British military men do not generally talk politics in public.  If they do, it is only because it directly affects their ability to do their job.  Even then, they prefer to let their feelings be known through retirees.  Not-so-coded signals can then be conveyed in the House of Lords, in private but frank letters and, in extremis, in a Press interview in the house journals of British conservatism, the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail, where it will be read by their own kind.

You do not get much bigger than General Sir Mike Jackson and today has seen just such an interview .  His attack on the United States is coruscating, distilled from an autobiography that the Daily Telegraph will serialise. It sends us back to last October's even more remarkable interview by his successor Sir Richard Dannatt in the Daily Mail.

The advantage of blogging is that you can read this material for yourself through the links but this is no coup in the making.  Unlike the paranoid atmosphere of the 1970s that led to Chris Mullin's thriller, later adapted for TV, much of the British Left finds itself well in sympathy with the military.  Tom Quelch, a founding member of the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1920, was warning Lenin in the early 1920s that any action that was seen to be weakening the British Empire would be regarded as 'treachery' by English workers.  A post-war Labour-voting working class family was often as likely to have one son in the forces for two in the mines or factories.

We seem to be going through one of those periods when instinctive national pride and instinctive internationalism are in creative tension.  There is an odd revival of a Left nationalism, perfectly compatible with solidarity with Venezuela or an anti-war position.  Two major trades unions and a substantial number of Labour MPs are, for example, demanding a Referendum on the new European Treaty alongside the usual Tory suspects. 

The military is not questioning the authority of Government to make decisions of peace and war.  Nor is it questioning the legality of the Iraq War - it dare not or else it will be in the same boat as the defeated Nazi Government of 1945.  What it is questioning is the competence of decision-making (where its analysis of the US is precisely the same as the Left's) and the failure to will the means, in terms of resources, to effect the ends.

This is where the apparent similarity of the critique of Government from Left and military breaks down.  It is the old guns versus butter debate.  NATO’s top military commander (Gen. Sir John Craddock) has complained to the NATO Secretary-General in a letter warning him that NATO’s rapid response force is suffering from a serious lack of manpower and is overstretched.  On the other side, neo-con guru Robert Kagan is clearly expecting that Europe, not excluding the UK, should start spending more on guns to fight the global war that is central to American interests instead of (implicitly) on the housing and social infrastructures that arguably have been neglected over the last thirty years.  Nor, in the context of the Katrina case study in executive incompetence and the collapse in the sub-prime market, is the US immune from a guns versus butter debate in the coming election cycle. 

It is becoming clearer by the day that you cannot have both guns and butter any more than you could in the 1930s - but does an alleged Islamo-Fascist threat exist quite to the extent that it justifies diversion of tax revenues to the flurry of homeland security entrepreneurs emerging as the next iteration of the old military-industrial complex, let alone to the conventional military's reasonable demand for decent working conditions? 

So, you can now expect that the proponents of the global 'war on terror', after six years of relative non-achievement (the entire second world war was fought within the same time frame), will have to fight a desperate rear guard action against the very real budgetary frustration of domestic electorates.  All Dannatt and Jackson are really saying is that, whether it be Sierra Leone (success), Iraq (failure), Afghanistan (on the edge of failure) or Darfur (unknown territory), politicians should not enter into situations which they have not scenario-planned to the umpteenth degree and have not provided the resource base, including the consent and even enthusiasm of the people.  The guns and butter argument is for the democratic process but do not expect the British military to allow itself to be degraded by stealth just to help idealist politicians avoid facing their voters with unpalatable choices.  Disgust at neo-conservative incompetence and Mr. Blair is unsaid but you can almost taste it in the air.