WI: The effects of the UK's defense spending slashed down to 3% by 1950?
- Thread starter Fuzzy Dunlop
- Start date
That's a policy that's not going to fly. Britain is still a global power, even if being challenged in many areas, and needs to compete, and nuclear weapons and technology (inc. the civilian side) are how you remain relevant post war.
Not even worth it as a trip-wire force then.
Or efforts are doubled down to keep them longer, either through the military who essentially revert mainly to their interwar role of policing the colonial frontier, or there is more economic investment in the colonies/territories (and emigration encouragement) to make them more viable (bonus of improved economics and finances is the development of local civil society etc.) as this is viewed as the way to maintain prestige and a relevant power (without nukes).
If Britain is going to go nuclear, it doesn't have many options, The US has (or is just about to) sign off on the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 (McMahon Act), which, lets face it, screws Britain over. That leaves trying to get more resources from the Commonwealth (e.g. Australia, who already contributed OTL and are going to want a bigger slice of the end results) or cooperation with the French (who have their own issues to deal with).
With such big defence spending cuts, this surely causes big diplomatic reverberations to the US and European allies about how serious/willing the British are to remain committed to the defence against future Russian advances on the continent. This could signal that Britain is looking to return to its 'splendid isolation'...
National Service in its OTL form almost certainly never happens. Given the amount of state planning at the time, its likely there is still some sort of civilian conscription/nat. service into essential industries/services and the civil defence.
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True, and probably possible. But therein lies the reason defence spending was 10% of GDP in OTL. You can’t do it all with less than a third the money. Whatever you decide is most important, something is going to have to be cut.
There is a profound difference between "the British Empire was actually a good thing" and "immediately withdrawing from Malaya and letting it become a Communist dictatorship was a bad idea." Believing the latter does not require believing the former.
Fuzzy Dunlop
Banned
Question
If say the UK gov't knowing that the Empire was finished gave everyone (including India) free elections in 1946, then 1950, then 1954 then again in 1958 stating they would have full independence after those elections in 1958 were finished would that make those areas more stable allowing less military assets being assigned there thus less money spent?
Disagree. Even IOTL, the Falklands was a relatively close thing, and if the junta could have waited just a little longer until Britain was scrapping one carrier and had transferred the other to Australia, it would have been pretty much impossible to win without U.S. intervention. Trying to fight naval war against a country with an aircraft carrier, or just air cover in general when you have none...well, see the fate of the HMS Repulse and the HMS Prince of Wales. And that was IOTL when Britain was spending more than 5% of its GDP and had been since the end of WWII. Likewise, if Britain can do literally nothing to stop it (because again, no way does Britain have any carriers or presence east of Suez with 3% being spent on GDP), Sukarno is going to be really tempted to pull a India-Goa and take over Malaya, assuming the MCP doesn't take it over before he can. They were ready to fight the Dutch IOTL over West New Guinea, and the UK is at about that level of military power or less now. Likewise, the British deployment in 1961 to stop Iraq from taking over Kuwait isn't going to be possible. With Britain at this level of power, Guatemala invading Belize looks a lot more viable. Overall, it would be a bad thing.
And the big one...it seriously weakens the forces in Europe facing the Soviets. There are some big black very scary butterflies that could come out of that.
It realy depends on the details in terms of what was cut and what was spent and perhaps how historical capabilities / politically desired outcomes might have been obtained for significantly less "defence spending.."
For example:
At first glance Guatemala could likely have been deterred from invading Belize by the presence of a large force mostly made up of infantry made up mostly of conscripts equipped mostly with WW2 era equipment
That might not have cost the UK much if the UK adopted and retained universal conscription, paid the conscripts next to nothing and had been prepared to accept signficant casulaties if a shooting war had broken out.Maybe instead of dumping WW2 era munitions in the ocean post WW2 conscripts are paid next to nothing to guard them in storage depots until the munitions were deemed to be no longer useable.
I realize the UK in our time line probably had little interest in doing such things but in alternate time line perhaps the UK might have made different choices.
Deleted member 160141
If anything, the French qualify more for that title. Look up Francafrique.
Did he at any point suggest that others were not as bad or even worse? It would be perfectly logical to suggest that the GB empire was bad even if you think there are plenty of even worse things?
The issue is could they have got out even earlier and still stopped the communists/chaos taking over? Much of the empire was held until a long time after 45 when its should have been obvious that it was going to end, and it was simply a matter of what replaced it? Better planning and earlier work towards it could probably easily have led to better transitions for the locals and GBs interests?
I dont think nuclear is actually expensive when you compare it with realistic conventional forces of equivalent power, UK did eventually cut conscription and manpower to save money once she had nukes in OTL, as they were far cheaper for the same amount firepower.
But that's still a huge cost even if you hide it in a different part of the balance sheet, you may not have to pay upfront for conscripts much in the short term, but they don't pay much in taxes and don't start working to develop careers paying even more long term especially if they die or get injured.
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I don`t really disagree but I suspect such costs (with the likely exception of costs related to any service related death or injuries) might not have been considered to be defense costs in an alternative time line if such a scheme was pursued. Depending on the circumstances it might also be possible to view costs associated with more or less universal military service as a partial substitute for funding unemployment compensation or welfare schemes. Maybe some of the conscripts could also be used to carry out food production (ie farming) for the rest of the services. To recap I am not saying the UK should have done those types of things in our time line.
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Agreed but from the OPs,
I was assuming he wants better ideas than OTL so cutting cost and leading to worse outcomes would be less than ideal?
Deleted member 160141
No, it's the simple fact that before the Brits left, their lands were quiet, their people nice to each other (on account of Big Boy Brit hovering in the sky with a ruler held menacingly in his hand), and the colonies were ruled without corruption and were being developed at huge cost to the empire.
After the Brits left and they had no incentive to keep the locals quiet, and after leaving before they could even properly train up a native bureaucratic class, everything went to shit. Everything in the colonies was predicated on the fact that if Big Boy Brit got cross with you, you stopped doing whatever the fuck it was you were doing because he could come over and beat the shit out of you. This is why most of the post-colonial nations fell into civil war, because suddenly you could do to your hated neighbor what you'd always dreamed of doing to him.
Moreover, being apart from the whole thing didn't mean Big Boy Brit couldn't make some money off of this. In fact, this would be the first time in ages in which he could really start to make money, because now that these problems were somebody else's problems, he could always just step back in and give the locals a helping hand (not for free, obviously).
You need weapons to deal with the separatists? Done, for $$$. You need a blockade to deal with their economy? Done, for $$$.
Hey, you know that old mine? We'd like it to be run by our company; would you like some $$$, Mr. President?
In short, being free of the actual accountability of not having the place you rule to shit on your watch, you can actually make a lot of money off that place!
And oh yes, colonialism did have accountability; if it didn't, Leopold's Congo project wouldn't have blown up in his face when it came out.Scramble-for-Africa colonialism was always more about the prestige of showing up somewhere, sticking a flag in it, and telegraphing back "Hey, sucks to be you, Frenchie! Mine's bigger, you loser!" than it was about profit. Leopold tried extracting maximum profit(!!!) out of the Congo, and he had to turn it into a death camp to get profits cheaply, for which he got his colony taken away from him. Most people didn't even bother to rule the colonies with more than a small skeleton crew of white bureaucrats, preferring to let native rulers with whom they had an understanding rule unmolested in the exact same land, doing the exact same thing except they periodically go to Lagos or Abidjan and pay homage. Those who didn't go unmolested were generally leaders of big empires (Sokoto, Ashanti, etc) who didn't want to surrender their sovereignty or who represented a large bloc of power (Toucouleur, Aro) which they feared would be wielded against them. Everything was about keeping the majority of the colony quiet and placid, even as some hick tribe who refused to pay homage got bent over in the neighboring colony.
At the time, nobody cared that the official colony borders snaked through half a dozen different tribes' territories. The local rulers weren't concerned with national affairs because most of them hadn't come out of an ethnic empire like Sokoto which actually prioritized that. The white bureaucrats didn't care because it just conveniently divided up the borders (often enough between two different colonies owned by the same empire) and if anybody actually wanted to cross them, they'd just cross the border no problem. No white bureaucrats at the local level means nobody's there at every border stopping every illiterate peasant just doing her daily washing in that river across the border.
Put simply, the Europeans ran SfA-style African colonies because they never envisioned that things would ever be allowed to go as far up the shitter as what the results of independence turned out to be. However, once they saw how shit everything turned out after they left, $$$ appeared in their eyes.
Neocolonialism is way worse than actual Africa-style Colonialism because it's all about extracting the most amount of profit for the least amount of accountability / responsibility for the welfare of the people being sucked upon.
To a Frenchman of 1914, provoking a civil war in his own colony would be unconscionable, because it'd be a bitch to clean up and expensive since it'd be conducted on his own land. He has no way to profit off of it, and there's nobody in Africa who is rich enough that conducting multi-year long wars against them for their money would be profitable.
To a Frenchman of 2014, provoking a civil war in his former colony is not a bad idea. After all, the guy in charge might not be in the French pocket, or maybe he is but his subjects are not and he needs the French to suppress a rebellion for him (and arms trade = $$$ for French companies). Fundamentally, the Frenchman won't suffer a loss of
face because it's not his land rebelling, and he won't suffer a loss of tax revenue because it's not his tax anymore. He's still profiting off of the resources, though, and he can always sell shit to the "independent country" now because the leaders are in his pocket and sharing in the plunder.
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Well.. I am not 100 percent certain that spending money post WW2 on lots of fancy new conventional weapons that may have had a short service life was necessarily the best use of the available money and foreign exchange in the UK at the time.
Maybe if the post WW2 the UK had focused on building at least fission nuclear weapons and looked for different (ie. less expensive) ways to meet its conventional defense needs they might have been better off in the long run if the funds saved had been invested in other sectors of the economy. That being said I doubt raising large armies of more or less un paid conscripts arming them mostly with WW2 era weapons and sending them to places like Belize and perhaps expecting them to partially grow their own food would have been politically possible for the UK.
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Riain
Banned
You can't just drop democracy on people and expect it to work, an Ethiopian migrant told me that years ago and it stuck with me. He said democracy isn't having elections every few years but stopping at a red light or stop sign even if nobody is there to catch you if you don't.
Britain tried at least to ensure countries were stable and local institutions were in place to ensure decent government once the withdrew, it didn't always work but it's better that doing a klepto and runner.
Yep. Getting an established and developing civil society, with improving literacy and an emerging middle class that can support democratic institutions along with the foundations of uncorrupt local government and business/commerce is critical to bedding democracy down and it becoming engrained into the fabric of the nation, that doesn't get ripped up at the slightest sign of trouble.
My question thought would be when did they start really trying, especially for the later African colonies the time between 45 and 57-63 is a significantly long time?