I am hearing a lot of noise in the UK at the moment about peacekeeping. Most of it embarrassing rubbish, political sound bites by empty people allowing them to sound tough and virtuous. These are people who have never before shown any interest in defence and in some cases have been responsible for its egregious defenestration over many years.

All of a sudden people who want to grandstand have found that having a deployable army is a useful thing.

But the British Army is so weak it could probably sustain a battle group on operations for a year, no more. This would leave the remainder of the army crippled.

Meanwhile the country has little real sense of how rundown our army and armed forces have become.

People seem to have forgotten that before you peace keep, you have to peace make. In any case, let others peace keep (if we get to that; remember, there is still a war to be won).

Instead, the U.K. needs to rebuild its hollowed out military capability as a matter of existential urgency.

I don’t hear anyone talking about this. The first duty of our government is to protect its people. Repeated governments have failed in this task. A change of approach is required, now. The peace dividend has only brought war, because it’s meant that we haven’t been able to use the threat of a big stick to deter bad behaviour by our unruly neighbours.

We’ve been here before. All the characteristics of our current defenceless age were writ large in the 1920s and 1930s. Don’t believe me? Lord Dannatt and I wrote about it here