3. Matters of State

Welcome to our failed attempt at a CURRENT AFFAIRS EPISODE. 

The aim was a discussion of unfolding events in the Middle East, now too long ago to be relevant (things move quickly). The actual result was twenty minutes of reminiscing about life among the Houthis in Yemen, and then a forty minute MANIFESTO about why the UK should not have an army or air force and instead focus all its excess resources on a reinvigorated navy that will rule the seas with GREAT SEVERITY. To the extent that one suspects that the entire concept of a topical episode was a trojan horse to introduce more Royal Navy propaganda into our lives.

“You can make the French ambassador feel really small, and nobody can put a price on that.”

Episode Transcript

Our first attempt at a topical episode — though, as rapidly becomes apparent, the specific news cycle is irrelevant. Starting from the Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping and Proxy's first-hand experience of Yemen, we end up arguing that Britain should abolish the army and the RAF and put everything into the Royal Navy. Cipher makes the case in detail and, credit where it's due, is quite convincing.

Proxy: Welcome underground, and to our inaugural attempt at recording a topical episode. It will be left to the listener as an exercise to guess when we recorded this, but as rapidly becomes apparent, it's irrelevant anyway. So — you read a lot more news than I do. Tell us what's happened.

Cipher: That's an immediately questionable claim. What are you trying to say?

Proxy: I'm just saying you know stuff. The daily headlines don't really tell you much about what's actually happening.

Cipher: Oh, you're above that. The mainstream media.

Proxy: I prefer reading about it ten years later to see what interpretation is put on the day-to-day noise.

Cipher: A true historian. The truth can only be discerned in the rear-view mirror. Well, alright. So what's been going on? As everyone will know, there were the terrorist attacks in Israel by Hamas, and the Israelis have responded. The strategic wisdom of that response is a whole podcast in itself. But there's basically a pretty nasty, quite intense, but very localised war going on in Gaza, with small flare-ups around the rest of the Israeli borders.

In the next layer out of the onion, there is the ongoing proxy war happening in the Middle East more generally, fought using small-scale operations, the occasional missile attack, the occasional drone attack — between two sets of alliances. There's the Israeli-US, broadly Western alliance, and then there's the Iran-Hamas-Hezbollah-Houthi, and perhaps China, alliance that we might call the Eastern.

Proxy: So the proxy war is the West versus the Shia — but I was expecting you to go in the direction of Sunni versus Shia, Saudi versus Iran.

Cipher: I think the Sunnis are aligned with the Western alliance, aren't they? But they're a third pole. We've spent a lot of time and moral capital keeping them aligned.

Proxy: So one side of the war is Israel and Saudi Arabia, and the other side is Iran.

Cipher: Well, that's why I'm not saying that. The fundamental conflict is between the two sets of alliances where you've got the US on one side and Iran on the other. In the background, of course, is China, and I think I can make that case as this discussion goes on.

So — at the centre is a very nasty, intense kinetic war in Gaza. The next layer out is this sporadic proxy war flaring up here and there across the region with drones, cyber attacks, and all kinds of grey-zone military actions. One of the most significant campaigns in this grey-zone layer is the Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea. The Red Sea is obviously a strategically very important bit of water.

Proxy: Lot of good pearl beds.

Cipher: That is the main thing. Where else would we get our pearls?

Proxy: But more recently, a good trade lane. If you're trying to move goods from China or India to Europe or America, you need to go all the way down below Africa, or you can come up through the Red Sea and into the Suez Canal. It saves, what, twenty days?

Cipher: Something like that. And if you add up the cost of fuel, time, everything involved — it's a significant cost saving, even with the fees Egypt charges. Egypt have lost forty per cent of that revenue as a result.

Proxy: A lot of their economy.

Cipher: Hello, Egyptian listeners. We love you. But about fifteen per cent of global trade goes through the Suez Canal — I actually thought it would be more than that, but there's a hell of a lot of global trade going in all sorts of directions these days. It's been a key trade route all the way back to the Romans — they got their pepper through the Red Sea — and even back to biblical times with King Solomon and his trips to the Queen of Sheba. I might be muddling up a few biblical incidents there.

The Houthis have been firing drones and missiles into that sea in order to attack all the shipping they can hit, with the excuse that they're targeting Israeli and Israeli-aligned vessels — by which they mean Western vessels. The point is to put pressure on that Western network of alliances. So you have the absurd situation where they're saying they're targeting Israeli-aligned vessels, but they're firing drones at a Greek ship sailing under a Barbados flag registered in Panama.

Proxy: Ships.

Cipher: But I think you can clearly see they're targeting the West. The reason they're doing it is to put pressure on America over its support for the Israelis. They're trying to cause a problem for the West in support of nominally Hamas and the Palestinian people — but really, one could argue this is a nice move for them in the global game. And it's very interesting that Chinese vessels are apparently still sailing through the Red Sea quite confidently, confident they're not going to be targeted. What do you think about that?

Proxy: Well, yes, but I think there are other and better motivations. The fact is that China hasn't been bombing them for the last however many years. The Houthis — or, as I think is a better frame, the government of Yemen — have been fending off a coalition of the Saudis, UAE, the USA, and Al-Qaeda, all working to destroy their country. And suddenly they've noticed and pulled together the means to strike back and actually say: you can't just keep bombing our hospitals. We can also hurt you. Quite badly.

Cipher: Brilliant. You spent time in Yemen, and you've seen the Houthis a lot closer than most of us have.

Proxy: They were valued colleagues.

Cipher: Perhaps you could explain a little bit about who they are and your perspective on these events.

Proxy: In line with my not-reading-newspapers policy, all my information is about ten years out of date.

Cipher: You've really reflected on it now.

Proxy: I've had time to bed in the knowledge and put it in context. So — the Houthis. They're a movement that arose in northern Yemen in the nineties. There's a tribe — if we're allowed to use that word — called the Houthis. Kinship group or clan. But the name came from their first leader, a religious leader called Hussein al-Houthi. They came to prominence around 2010 in rising up against the Yemeni government under President Ali Abdullah Saleh. They came to blows and eventually the Yemeni government killed Hussein al-Houthi, who became a martyr.

Cipher: They're Shia?

Proxy: They're a branch of Shiism that believes you need to focus on what the Quran says, not so much the tafsir and interpretation around it. So they're quite purist on the written word. They also believe in a Mahdi — that the leader of Islam should be a direct descendant, a direct follower of Muhammad, following the prophetic succession.

Cipher: Following Hussein and Ali — is that right?

Proxy: Sort of.

Cipher: We can tighten that up if it's wrong. They believe in the legitimacy of charismatic leadership that ultimately goes back in succession to the Prophet himself.

Proxy: Until the sixties, Yemen did come under such an imam, although no one remembers him fondly. I lived in his servants' quarters when I was there. He eventually — I think it was '68 — his palace got bombed, he escaped through the loos, and ended his days in the Home Counties.

Cipher: I wasn't expecting the Home Counties. I was thinking he ended his days in a cesspit or something. But no — the Home Counties.

Proxy: A lot of the world's dictators end up in the Home Counties after many adventures.

Cipher: So the Houthis — a group that follows a charismatic leader, falls out with the government, comes to blows. What has led to the current situation?

Proxy: Since I left, there was another kind of civil war. Two big factions wrestling for control of Yemen, the governing system falling apart. There was a two-year process to try and write a constitution, which obviously didn't go well. You had the southern separatists who wanted the country split along colonial lines, because South Yemen used to be a British colony and North Yemen was under the Ottoman Empire. There's a tension there, and the North and South are very different places even without that influence. The North is mountains and tribesmen. The South is a bit more domesticated, more agricultural.

Cipher: It's got a long history of urban settlement in Aden, as well. The climate and ecology are a bit different down there. So — what were the Houthis like? You worked with them, didn't you? What was it you were doing again?

Proxy: I was chief of staff at a college trying to teach Arabic and Middle Eastern studies to American and European students, but ended up mostly teaching English to the employees of Yemen Airways to make money. Except they never paid.

Cipher: So what were they like as people? Good, sound chaps?

Proxy: Extremely. I mean, to be a Houthi then meant that you'd fought in the uprising. One of them — around his house, everyone's got a kind of guest room, separate from the house, where you hang out and chat with the boys — about half of it was a shrine to his brother, who'd been killed in the Houthi wars. But basically they're just proud Yemenis, proud of a traditional, authentic lifestyle. If you're Yemeni, to live a good life is to be a qabili, a tribesman, out in your village serving your sheikh. Subsistence farming for the greater good. That's how you perform virtue.

And the Houthis always had that traditionalist streak, which is much more of a northern Yemeni thing. It appeals to the traditional social structures there.

Cipher: OK.

Proxy: But you'd be walking through a Houthi protest and they're chanting "Death to America" — because their logo literally says "God is great, death to America, death to Israel, a plague on the Jews."

Cipher: So — friendly sort of chaps. What's underlying that as their slogan?

Proxy: Pride and anti-Semitism, I mean. But what do you do if you're a small country in a world dominated by America that is not working in your interests?

Cipher: That's a question we're going to come back to for Britain later in this podcast.

Proxy: Of course, we don't align ourselves against America. We've taken the opposite choice.

Cipher: Those are the two choices, I suppose.

Proxy: And who's to say we've made the better one?

Cipher: I would respectfully disagree about that. But so — the Houthis have pride and honour, and want to be independent. Is the antipathy towards Israel purely anti-Semitic, or is there something particular that adds context?

Proxy: No, it's a very similar vibe to what you'll get throughout the region. In Syria more so, because they'd been direct victims of Israeli aggression. I remember walking through the market in Damascus — there was a big Israeli flag on the floor in metal that everyone had to tread on as they went around shopping. They had Israeli flags on the bins, which in the UK would be advertising. In Syria that's a grave insult.

All these countries had substantial Jewish minorities. If you look back at the history of Islam, Jews were an important part of administering the early Islamic empire. Judaism is the basis for the whole religion. And Yemen in particular had a lot of Yemeni Jews — a lot of people in Israel proudly trace their line back to people who left Yemen quite recently.

Cipher: So it's very much about twentieth-century political history.

Proxy: Obviously there were always pogroms, as there were in Europe. I don't think the attitude was particularly different in the Middle East from in Europe. Islam is quite a totalising force — if you're not Muslim, are you really one of us?

Cipher: Very much so.

Proxy: But you could say the same dynamic was live in Europe. I think Israel these days is a convenient other, but it's also something that's been forced on the region by the West.

Cipher: That is very much perceived, isn't it? As, to use provocative language, an American colony imposed on the region.

Proxy: Pretty much. It's hard to say that's wrong. The question is what you do about it.

Cipher: So that's where the Houthi alignment is coming from, and obviously the attacks in the Red Sea are in solidarity with the Palestinians. Presumably it also gives them political capital at home.

Proxy: But in my extremely disorganised history of the Houthi movement, what I neglected to say was that they basically became de facto rulers of Yemen and have been engaged in a war against the Saudis, UAE, Al-Qaeda, and the USA since then. There is a live war that's taken a massive toll on the Yemeni people. While they've thrown some missiles towards the UAE — much to Abu Dhabi's surprise — this is the first time they've actually managed to get a good hit on the West, on the people who have been destroying their country and forcing them into famine and poverty.

Cipher: So on that analysis, you're very much aligning the Saudis and the UAE as part of the West. Which is interesting.

Proxy: As far as this war goes, the Saudis and UAE were doing the bombing, but using intelligence and targeting from the US. As for Al-Qaeda — they just happened to be on the same side, as they often are in these regional conflicts, weirdly. My point is that rather than being some solidarity-with-Palestine thing, or some masterplan involving Iran, this is purely Yemeni self-defence. They've been the victim of Western aggression for close to a decade, and finally they've found a way to strike back. I have quite a lot of sympathy with that.

Cipher: That's a moral analysis, and I'll bow to your direct experience of the region. What I want to talk about now is the geostrategic analysis, particularly how Britain fits into it.

In response to these attacks on the Red Sea — which are causing huge economic problems because of just-in-time logistics; if you're a company in the UK selling stuff that's come through the Suez Canal and it doesn't arrive on time, you don't have stock, you can't generate cash, and you're very quickly going into the red — there's an economic problem about global trade, a diplomatic problem about maintaining what we might think of as the Pax Americana and freedom of navigation in the seas, and the element of our association with the Israelis through history and foreign policy. All of these are coming together to motivate the West to deploy various operations and flotillas under different operational banners. There's the US-led Operation Prosperity Guardian —

Proxy: Great name.

Cipher: Very American name. The UK has been a part of that. Then the EU are starting their own operation, because the EU is a big strategic player in the world —

Proxy: A priority independent military power.

Cipher: Operation Aspides — ancient Greek for "shields" — where they're deploying at least three ships into the Red Sea under Italian command. At least one German frigate did sail at some point. It's not clear where it is.

Proxy: The Houthis are cowering in fear.

Cipher: Meanwhile, the US and mostly the US have been getting stuck in, with the UK also trying — one of the Type 45s shooting down something like a dozen drones.

Proxy: With million-pound missiles.

Cipher: Well, guns as well, apparently — their close-in weapon systems. But I was reading an analysis that for cost reasons they decided not to fit the ship's main gun with the capability to fire anti-air burst shells. If they had, you could just take down a drone from a mile away with a radar-guided shell, and it costs whatever it is — ten grand.

Proxy: Still fifty grand. Well —

Cipher: A lot less than a Sea Ceptor or Sea Viper missile, which is like a million pounds a pop to take out a twenty-thousand-dollar drone.

Proxy: True.

Cipher: Anyway — the UK is getting stuck in, and then separately there have been air strikes by the US and UK on Houthi targets within Yemen.

Proxy: Which I found weird, in that we announced the planes were taking off, thereby giving the Houthis a good ten hours' lead time to get out of the way.

Cipher: Didn't they take off from Cyprus?

Proxy: Maybe. Still a long way away. I don't think they hit anything of value.

Cipher: No. So you've got the American-led operation, and it doesn't really seem to have solved the problem. Insurance costs are still massively high because it's still easy for the Houthis to launch drones, and very difficult to stamp out the threat. The objective — making sure trade flows freely through the sea — isn't really working, because you have to eliminate the threat completely before insurance costs go down. It's a real problem.

Proxy: It's counter-insurgency at sea.

Cipher: With ships. Very exciting. So there are a few questions Britain has to answer. Why is it that we're only able to send one ship — assuming there is a justified logic to us doing this, which I think from the British perspective there absolutely is? This is exactly the sort of thing Britain should be good at. We're an island. We're a sea power, or at least we historically have been. If Britain can do anything militarily, it should be defending trade routes. If we naturally fit anywhere into a Western alliance, it is surely as a sea power — something that can project power across blue water but also in littoral spaces. Discuss.

Proxy: So — we've just been in a whole run of land wars over the last couple of decades, which we suck at, and this is finally an opportunity to do a sea war, which we ought to be good at. Or is this just another counter-insurgency while we're still set up to fight Russia?

Cipher: It obviously is a counter-insurgency — it's asymmetric. But one could argue the only reason it's asymmetric is because the Houthis have got the right piece of kit for the local environment, whereas we're forced to use kit that can be used anywhere and so is much more expensive and unspecialised.

Proxy: Kit that's designed to take out peer navies.

Cipher: Which is not what's going on here.

Proxy: Have you ever watched The Princess Bride?

Cipher: No.

Proxy: It's an excellent film you should watch. In it you've got André the Giant playing a heavy, a fighter, and he's used to fighting several people at once. Then a guy fights him — just the hero, one on one — and wins easily. And André the Giant complains that he just hasn't fought one on one for such a long time, he's forgotten the moves. It's different when you're fighting five people at the same time, which he's very good at.

It's the same here. We've optimised for fighting big enemies, when actually the only people we've been fighting for the last twenty years are not that.

Cipher: But I think that as a nation or military, you can become really good — top tier — at one thing if you resource it properly, and then be quite good at an array of subsidiary things that come off that one thing.

The US and the UK are both sea powers. If you look at Russia, it's clearly a land power — lots of men, lots of tanks, lots of artillery, and just numbers of stuff that can be attrited in a land war. How much they can afford is being stress-tested at the moment, but they've lost the British Army's entire inventory several times over and they're still very much in the fight.

Proxy: But the British Army's entire inventory is what — fifty tanks?

Cipher: Exactly. And that's because Britain is trying to be a first-tier land power, have a first-tier navy, first-tier air force, and do cyber, and do all of these things. What that means is incredibly small numbers in each, which means we can't afford any attrition and don't have the logistical or material depth to launch sustained operations at short notice. The fact that we haven't been able to deploy a carrier to the Red Sea —

Proxy: They're a good statement of intent.

Cipher: From the optics to allies and the optics about "Global Britain" and all that — carriers are much more about that. The whole reason you have a carrier is to have a big stick to wave around. They look extremely intimidating off your coastline. And this is a perfect situation where Britain would theoretically have been able to deploy one of these expensive new carriers, and everyone would say, "Bloody hell, look at Britain, they are actually still a serious player." All of the Guardian and Telegraph editorial writers would have to suck their pens and concede the point —

Proxy: You and your newspapers.

Cipher: Politicians care what they think. They're the ones making the decisions. The fact that we haven't done it is clearly because we can't. We wanted to, we tried.

Proxy: We couldn't. Rather like that recent Trident test where we tried to launch a Trident missile and couldn't.

Cipher: I loved what the First Sea Lord said about that. He said, "Look, it's the most reliable weapon system ever made, and if it had been a live missile, it would have worked."

Proxy: A nuclear-warhead-armed ICBM has never been tested as a full system. We've tested the missiles and we've tested the warheads, but there's never been a test of an ICBM with a nuclear warhead in it. By anyone. So we don't know these things work. And they're old anyway. It might be that nuclear weapons don't actually exist in any functional manner any more.

Cipher: Only sort of. Extremely exciting. So I think I've articulated a problem Britain has: it wants to be able to do this stuff, but it can't. This raises the question of what we should be doing with our military spending. I think we should clearly be focusing on the navy, because that would allow us to slot usefully into a general Western military alliance. It's where we naturally fall. It's where we're located.

Proxy: So you're saying we abandon any pretence of being able to operate independently.

Cipher: No — I'm saying we abandon the pretence of being able to operate independently as a land power. We abandon the pretence that we're going to be deploying armies into Europe, and instead take those resources and put them into being able to operate independently as a sea power.

Proxy: Are you worried about Russia?

Cipher: Of course. But what does Britain have to fear from Russia? Everything that threatens us comes across the sea or under the sea.

Proxy: So we act realistically — we're not trying to defend Europe, we're trying to defend us.

Cipher: But by defending the seas around Europe, we are slotting into European defence usefully. If Germany, Poland, and the Baltics — the inland powers — can go to bed at night thinking, "At least we know our sea lanes are secure because the Royal Navy is there and the Royal Navy is powerful," they can focus on what they're going to do: keeping the Suwalki Gap open, having big mechanised divisions rolling across the North European Plain, all that.

Proxy: Dying heroically.

Cipher: While we're looking after the sea lanes, blocking Russian submarines from the Atlantic, keeping tabs on them, making sure we don't get nasty surprises coming out of Kaliningrad. Internet cables, gas pipelines — all that.

Proxy: But isn't the problem with naval stuff that it's all quite expensive kit with long lead times? You can't build it up quickly. If we decide to make the switch now, it's ten years before —

Cipher: It would be a ten-year lead time, but you can always make that argument. With defence procurement you're always thinking a decade ahead. And we'd be able to invest properly in an industrial shipbuilding base. If you're building three times as many hulls, it's actually worth having shipyards. You get economies of scale. Your ships get better because you're building more of them — those efficiency and qualitative gains — which means you can export a few more, and once you get up to that point of scale, everything becomes more effective.

Proxy: Did you ever read about that experiment in a pottery class? The class was split in two. One half was told: you've got three hours, whoever makes the best pot wins a prize. The other half: you've got three hours, whoever makes the most pots wins. It turned out the side aiming to make the most pots also made the best pots, because they were just cranking them out and getting really good at it. The people on the other side were just trying to make one artisan pot, and it sucked, because they didn't have the space to make all the mistakes and get better.

Cipher: Also the story of the people trying to design a nozzle for an industrial process. They got a group of mathematicians to mathematically design the perfect nozzle, and every single one was absolutely terrible. Then they got some evolutionary biologists to look at the problem, and they just started making nozzles — making them and making them — until it did what they wanted. They got a perfect nozzle that had been evolved through iteration, at a fraction of the price and in a fraction of the time.

I think in the UK we're very guilty of trying to buy one perfect thing that's been designed to death and doesn't really work properly. What we should be doing is building lots of things, learning the lessons, and making them quite good through an iterative, evolutionary, adaptive process.

Proxy: I think there's a fundamental problem here — well, not a problem per se, but a problem with regards to your plan. You can divide the world into countries that are militaristic and countries that are warlike, and these are very different things.

If you look at Germany, especially back in the day — extremely militaristic, but there wasn't much chaos. It wasn't like Vikings just going for it. Very methodical, very planned. The phrase "military-industrial complex" comes to mind. America too — extremely militaristic but not very warlike. They don't just go charging in.

The UK, on the other hand — I don't think we're a militaristic country. We don't have that kind of structure and hierarchy, that organisational capacity. We're all a bit too free-spirited. But we are extremely warlike. When our blood's up, we will go charging in.

Cipher: George Orwell always said we're like a nation of cows. Very placid, but occasionally we'll all turn in the same direction, and then you need to be worried.

Proxy: But not initially. If you look at all the wars we've fought, we go charging in, get our arses completely handed to us, fall back, regroup, think a bit, and then go in properly. And then, as often as not —

Cipher: Absolutely ruthlessly.

Proxy: But there's always that initial failure. The world wars are obvious examples — you've got things like Dunkirk. Going further back, Agincourt was a miraculous recovery from a disastrous situation. All the military victories we're allowed to celebrate — Rorke's Drift is another one, where first we got our arse handed to us by the Zulus, and then we managed to retain a shred of honour. The Peninsular War — we charged in, it didn't go well, we regrouped. I worry that it's impossible for us to prepare for a war in advance of the war actually happening.

Cipher: There are some very good counter-examples. When you look all the way back to the Napoleonic Wars, the navy in all the global wars we've fought has just done its job in the background very effectively.

Proxy: In the Peninsular campaign, the army was struggling, but the navy was there, doing its thing.

Cipher: Very effectively and professionally. Blockading France, keeping the sea lanes open, keeping the empire running. It did exactly the same thing in the First World War. It did exactly the same thing in the Second World War. And it did it so well that we almost forget it had to be there for the whole war effort to work. Keeping the Indian Ocean open — the difficulty of that as a military task in the Second World War, when the Navy had so many other things to be doing, yet it did it, and nobody thinks about it, because it did it so professionally there was just no fuss.

That, I think, is a perfect example of what Britain does do well. But it requires the investment. It requires the hulls.

Proxy: I like that, too, because you always need a navy — you always want to keep trade lanes open. It's not like you only need a navy in wartime. You only need an army when you're at war. A navy is always useful.

Cipher: They can be used for diplomacy as well. Humanitarian work — there's always humanitarian stuff going on. It's that soft power. It's our self-image, isn't it?

Proxy: It's also good training.

Cipher: Aircraft carriers are perfect in a secondary role as humanitarian relief platforms. There's a cyclone, there's a disaster — you park the carrier off the coast, fly helicopters in with aid. Very effective.

Proxy: And you can hold good cocktail parties on them.

Cipher: You can make the French ambassador feel really small, and no one can put a price on that. He'll be piped up onto the deck, and all that racial memory of Trafalgar will shiver through his bones.

Proxy: There is no higher purpose.

Cipher: So that's my case. We should abandon all this expense on things like Challenger 3 and Ajax and instead build about three times as many frigates, three times as many destroyers, three times as many nuclear attack submarines, and do navy properly. Then for a Marine Corps — fifty thousand or so. A big reserve. Stop making it impossible to join the army reserve.

Proxy: Speaking from the heart.

Cipher: And a quite small Marine Corps, totally specialised in really hard-hitting littoral operations. If we did that, a situation like the Red Sea — Britain would have loads of options to present to the cabinet. The Navy would be able to say, "We can deploy a carrier strike group, and if you really want, we can do a lightning hard-hitting raid onto the shore to show them who's boss." I think that would probably be unwise here, actually, but at least we'd have the option. Whereas currently we don't. Instead we're flying RAF jets from Cyprus with refuellers, which is fine, but it's a bit weak, isn't it?

Proxy: It's a bit weak.

Cipher: We're not really doing anything. The Americans hit thirty targets in one night. We hit three in total.

Proxy: Thanks for coming.

Cipher: So — goodbye the army, make it all navy. Goodbye the RAF, make it all navy. Planes should only exist if they can be launched off carriers or are necessary to support the navy.

Proxy: Coastal air force. Spotting submarines.

Cipher: A coastal air force based on naval bases around the coastline, carrier decks, helicopters on frigates, and a massive investment in naval-specialised drones. Then your cyber, nestled somewhere in the centre of England, that can strike out as well. Some space capability, but really that's something we just contribute to the American programmes in return for a bit of coverage.

Then we get the best of both worlds. We're able to do things on our own, because we have the scale and the mass. And we're more useful as an American auxiliary because we can actually perform a definite function, so the Americans can say, "At least we can leave the North Atlantic to the Brits for a few months while we deploy our carriers to Taiwan." And it's a way of avoiding being dragged into certain conflicts, because we can say, "You go fight the Chinese in the Straits of Taiwan. We're right behind you — every step of the way, old boy — we'll watch the back door." And they'll actually be quite grateful for that, without us having to get into the question of "Prime Minister, are we really going to sink this Chinese transport?"

Proxy: There'd be a fuss, though.

Cipher: It would cause the most almighty hoo-ha if you said we're going to shut down the British Army.

Proxy: Among quite a small section of the population. As I said, we're not militaristic — it's not built into our society.

Cipher: There's a lot of respect for the army, though. Britain is a sentimental nation. We're sentimental about our institutions. The headlines write themselves: "500-year-old regiment being closed down."

Proxy: But we've had those headlines for decades. We've been closing down 500-year-old regiments left, right, and centre.

Cipher: Very true. So — that is my thesis. I've made the case that we should get rid of the army and the air force.

Proxy: I think this was going to happen at some point, and I'm glad you got it off your chest.

Cipher: I'm going to come back to this every single episode.

Proxy: Any subject can be brought around to it.

Cipher: Let me put some numbers on it. I think we should have at least thirty-six frigates, at least eighteen air-defence destroyers, low twenties of SSNs — nuclear attack submarines. Two carriers is about right for Britain.

Proxy: But working ones.

Cipher: Working ones, with an actual decent number of naval air squadrons. The F-35 is very capable, but we need six to eight squadrons to always have one deployable. Loads of drones that can be launched off the carriers. Loads of fleet auxiliary ships — dry stores, logistics.

Proxy: I think that's something a lot of navies neglect. The US Navy doesn't have nearly enough logistics ships. You actually need the oil tankers, the stuff that carries ammunition and fuel.

Cipher: It's all about logistics with a global navy. And then you need the landing ships — assault ships.

Proxy: Cool name.

Cipher: I reckon Britain needs eight.

Proxy: Probably eight.

Cipher: Like those Russian ones the Ukrainians keep hilariously sinking in the Black Sea. So that's what we need: a real navy. Not a land army, but an expeditionary Marine Corps — Royal Marines. A coastal air force for air defence, submarine hunting, power projection off the carriers. All that good stuff.

Proxy: You can actually defend yourself. Be sovereign. Most countries can't.

Cipher: Nobody would be able to mess with the UK if we did it properly. What are you going to do?

Proxy: And it wouldn't even look aggressive. It's quite defensive. And it looks cool.

Cipher: It fits with our heritage, our deep cultural memory. Absolute no-brainer. But the key question is: what would it be called? Would it just be called the Royal Navy?

Proxy: You need the word "Royal" in it. What would you lose? You'd lose the RAF — no one cares, it hasn't existed a hundred years. The army is more difficult, because that's existed for a thousand years in its current form. The old regiments, the Engineers, the Artillery — they trace their heritage back to William the Conqueror's bishops. You don't toss that aside lightly. But it's not the Army that goes back that far. The idea of having a British Army is quite recent. It's the individual regiments that have the heritage. So I think you could preserve that.

Cipher: You keep the regiments.

Proxy: You still have the Royal Engineers, but they're now part of the Navy.

Cipher: You still have the Honourable Artillery Company.

Proxy: They just drink now. Much more honest.

Cipher: You still have the Special Air Service, but the "air" comes from the deck of a carrier.

Proxy: That's one option. The other is to go back to the idea of a militia. We call it a Houthi militia, not the Yemeni Army, and "militia" is a name with a lot of heritage behind it.

Cipher: The county militias. You can have the Wiltshire Yeomanry, or whatever it was.

Proxy: Still is. The reserve regiments are called the Yeomanry.

Cipher: So you can have your reserve based on land, but its ideological compass is pointing towards the sea. Because we're an island. OK — so is it just the Royal Navy? Let me throw out some ugly ideas. The Royal Military. The Royal Armed Forces.

Proxy: Royal Defence Force.

Cipher: The Royal Host in Arms. No — it's just the Royal Navy.

Proxy: Everything else does sound worse. You're right.

Cipher: You'd still have professional military people specialising in various areas. You'd still need people who specialise in fighting on land, from a ship.

Proxy: We're not talking about boarding other ships. We're talking about beach assault. And then there's a second phase where you do need the Engineers to build a bridge over that river or move that minefield, and you do need artillery, because you want to get off your beach at some point.

Cipher: The Falklands is the perfect war for explaining how this would work. You need artillery, engineers, all that — but it all comes off a ship.

Proxy: And that's where being warlike rather than militaristic came in. Our ships were good, but we were using civilian container vessels as aircraft carriers. There is a budget option if you're in a hurry.

Cipher: And that's where the industrial base comes in. If you're building more ships, you have more people who know how to build and run ships — a bigger pool on the civilian side of the military-industrial complex that you can call upon in emergencies.

Proxy: And then you'd have more British-flagged ships if there's actual Royal Navy protection. If there's a reason to be British-flagged — which there isn't at the moment, so you go for Panama because it's cheaper. But if there's a reason to flag as British, and part of that comes with a commitment to giving your ship to the Navy in times of war, but in exchange you get the protection of the Navy, and that means something, and that reduces your insurance — it becomes quite powerful. Then you have more British-owned ships, British-flagged ships, British-built ships.

Cipher: And the soft power. If you want to know how soft power comes from hard power — a great example: Guyana. Venezuela held a referendum asking whether they should own most of Guyana. Guyana was like, "What? Guys? No." And we were able to send something like an offshore patrol vessel from the Caribbean. Something really pathetic.

Proxy: "Don't you dare, Venezuela, otherwise this thirty-foot vessel with two machine guns and a 30-mil calibre is going to really tell you off."

Cipher: But being able to send a decent-sized flotilla with a couple of frigates —

Proxy: I saw a photo taken off a Lebanese beach with a US aircraft carrier just sitting in the sea a couple of miles offshore. It was like an Imperial Star Destroyer. Just there.

Cipher: And all of these countries with coastlines — which is a lot of countries — if we can actually say, "If things get really rough with your neighbour, we'll be there, we'll sit off the coast" — they're going to be like, "That's really cool. Thanks, Britain. And by the way, do you want that contract for that mine in the mountains? You can have it. Screw the French."

Proxy: There is no higher purpose.

Cipher: The fleeting arm. His Majesty's Marine in Arms. Well — there we go. Our first episode of Matters of State, and I think we got into quite weighty matters indeed.

Proxy: I think we did. We solved Israel-Palestine.

Cipher: Did we? Well — you would solve it, because you could sit off the coast and say to the Israelis, "You're about to make an incredibly bad strategic decision" —

Proxy: And the exact same thing to the Palestinians.

Cipher: Just everybody calm down. So we've solved that. We've solved how we fit into the American alliance: if you have a meaningful navy, you can do something useful and avoid being sucked into America's overseas adventures. How to spend a limited defence budget effectively.

Proxy: How to reinvigorate British industry.

Cipher: How to get the country out of its current rut of mediocrity.

Proxy: Just do one thing really well.

Cipher: Do it really well, so we can be proud of it.

Proxy: And we'll start doing other things really well.

Cipher: Exactly.