In the Land of Net Zero, The Man in the Diesel Tank is King

Gwythian Prins is quite right to express his concerns about the impact of Net Zero on the U.K.’s national security in a piece published the other day on this site, ‘Net Zero Threatens National Security‘.

I’ve been racking my brains to think of a time in human history when a kingdom or state consciously chose to retro-equip its army with inferior technology or compromise its capability by seeking to introduce unreliable equipment. And I can’t think of one – what can I think of is all those who lost because they didn’t keep up.

Back in the middle of the 16th century BC, northern ancient Egypt was controlled by a group called the ‘shepherd kings’ or Hyksos. They’d invaded from what is now Syria and pushed back native rulers, establishing their own regime. They’d achieved this with one very simple tactic: they had chariots.

Now, the Hyksos chariots were a bit cumbersome and seem to have had four warriors in them. But when the Egyptians didn’t have chariots, the Hyksos behemoths were cutting edge.

When an Egyptian leader called Ahmose materialised on a cometh-the-moment, cometh-the-man basis, he didn’t try to push the Hyksos out with slower and more cumbersome chariots. Indeed, the Egyptians didn’t have any chariots.

So they started making chariots. And what’s more, they made their chariots smaller, lighter and faster so that they could fight a Bronze Age Blitzkrieg war. Ahmose led these vehicles into battle and, just like Heinz Guderian’s Blitzkrieg war of 1940, he pulverised the Hyksos whose chariots had become obsolete in an instant.

The blistering Ahmose established the 18th Dynasty, reunified Egypt and ushered in its greatest line of kings who presided over an unprecedented era of wealth, power, and – most important of all – national security.

One of the last of the kings of that dynasty was Tutankhamun in the late 14th century BC, whose tomb was famously found almost intact in 1922. On his body was an iron dagger, made of iron from a meteorite. At this time this spectacularly hard metal, which cut through bronze like a wire through cheese, was beyond the wit of man to smelt. Only a king could own one.

Within a few centuries the secret of the high temperatures needed had been discovered and humanity, for good or ill, entered the Iron Age. No-one went to war with a Bronze Age sword after that unless he wanted to lose or be conquered. The Roman Empire was an Iron Age state.

When the Romans went to war against the Carthaginians in the First Punic War (264-241 BC) they were not a naval power, even though the Carthaginians were. The Romans used a wrecked Carthaginian ship as a template and built their own, adding improvements in the form of the corvus boarding ramp. Yes, it was trial and error, but they won their first engagement with the Carthaginians in the Battle of Mylae in 260 BC because their ships were better.

It was a long and hard struggle with catastrophes along the way, but Rome won that war, and the next two wars against Carthage and ended up as the most powerful naval force in the Mediterranean.

There are so many other stories like this that I could go on for hours. The principle is always the same and the dynamic is the process of technological development, which at its fastest is and always has been driven by warfare. The unavoidable fact that it is impossible to stand still or diminish the effectiveness of a nation’s armed forces without making that nation a sitting duck for a more ambitious nation’s greed.

Yes, of course arms reduction treaties can and do exist, and they’ve been a mechanism for trying to inhibit the recklessness of unrestrained militarisation by encouraging mutual compliance in stepping back. They can and do work – up to a point. But there has never been a situation where everyone is prepared to play ball at the same time.

In the world of realpolitik there is simply no conceivable possibility of any serious nation unilaterally trying to cripple its capacity either to manufacture the raw materials or the hardware with which to defend itself, and expecting to survive. Extraordinarily though, that is quite literally what seems to be happening in Britain today.

There is no future for Net Zero in warfare, the armed forces or manufacturing. We cannot defend ourselves with electric tanks made of papier-maché steel, to use them as a metaphor for any other aspect of military technology.

We can’t have a situation in which during a war our factories are at the mercy of windpower generated by turbines in the middle of a sea beyond us to defend in a meaningful way or can’t function at full bore simply because it’s a cloudy day. Nor can we depend on an energy source that isn’t up to the job, however much of it we have, just as in the same way the Bronze Age fizzled out in the face of iron.

It might be better for all of us if we were all susceptible to such limiting factors, but the world doesn’t work like that. The ‘enemy’, whomever that turns out to be and whenever that is, will kit itself out with whatever will make it most likely that it wins and seizes what it wants, whether that is territory or resources or just power. And if that means the enemy goes to war with faster, more reliable and more powerful equipment then that’s exactly what its troops will have to hand.

Look at how the Germans spent years preparing themselves for 1939. That they ended up losing isn’t the point. In 1939-40 they were streets ahead of other European countries, which is why their advance was terrifyingly fast. They lost in 1945 because by then the Allies (which means the U.S.) had poured unlimited resources into record-breaking technological development and manufacturing capability on an unprecedented scale. The Germans probably had some of the best equipment, but they couldn’t produce it in sufficient quantities, despite resorting to synthetic oil. And that’s just as important as the equipment itself. The Tiger tank might have been as good as ten Shermans, but the Allies had eleven Shermans.

It may be an unpalatable aspect of human society, but if there’s anything that history tells you, it is what people are like. And in a world of nation states, you must be in a position to defend yourself. I hope beyond anything else there isn’t going to be a war, but one of the best ways of making sure there is one is to make yourself look like a pushover.

Cyber assaults are all too likely in the future. That’s a whole other story too, but it won’t change the fact that if we ever need to pull ourselves together and fight back then we’ll have to kiss Net Zero goodbye on the spot. The only question now is whether it’s already too late.

Here’s hoping we don’t have to find out the hard way.