New security environment is a boost for independence, not a threat

The rapidly collapsing global order is now regularly cited as an argument against Scottish independence. Given that what is collapsing is a gross error by the British establishment, the truth is the other way round.

The idea that the breakdown in the world order (so far as there ever was one) counts against Scottish independence is becoming a consistent theme. It is argued that we can't defend ourselves in an unstable world.

This is to see the whole issue back-to-front; what is happening just now is a great argument in favour of Scottish independence if we could only see it, understand it and respond appropriately. The barrier to doing that is SNP policy.

In 2012 a group of people on the right of the SNP set out the current defence strategy; make yourself as small a target as possible, politically-speaking. The idea, espoused explicitly by Angus Robertson, was that if we tried not to talk about defence and security and in as far as we did we only said the same thing as everyone else, then they wouldn't be able to attack us. It would go away.

It didn't, it hasn't and now it is an albatross around our necks. Because the SNP's current defence plan really is vulnerable in the current world. Relying on Nato while slowly building up a Nato-compliant force highly integrated into the Nato structures, was always a sop rather than a policy, and it has fallen apart.

The alternative is much stronger. That is to go on the attack and to say very explicitly that it is the British defence establishment which has left us undefended, equipped with ego-boosting toys like Trident and aircraft carriers that do nothing whatsoever to defend us and are all-but unusable for anything but following the US around in its adventures.

We should have prioritised defence spending that secured our territory, but instead we spent it on vanity to please the Americans. That is a weak point for the union, not for us. But to exploit it we need credible, coherent and very different approach.

That is and always was to focus first on territorial defence. The ludicrous sums we spent on Trident could have equipped Scotland with a coastal defence system. That should be our focus. Scotland is hard to invade (as our history of not being invaded shows) and we can make it very hard indeed.

I don't want to offer a blueprint for this because things are changing rapidly and there is an enormous amount of innovation taking place. But I can pretty well guarantee you that our focus should be first on detection, then on disabling, then on interception.

The former would be comfortably the big ticket item. I wouldn't have contemplated this ten years ago but I think an independent Scotland should look seriously at putting up a satellite monitoring system so we can track exactly what is happening in Scotland's land, seas and airspace.

The cost of this would vary depending on approach, but could be anything from half a billion pounds to £2 billion. Remember, 'we' are currently spending well over £5 billion on the UK's 'defence' every year.

“Britain’s defensive capabilities being exposed as the Emperor’s New Clothes is not a weakness for us but a strength”

Once you know you have ships or aircraft in your territory and if you have confirmed hostile intent, the next step should be to be able to disable them. This almost certainly means fleets of drones (both arial and aquatic) ready to launch from a variety of coastal sites. We probably want some anti-aircraft missiles as well.

There are many options for disabling ships (Scotland couldn't be successfully invaded by air alone). Once that is done we need a basic coastal naval defence – cutters (intercept ships) would predominate.

After that the 'must have' is a proper home guard, a military equipped to either overpower or to make life hell for anyone who actually set foot on our soil. We should be training in guerilla war not because anyone is actually going to invade us but because we want to deter anyone thinking about it.

From there we can discuss priorities. Should we be aiming to protect ourselves from missile attack? Do we want to create a system of intercept missiles, or could a defensive 'curtains of cheap drones' be viable? To what extent to we really want an expeditionary army at all?

Otherwise it's helicopters and troop transport – we have very little need for fast jets. The rest is about the real areas for security – proper intelligence services, proper awareness of the threat to infrastructure (data cables, telecommunications, energy systems). It is time we were sinking more of this vulnerable infrastructure underground.

And we need a much better plan to deal with outages – as much for civilian purposes as anything. How do we communicate internally if a hostile power was able to cut the internet?

Ideally we would have taken this seriously years ago when it first became clear that this was the real battleground of the future, not posturing along behind America and its Nato hangers-onners. That's not what happened and establishment-pleasing soundbites took the place of seriousness.

But nevertheless, Britain's defensive capabilities being exposed as the Emperor's New Clothes is not a weakness for us but a strength. It wasn't that hard to defend Britain and it isn't that hard to defend Scotland. Both were sacrificed for sycophancy to America and a desire to pretend we were a world power.

If the independence movement can't take that situation and turn it to our advantage, hell mend us.