There's an old apocryphal saying, frequently but not accurately attributed to George Orwell, which is nonetheless true: People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf. Orwell or not, that's as accurate a statement as one is likely to find regarding the relationship of the regular citizens of a nation and the hard men, the men-at-arms, who guard them.
It's been this way for hundreds, thousands of years, and yet throughout history, various societies have forgotten that. These societies grow weak, fat, soft, and in time, helpless. Then they are overrun by societies that have not lost their cadres of hard men.
The United States was on the brink of that, with our military leadership having gone from General George Patton and "We will rip out their living guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks" to the United States armed forces submitting to politicians wanting to subject the profession of arms to "transgender" members. We're on the road back now, with the "Department of Defense" more appropriately re-named the "War Department," and a new focus, not on being a jobs program for the neurotic, but a force of warriors.
Our British cousins also used to have hard men that they could rely on. But Richard Williams, a former Special Air Service (SAS) commander, thinks that Britain may be losing those hard men. He may be right.
I’m not persuaded by the naïve optimism of those who say John Healey will be generous to the Ministry of Defence now that he’s been promoted to Chancellor.
And nor do I expect that there is real substance to the hint from Wes Streeting, the new Defence Secretary, that spending on Britain’s military will increase.
Instead, I believe that the identified investment gap will remain unfilled in real terms and that only the bare minimum will be spent to comply with Donald Trump’s revised Nato demands.
In this, the failure to support the hard men, to train and equip them, the United Kingdom may well be committing national suicide.
Very creative accounting and snappy power-point charts will be used to show the UK hitting a (bogus) 3 per cent of GDP defence spending target in the future.
Further, I am not confident that, even with Keir Starmer gone, our heroic veterans of close-quarter combat will be protected from endless lawfare and the retrospective, ideologically motivated misapplication of human rights legislation.
But there's more to it than that. Mr. Williams continues:
I was once one of those necessarily violent men, as commanding officer of 22 SAS – the British Army’s most elite Special Forces regiment.
But I fear that in the coming years the aggressive, war-fighting nature that the SAS embodies will disappear, its claws clipped, its teeth filed down.
Instead, we will get a socially-acceptable, relatively harmless, human rights-compliant and cheaper pocket gendarmerie that will never again be capable of fighting necessary overseas wars – expensive and unpopular as they can often be.
That's where we were headed. That's where Britain, the nation that was once America, Original Recipe, is still headed, and it's a road to disaster.
Read More: Sec. of War: Pentagon Now Led by Warriors, Not Washington Bureaucrats
The problem isn't just financial, with politicians willing to spend money on anything and everything except the armed forces. The problem is cultural.
Some years back, I was sitting with a cold beer in front of me, shooting the breeze with an old friend. My buddy is from Quaker stock, a self-proclaimed pacifist, and on this occasion, I grew mildly annoyed when he reminded me of that for about the fourth time. I told him, "You have the luxury of being a pacifist because men like me were willing to take up arms, to fight and kill and, if necessary, die, so that you would be able to sit on that barstool, in a nice, comfortably warm and clean place, and proclaim your pacifism." To his credit, he admitted I was right. But too many people don't understand that. They don't understand that line of hard men in green that stands between them and all the evil in the world. They enjoy, for now, the blessings of liberty, while too many of them don't understand that their liberty comes at a cost.
My father's generation, the World War II generation, understood this. The soldiers, airmen, Marines, and sailors who have served in places like Iraq and Afghanistan understand it, in no small part because they have seen what a society where there is no liberty is like. But too many Americans, today, don't understand that, and obviously, too many Britons, including much of their government, don't remember either.
Rudyard Kipling once wrote:
In times of war and not before,
God and the soldier we adore.
But in times of peace and all things righted,
God is forgotten, and the soldier slighted.
Britain seems now to be forgetting it's soldiers, and worst of all, they seem to be forgetting how badly needed they are. Perhaps today, more than at any time since 1945, that is Richard Williams' warning.
And, as always, remember: Watch Europe. Watch the UK. What the Left is doing there is the to-do list of the Left here. We forget that at our peril.
