was an escalatory move showing they were taking no notice of Trump’s overnight threat. Iran also struck two refineries in Kuwait.

So now, once again, the Islamic Republic’s greater ability to withstand pain leaves them with the choices about where this now goes. The US meanwhile has far fewer choices.

A few days after the war began I blogged about possible end games. I anticipated that Iran might want to continue for longer than the US - and will explore further down what their aims in that might be. But I underpriced the way that they would leverage the world’s need for Gulf energy and how that might stymie both the US and its Gulf allies’ ability to coerce the Islamic Republic.

Now you could argue that Iran’s leveraging of oil and gas in order to set the pace of this conflict was already quite evident. Early in the war, the Trump administration was critical of an Israeli strike on an Iranian oil facility revealing a difference in strategy. And of course Iran’s decision to block the Hormuz Strait to nations it considers hostile also showed their ability to escalate in ways to which the Americans had no answer to – not immediately in any case.

Could something restore that escalation dominance to the US? Many things might still go against Iran – from popular unrest to internal divisions over the management of the war or a decision by the Gulf states to join in the campaign against them. And efforts are underway to move US Marines to the region, possibly as part of a broader effort to reopen Hormuz.

But for the moment it is the Iranians shaping this. And consider the speed with which they reacted to the attack on their gas field yesterday, upping the ante – all of which suggests that not only did the US/Israeli decapitation strike at the start of the war fail to bring about their surrender, but in Tehran at any rate the war is being commanded in a swift and strategic way, with certain aims in mind.

There are some other indicators that should concern those who would wish to see the Islamic Republic humbled. Firstly, after the body blow of early US/Israeli strikes, the Iranians seem to have settled into a sustainable regime for firing their missiles and drones. Indeed the rate of drone firing (in blue below) as calculated by geopolitical analyst Dmitri Alperovitch is actually going up somewhat.

And there are signs too that the very high tempo of operations set by the US military during the first few weeks is slackening somewhat. The aircraft carrier Ford has had to stop operating after a fire, and the USAF’s big airborne tanker fleet has become more dispersed in response to Iranian strikes on its various bases. Inevitably also we should ask the question, how this many drones and missiles are getting through to key targets such as that gas plant in Qatar. After all, they’ve had some practice at intercepting them now, and the emirate’s allies (including the UK and France) have sent aircraft to boost the drone hunt.

Given this generally downbeat outlook, Iran is trying to exploit differences between the Gulf states and US, and to imply that Trump is desperate to end the conflict. On the other hand, many of the stresses within the Iranian regime, from commanders of shattered units to the machinations around the new supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei are opaque to us and may yet cause a collapse of the Islamic Republic’s position.

But the indicators as they stand, nearly three weeks into the war are troubling for the US. And what’s more we don’t see the military moves - for example sending another carrier, tactical aircraft squadrons, or more substantial ground forces - that would indicate that America is about to up the pain level for Iran. Indeed sustaining the effort of the first few weeks could become a strain for them.

*p.s.

I’m adding a couple of paragraphs because I realised that in my haste to post this, I had not added some thoughts promised higher up this blog about why Iran might want to continue this even after the US signals it wants to stop pounding them.

There’s no doubt that Iranian decision-makers will have noted the power of the energy weapon and now believe they can use it to reshape the Gulf security environment. Statements in the last couple of days would suggest: they want to draw Gulf states further away from America, getting them to shut down US bases; they could seek international guarantees to stop Israel ‘mowing the grass’ with further attacks whenever it feels Iranian capabilities have reached dangerous levels; as part of this they could seek a Chinese and Russian backed UN Security Council resolution on future Gulf stability. Lastly there could be an incentive to carry on lobbing missiles and drones at their neighbours for internal consumption, to show their regime supporters that their power is unbowed, and opponents that the Israeli/US design for regime change has been thwarted.

Of course there will be reasons too why the regime not so publicly want this destruction to stop but as a wise Iran watcher said earlier today, Iran has a tendency to overplay its hand diplomatically. All of this means that in the absence of a rapidly agreed armistice, a lower level war of attrition might carry on for some time.

Wrapped within the optimism bias, miscalculation, and all those dilemmas of matching means to ends that this war has thrown up are judgments made by professionals who really should have known better. Consider, for example, the failure to plan for Iranians mining the Strait of Hormuz.

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It was just last week in fact that HMS Middleton, the last of the Royal Navy’s Bahrain-based mine hunting squadron, returned to British waters. It marked the end of a presence that had lasted for decades, with four or five mine countermeasures vessels and a support ship based out in the emirate. What timing.

I have no doubt that there are Panglossian staff officers in the Ministry of Defence who even at this moment, with the trade through the Strait of Hormuz seized up, are arguing that it’s just as well Middleton is back home, because this way they can’t be targeted by the Iranians. But make no mistake the squadron’s withdrawal was a cost-cutting and personnel management measure, at a time when the promised replacement for the mine hunting force (making greater use of robotic craft to do this vital work) is not yet fully ready.

I have over the last few months of this blog charted both the vertiginous decline in Royal Navy ship numbers, and the fact that until our recent cutbacks that naval mine hunting was one of those things on the fairly short list of British capabilities that the American military still valued. The current situation is even more troubling because the US Navy has in recent decades neglected mine warfare and also withdrawn its own fleet of (four) small ships from the Gulf before the current hostilities.

Undoubtedly, the departure of Royal Navy at this point was viewed negatively by Gulf allies. There has been plenty of comment in the UAE in particular about discovering who your real friends are.

To make it all worse we’ve have plenty of recent lessons in the value of those capabilities. The 2003 Iraq invasion involved extensive mine sweeping operations, as did its aftermath, and during the tanker war of the 1980s Iran made much use of such weapons often dropped by small civilian craft or traders’ dhows.

At times in the past the Americans have used minesweeping helicopters dragging sledges across the water to deal with the threat. At others they based special forces with helicopters on floating bases in the Gulf, ready to intercept Revolutionary Guard speedboats and mine layers.

They’ve also announced that they’re striking many craft that could be used for such missions. But as the picture accompanying this blog shows, all manner of civilian boats can be used in such missions, and like the drones damaging hugely expensive oil terminals, it only takes a small number of exploded mines to have a dramatic effect.

In truth though there have been some cultural problems on show here for a long time. CNOs and 1SLs (that’s Chiefs of Naval Operations, ie the US Navy boss or First Sea Lords, the British counterpart in matelot-speak) have a long list of pricier, shiny, items on their priority list; from carrier aviation to hunter killer submarines or air defence destroyers.

When it comes to lobbying the politicians for money, deploying the arguments about jobs saved, or plotting their own career path to advancement, ambitious admirals have long known where this is where it’s at. Mine hunting was a Cinderella branch in the US Navy, which is one reason why they appreciated having British expertise and back up in this.

In recent years however, the Royal Navy has been run by people who have time and again allowed ‘capability gaps’ to emerge as a way of leveraging future funding. When Nimrod maritime patrol aircraft went out of service, there were howls of anguish from many sea power advocates – how could we, as a maritime nation, have allowed our ability to patrol our waters be reduced to a crew member with binoculars looking out of the windows of a Hercules?

The tactics worked, pressuring the MoD to find the money to buy a new fleet of P-8 patrol planes from the USA. Something similar has happened with mine hunting – there is a plan to make use of support ships operating uncrewed submersibles to do this, but so far there’s just one of them and it’s still working up. Capability gaps are all very well then, until someone actually calls upon you to do your duty.

There are those on social media and the airwaves seeking to justify past mistakes by arguing that small mine hunting vessels would be sitting ducks in the Gulf and would require a naval task group to protect them from Iranian attack. There’s something to this, but it speaks to a bigger failure to make effective plans to thwart a closure of the Strait of Hormuz as well as the absence of sufficient investment in some of the means needed to do it.

There is a bigger crisis here of sea power in the way Britain and the United States long defined it.

A major effort would be required, likely using dozens of ships and aircraft, to reopen that vital shipping lane. And even if this effort was made, there are those questions of insurance, whose flags the ships are under, and owners’ risk aversion.

Such an operation would require a readiness to suffer repeated attacks and, in extremis, the loss of warships. What we’ve seen off the shores of Yemen, after Houthi attacks on passing shipping, provides a foretaste: western warships could defend themselves but at high cost in scarce munitions and with merchant ship owners generally reluctant to follow.

The running down of mine hunting, an apparently niche capability, is part then of a much bigger and more momentous picture in the decline of western navies that were key to maintaining trade routes for so long. Off Yemen before, and in the Gulf now, many ships trying to evade attack are identifying themselves as Chinese.

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We are three days in to this now and the conflict has escalated dramatically. The US/Israeli bombing attacks have triggered a spasm of Iranian retaliation that has spread across the Middle East and as far as Cyprus.

As this happens, again people will ask, as they have since the outset, what are the war aims here? It may come as no surprise to students of the Donald Trump school of presidential communication that he has given inconsistent answers to this question.

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Announcing the bombardment in a televised message, he said action was underway, “to prevent this very wicked, radical dictatorship from threatening America and our core national security interests”. But he also appealed to Iranians to take control of their government once the bombs stopped falling, urging, “now is the time to seize control of your destiny”.

At the outset then, an odd conflation of war aims, involving thwarting Iranian nuclear ambitions as well as power in a more general sense, while urging a popular rising – but only once American action has halted. This mixed messaging has been followed in subsequent days by suggestions from Trump that he could, “end it in two or three days”, then on Sunday he talked about, “four weeks or less”.

As for the really key thing, the terms on which military action might end, there’s also been a host of different messages. At times there have been suggestions of regime change, at others suggestions of a ‘deal’ that carry an implicit assumption that this involves an agreement with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s successors.

On Monday, at a Pentagon briefing, General Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said the aim of his operations was, “to protect and defend ourselves and together with our regional partners prevent Iran from the ability to project power outside of its borders”. Former US Middle East envoy Brett McGurk commented, “that’s a more defined military aim than one promising political end states”.

So, let’s consider the following during the coming days:

By discarding talk of regime change, the Pentagon sets what is seemingly a more achievable objective. But the talk of overthrowing the government could easily return – either from Trump shooting from the hip or because Iran’s actions, in setting aflame the region’s oil industry and attacking all of America’s allies causes a fundamental mission creep back to one of overthrowing the system.

It is evident that America’s friends – from Israel to the UAE – may well argue that future peace is impossible if the new Iranian leaders are left in place, and an enormous bill for reconstruction and ecological harm needs to be paid by them. But Trump, as we well know may well ignore these friends if he thinks the war is getting too messy and wants a rapid resolution.

By adopting this approach the Pentagon hopes to leverage its strengths. In the attritional battle between Iranian ballistic or cruise missile as well as drone launchers, the US and Israel will be assuming that they can eliminate this weaponry fast enough to limit damage in the region and blunt Iran’s military options.

No doubt, there is a very impressive intelligence and air force system now at play. They can and will do enormous damage to Iran’s military forces and arms industries. It may even be that this causes the regime to fall. But so far, the signs are that Iran’s leadership will be ready to suffer a heavy price.

Iran will play for time, husbanding its missile launchers, trying to boost drone production, all in the hope of exhausting the Americans through a combination of allied pressure prompted by the horrible economic consequences of this, Trump’s impatience, and ebbing stocks of defensive as well as offensive weapons. The approach adopted by the Pentagon allows them in theory to stop when they want to, saying they have achieved their aim of blunting Iran’s ability to ‘project power outside its borders’. But it is one of the oldest clichés of the American military estimate that ‘the enemy has a vote’.

Iran may simply refuse to stop fighting. It’s quite possible after weeks of bombing that, under pressure from Trump, the Pentagon will announce its aims have been met but Iran may – initially at least - decline to enter a negotiated ceasefire. After all their revered leader has been assassinated along with much of the Revolutionary Guard’s top brass, emotions are high and the desire for revenge strong.

So long as their repressive apparatus remains effective against regime opponents, the Iranians may feel an occasional rocket or drone attack or release of mines into the Gulf is enough to sell the message internally that they are undefeated. This is very much what happened last June, when the leadership used the fact that they could get the occasional missile through to Tel Aviv and fact that Israel agreed to a ceasefire to claim victory.

A deal with Ayatollah Khamenei’s successors may then be the only way to restore regional calm. If such an agreement involved them ‘drinking the poisoned chalice’ of significant limitations on their nuclear and missile programmes that might allow both sides to claim a win. Trump would say job done, and the Iranian leadership would argue it had seen off the most powerful military in the world and could expect relief from economic sanctions as part of the bargain. In that scenario, just don’t mention freedom for the people of Iran.

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The war against Iran is barely two days old and is already delivering big lessons in terms of the conduct military operations, Middle East politics, and our concept of what is a just war. Let’s start with that last one first.

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For the record, I think the US and Israeli attack has only the slenderest basis in international law. The idea that they were trying to stop the Islamic Republic re-starting its nuclear programme or that it would imminently have launched attacks across the region if left alone, seem strained to say the least.

But the problem for those standing on the legal principle is twofold. Firstly, as liberal media, politicians and lawyer need constantly to be reminded, only three wars in history have met the international legal gold standard of being endorsed by a Chapter VII ‘all necessary means’ UN Security Council resolution (Korea in 1950, the 1991 liberation of Kuwait, and Nato’s 2011 Libyan campaign).

So saying you’re against what’s going on in Iran because it involved killing a head of state, or could set off untold regional consequences has a lot more basis in my view than simply declaring it ‘illegal’. The Iran war, in its absence of an enabling UN resolution is just as ‘illegal’ as Nato’s 1999 campaign against the Serb military in Kosovo, but that was a campaign that progressives heartily endorsed.

Indeed, let’s remind ourselves that in that moment, back in 1999, Tony Blair, argued that stopping the Serbs killing what the frontiers of the time defined as their own people was such an important objective that it justified a whole new idea of ‘humanitarian intervention’ and with it the ‘responsibility to protect’. Apparently though Blair’s legal-minded Labour successors Keir Starmer and Richard Hermer, think there is no similar duty to protect Iranians from being gunned down in their tens of thousands by their own government.

Casting the role of the Iranian government in recent years more widely, has it not represented exactly the ‘threat to international peace and security’ so central to the UN Charter’s definition of circumstances when the use of force might be justified? Look at the social media of Lebanese Christians, Syrian Sunnis, or indeed Shia Iranians celebrating Khamenei’s demise.

From its use of proxies to destroy opposition to Bashar al-Assad in Syria (a struggle in which 600,000 died and 15m lost their homes), to its sponsorship of the Houthi movement in Yemen’s long civil war or of militias in Iraq, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have sowed suffering and death throughout the region. Let’s not forget also their role in killing US and British troops from the 241 US Marines slain in the 1983 Beirut bombing to the ones blown up by Iranian-supplied roadside bombs in Iraq.

Several European leaders have cleaved to the argument that Trump’s war is ‘illegal’. In Starmer’s case this initially meant no use of British bases to strike Iran. Late on Sunday evening government policy changed - due in large part to Iran’s attacks on Gulf states, which created in the view of UK government lawyers a suitable justification for defensive operations.

Shadow Attorney General Lord Wolfson argues, “if the doctrines of international law prove unable to restrain Iranian terrorism and mass murder, and tie the hands of democracies while forcing them to stand and watch Iranian atrocities, international law will have failed”.

I’m worried by the possible consequences of what Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have unleashed. But I also think Wolfson has a point. We need to consider historic concepts of just war in this context rather than believing in the near impossibility of gaining an enabling UN resolution.

I imagine Starmer has been in this bind because the politics of aligning with Trump and Netanyahu are toxic for him. Hermer, a complete sceptic when it comes to the just use of force by his own country, had given him a useful pretext. However events quickly, and policy may shift again as the week progresses.

The UK, France, and Germany, all countries very involved with diplomatic attempts to contain Iran’s nuclear programme as well as victims of its proxy forces or terror cells initially made themselves irrelevant to the unfolding regional war. But on Sunday evening they agreed to join in “necessary and proportionate action” to thwart Iranian missile attacks. Whether this means active military operations, we shall see.

Meanwhile countries like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and Bahrain have become very much involved because Iran fired hundreds of missiles at them as the war began.

Some of the Gulf states wanted to remain neutral in this, previously denying the US the use of their bases for an attack, but Iran, whose leaders have contempt for the ‘soft’ Arab sheikdoms of the region thought that doing this would alarm those emirs into putting pressure on the White House to stop the war. This, along with holding meetings of their entire political and military leadership after what happened last June and refusing to engage seriously with diplomatic efforts of the past few months, has proven to be another mighty miscalculation by the Islamic Republic’s bosses.

Not only are the Gulf leaders now committed to defend themselves, but they are far more useful to the US as allies in this. Their bases offer proximity, and a couple (notably Saudi and the UAE) have very capable air forces with deep stocks of precision weapons as well as air defence systems.

In short, if they become fully involved they bring more to the Coalition than Britain or France, and none of the moral of legal qualms. And even if they don’t join in defensive action, some like the UAE, have made an investment in defensive systems that dwarfs anything the UK or France could deploy there.

As for the business of raining destruction down on Iran’s military and security establishment, it gathered pace on the second full day of the war, a consequence of the US and Israel achieving ‘air supremacy over much of the country. Despite fielding an air component a fraction the size of that used against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (400 US and Israeli strike aircraft now versus four times that number back in 1991) the number of sorties flown during the first twelve hours of this current operation was 1,500.

There could be some definitional questions there – of counting all planes flying versus just fast jets in the conflict 35 years ago – but it appears that the large fleet of tankers and clever basing have allowed the US and Israel to fly very high rates of sorties

.Orbiting over Iran, taking on additional fuel when needed, these two advanced air powers have now established ‘stacks’ of combat aircraft ready to be cued in by air controllers using drones or electronic intercepts. Open source analysts are now posting the results of satellite passes showing the results, from crippled Iranian warships to collapsed underground missile facilities. And they’re just getting started.

President Trump appears to think this can give him a rapid victory, a campaign of just a few days, even if that involves doing a deal with the surviving regime clerics and generals. But one of the big questions now is whether those Iranian decision makers will opt to fight on, accepting further drubbing from the air over the coming weeks.

They may well argue that America’s use of force while further talks were planned makes a negotiation pointless and that Khamenei’s death must be avenged. So this may well prove harder to end than the White House anticipates.

No doubt, using their ballistic missile launchers or minelaying vessels in the Strait of Hormuz will expose Iranian forces to destruction. But if the people have been too traumatised by the recent suppression of their protests, Iran’s leaders may be able to hunker down and continue.

By decapitating the clerical and military leadership the US and Israel may have made it harder for any Iranian leader to marshal consensus within the regime for ending this. So the big questions about the ‘end state’, what constitutes victory for the US remain. And in talking up the possibility of the rapid deal, Trump apparently sees no contradiction in making that agreement with the regime, and once again leaving to its meagre mercies the Iranian opposition.

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The reporting that comes from our adversaries’ capitals or indeed their military camps is for me often the most compelling kind. So it was with a weary resignation that I saw Lyse Doucet coming under fire, including from some people I respect, for her recent reporting from Iran.

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There’s a long history of armchair condemnation of going to ‘the other side’. I can recall those who denounced John Simpson for staying Baghdad in 1991, when Coalition forces were about the begin the liberation of Kuwait, to the Balkan wars or indeed the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

As it happens, I first met Lyse Doucet in 1988 when we were covering the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. Following years of uncritical reporting from the mujahedeen side, the Kremlin and its Afghan allies allowed a small number of foreign reporters in during the last couple of years of the Soviet occupation.

Inevitably some of our colleagues thought we were stupid to go, overestimating the mujahedeen’s competence, while others were ideologically opposed. I was denounced at a public event by Sandy Gall, whose reporting for ITN idolised the Afghan resistance, as a Russian lackey.

Those early visits were a vital formative experience for me – and I hope illuminated under-reported aspects of a conflict for the readers of The Independent newspaper, which I worked for at the time. Surprise surprise, narratives in times of conflict often de-humanise the ‘baddies’ and over-simplify their motives.

Make no mistake, I was not reporting Afghanistan from a hard left position of sympathy; to me the Soviet occupation was evidently wrong, but I believed my work there should be more about the reality of what was going than an opportunity for moral posturing. I also had some reservations about the CIA or MI6 using hardline Islamist factions in an attempt to humiliate the Soviet Army.

Others reached different conclusions – journalism is a broad church after all. It is also one that attracts flak from all manner of spectators who think they would be doing a better or more moral job if they were there.

The parameters have changed somewhat since I went to Afghanistan decades ago. War and political strife are naturally enough the crucible of murderous actions and similar feelings that now people can vent on social media – pouring hate on those who challenge their views or simply fail to echo them. It is the old game of ‘shoot the messenger’ amplified by bot networks and big budget information warfare.

Old notions of allowing access have been eroded, being replaced with an attitude of ‘are you for us or against us’ and a tendency by belligerents to rely on their own media. So whereas in the 1990s I filmed with Hezbollah and Hamas, gaining pretty good access, that would be far less likely now.

They prefer these days to deal with allied foreign media, for example al Jazeera in the case of Hamas or simply use their own channels. It also became far less easy to engage with hardcore jihadist movements after 9/11, there being too high a risk of being kidnapped and murdered.

Israel of course has also stepped back from more open attitudes of earlier years, blocking independent journalistic access to Gaza since October 2023. They have also increasingly targeted Palestinian journalists, characterising them as belligerents.

Another aspect of this changing attitude is reflected among journalists themselves. The international press exhibits considerable groupthink about who the goodies and baddies are in current conflict. That can lead to excoriation of colleagues who take the less trodden path, seeking stories from the point of view of those the hack pack view as culpable.

The dynamics of this are not always predictable. The BBC’s Steve Rosenberg is very widely esteemed for his reporting from Russia. He’s got the guts to ask difficult questions of Putin or Lukashenko and I’m a big fan.

But make no mistake, along with his factual recounting of the costs of Russia’s war in Ukraine, he will often repeat the Kremlin’s justification for it or the views of ordinary citizens in support of their military. That’s reporting.

It is evident to me, but maybe not to some, that there is a mutual interest in Steve continuing his work. We benefit from it greatly, and we must accept, implicitly since he hasn’t been thrown out, that the Kremlin sees value in it too.

Although there is a pretty wide acceptance of the quality of his work, I think things are different when it comes to frontline reporting. The type of thing I did in Afghanistan, going on operations with Soviet Army troops, would probably today produce much criticism in the Ukrainian context.

Film maker Sean Langan filmed with Russian troops for his 2024 documentary ‘The Other Side’ shown on ITV. Inevitably he was attacked for it by Ukrainians, more disappointingly from many fellow journalists.

I certainly wouldn’t have done what he did, I’ve taken a lot of risks over the years but this would have been too much, a spin too many of the wheel of fortune. However, when I did make a piece for Newsnight about the Russian 331^st Paratrooper Regiment in Ukraine, basing it on open source Russian official and social media reporting, a Ukrainian producer at the BBC filed a complaint with my editor that I was ‘humanising the Russians’. Well yes, but that hardly means you support their invasion.

More practically she also suggested I make a film – not from the comfort of London, but on the frontline with a Ukrainian unit. I did this with the 24^thMechanised Brigade in 2024 and that producer and I reconciled our differences.

The point for me, and it’s a fairly obvious one, is that in times of conflict, with bitterly contested narratives, it’s worth reporting on both sides. But I think that doing the kind of pieces the late David Sells made for Newsnight in the mid-1990s, from the Serb side of the war in Bosnia-Hercegovina would bring opprobrium on the heads of the BBC.

Sometimes critics use the challenge ‘would you have covered DDay from the Nazi side?’ which is a nonsense in my view. Evidently in a total war of that kind that was impossible but it’s worth remembering how much British or American reporting came out of Nazi Germany while it was still doable.

William Shirer filed reports for CBS radio from Berlin until 1940, more than two years after the outbreak of the Second World War, leaving when attempts to censor his reporting became too heavy. The USA had not joined the war by this date of course, but its position, in theory neutral but actually arming Britain, was not that different to ours today in relation to Ukraine.

Sefton Delmer, reported the rise of Hitler for the Daily Express, gaining such good access to the Nazi inner circle that journalistic rivals accused him of being a sympathiser. Once war broke out he became a purveyor of black propaganda against the Germans, a story told in an excellent book by Peter Pomerantsev.

So we come back to reporting from Tehran by Lyse Doucet earlier this month, with a visa to cover the 47^th anniversary of the Islamic revolution there. Some were angry that she talked about the festive nature of pro-government rallies, or that the BBC had gone at all after January’s mass killings of anti-government protestors.

But naturally, she did not ignore the suffering of families who had lost loved ones in that crackdown, going graveside with grieving relatives. She also reminded us that the Islamic regime has a great deal of support still – some estimates based on recent elections put its power base as high as 10m people.

If reporting from Tehran reminds us that a significant part of the Iranian public still backs its government including its repression of dissent, then to my mind we need to hear it. In fact, at a time when serious consideration is being given in the White House to toppling Iran’s leadership by military force it couldn’t have been more timely.

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