Scottish Defence Policy III: Scotland's Army

independent Scotland could easily have a bigger army than the UK

This is part 3 of a series on the defence policy of a future independent Scotland (iScotland from now on). In part 1, I asked what are the uses of military force, and in part 2 I compared the British army with those of 3 other nations, and concluded it would be both larger and more capable if it was geared towards homeland defence rather than expeditionary warfare.

Summary of Part 2

You should read part 2 first, because this article builds on it, but in case you don't I'll briefly summarise parts of it here: I compared the British army with those of Finland, Greece and Singapore and noted that those countries had armies about the same size as Britain despite being much smaller and spending a lot less on their armed forces. I gave 4 reasons for this:

1. Britain spends a lower proportion of its military budget on the army than the other countries

2. Britain is the only one of these countries not to have conscription, and also has a low ratio of reserves to peacetime soldiers

3. Britain generally has more modern (and thus more expensive) military equipment

4. There is a lot of waste in UK defence spending

I further pointed out that Britain has an army set up for expeditionary warfare, and that if it instead had an army suited for homeland defence, its army would be more capable and thus better able to allow the UK to achieve its foreign policy goals. And also that expeditionary warfare (which I derisively described as "poodling for the Americans") hasn't actually achieved anything for the UK. Consequently, the UK would be better off with a homeland defence army than an expeditionary army.

Scotland's army should be geared towards homeland defence

Exactly the same arguments apply to Scotland. The army of an independent Scotland should be geared towards homeland defence and not expeditionary warfare. Some reasons for this are:

(1) For any given level of defence spending, a homeland defence army will be bigger and better able to defend ourselves from an invasion than an expeditionary army would be.

(2) The Scottish people don't want to invade other people's countries; many people in 2021 still dislike Blair for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. (According to a YouGov poll in 2015, only 26% of Brits thought it was right to invade Iraq, and the part of the UK with the lowest approval rating was Scotland, where 20% approved of the invasion. So UK-wide most people disapproved, and in Scotland this was even more the case). Since Scots don't generally want to fight expeditionary wars, it's pointless to be geared up to fight them.

(3) iScotland only has a land border with one other country. While it would've been inconceivable that a UK run by May, Cameron, Brown or Blair would attempt to militarily threaten independent Scotland, I don't think the same is true of Boris Johnson: it's exactly the sort of hare-brained scheme he is likely to come up with.

Is the UK a possible military threat to Scotland?

On the subject of whether Scotland faces a possible military threat from the UK, one needs to bear in mind both the overall world geopolitical situation, and the specifics of the UK. I'll look at the world situation first, then turn to the UK.

The world has become a more dangerous place over the past 3 decades. For example, in 1992 Francis Fukuyama said it was the End of History in the sense of ideological struggle and that Western liberal democracy was the final form of all human societies, which all states would gravitate to. Suffice it to say that Fukuyama's book has not withstood the test of time: we've seen the rise of Islamist ideology and states such as Russia and China, all of which are ideologically and violently opposed to the West and liberal democracy. And we've also seen democratic backsliding, where states have become less democratic over time.

Over the period 2010-2020, the red states on the map have become less democratic, while the blue states have become more democratic:

Turning to the UK, consider that during the Brexit negotiations British cabinet minister Priti Patel suggested that the UK put pressure on Ireland by threatening their food supplies.

Patel is currently the UK's Home Secretary. It's likely the Johnson government would try strongarm tactics against Scotland, particularly during independence negotiations, if they thought they could get good results from doing so.

In that instance it would be very prudent of Scotland to build up its armed forces as fast as it can, to deter the possibility of aggression from the UK.

If the UK is a threat to iScotland, when might it be a threat? I've detailed how I think independence negotiations might go:

1. an independence referendum, which the independence side wins

2. Scotland becoming an independent country maybe 2 years later

3. various transitional arrangements, carrying on for some years, until all the lose ends are tied up

Scotland will only be able to set up an army once it becomes formally independent at the beginning of phase 2, so the danger period would be between 1 and 2. Having said that, it would make a lot of sense for the Scottish government to have various informal links with the British army to assure them that soldiers moving over to the new Scottish army upon independence will do so on good terms.

After formal independence takes place, how quickly Scotland sets up its army (and armed forces generally) would depend on an assessment of the threat: the greater the threat the more quickly Scotland has to set up its armed forces.

As with all the institutions of an independent Scotland, I imagine the armed forces would be set up in two stages: firstly creating something quickly that does the job adequately, then secondly at a less hurried pace, setting up something more permanent that does the job well.

Should independent Scotland have conscription?

Finland, Greece and Singapore all have conscription. Doing so helps them to have a large army (after mobilisation) at relatively little cost. Should Scotland have conscription?

Arguments for: Conscription allows the armed forces to be more effective at a cheaper cost. If the people aren't paying for this effectiveness via conscription, and they wanted the same level of military capability, they would instead have to pay for it by significantly higher taxes. Conscription would also form a shared experience for a large number of Scots, which would build social cohesion.

Arguments against: Conscription represents a loss of personal liberty. Also there is the opportunity cost of whatever else people would be doing with that time.

Personally I'm in favour. There's a patriotic Romanian song, Trăiască România which contains the line "we are a country of soldiers if need be", and that's the spirit I'd like to see for Scotland's armed forces. It's not that we want to fight anyone, but if we do have to, we are determined to fight and win.

Scotland should precommit to NATO

Before independence the Scottish government should precommit to joining NATO (this is already SNP policy) and to spending 2% of GDP on defence (which is a NATO recommendation). Why? Because it may well be that the UK tries to prevent Scotland from leaving, or makes it difficult for us to leave. In that event it will be really useful if Scotland has friends that will help us in the process of extricating ourselves from the UK. The countries that we most want to help us are European countries (most of which are in the EU and NATO) and the USA (which is in NATO).

These countries are more likely to see it in their interest to help us leave the UK if independent Scotland is going to be in NATO and pull its weight within that organisation. Thus, if they think we will join NATO, spend 2% of GDP on defence and have effective armed forces, they are more likely to support us than if they don't think we will do these things. This goes especially for the USA.

If NATO countries thought that Scotland wasn't going to join NATO, or not pull its weight, they might think "UK is currently part of NATO, and therefore contributes to NATO's defences, which helps us. If Scotland leaves the UK, that makes UK weaker, so if Scotland isn't going to be contributing to NATO's defence, then NATO is weaker, which is against our interests. Therefore Scottish independence is against our interests too, so we won't lift a finger to support it."

Conversely, if these countries think iScotland would be a strong member of NATO, they might instead think "Scotland will strengthen NATO, which helps us, so we will support Scottish independence."

For these reasons, precommiting to NATO makes independence more likely.

Nation comparisons

In part 2, I posted data on nation and army comparisons:

I chose Greece, Finland and Singapore for the comparisons because Finland and Singapore have similar populations to Scotland and Greece has a similar GDP, so all three are roughly similar to Scotland.

From this data we can estimate what size the army of iScotland might be. For example, Finland spends $5.96bn on its armed forces and has 239 tanks. Pro rata, if Scotland spends $5.02bn, it would have 239*5.02/5.92 = 203 tanks.

(Of course, you can't just order 200 Leopard 2 tanks on Amazon for delivery next Monday: it would take Scotland some time both to get the tanks built and to get the money to pay for them. Doing a back of the envelope calculation: an MBT costs around $10 million so 200 of them would be about $2bn. If Scottish defence spending was $5bn with 60% going to the army, that would be an army budget of $3bn/year, of which maybe 1/3rd might be spend on procurement so $1bn/year, meaning that 200 tanks would be the procurement budget for a year.).

We can perform the same calculations for all types of personnel and equipment, for each of our three comparison countries. We can then take averages, and the chart below shows what we get. (I have added figures for the current size of the UK army in, for comparison purposes, labelled "UK COMP").

(As with the comparison of the British army in part 2, I have taken the number of Greek MBTs to be 353 and not 1243, as that is the number of modern tanks they have.)

Note that I am NOT saying that these averages calculated for Scotland are the exact sizes the Scottish army would have in personnel or equipment; they are merely very rough ballbark figures, of the sort of size one might expect.

These figures suggest that Scotland's army would be a good bit bigger, on mobilisation that the British army is. In fact, these figures underestimate now much bigger, because they don't take into account:

(1) Recently-announced reductions in the size of the British Army

(2) Since Scotland is about 8% of the UK's population, it's likely that after we leave the UK, they will reduce the size of their army because of their smaller resource base; the alternative would be to fund their military at a higher proportion of GDP.

Conclusion

These figures indicate that a Scottish army based on homeland defence and funded at 2% of GDP (which is less than the level of funding for the UK armed forces) could fairly easily be larger than the British Army, in terms of mobilised strength: it would have more soldiers, and roughly similar numbers of tanks and other AFVs.

In future episodes of this series I will discuss the navy and air force of an independent Scotland, and procurement and defence research and development.