Wildfires, floods, strikes: We can’t keep using the military as Britain’s emergency Swiss Army knife

Something terrible happens, the civilian system starts running out of capacity, somebody says “call the Army”, and a few hours later a collection of squaddies who thought they were going home for the weekend are standing in a field being asked to solve a problem they were never supposed to solve, sometimes with kit that looks like it has been found at the back of somebody’s garden shed.

This isn't a criticism of the soldiers. Quite the opposite. One of the great strengths of the British military is that if you give troops a ridiculous task, in awful conditions, with insufficient equipment and very little notice, they will generally find a way of getting it done.

That ability to improvise is precisely why politicians and civilian authorities keep reaching for them. Flooding? Call the Army. Strikes? Call the Army. Pandemic? Call the Army. Fire? Call the Army. Need drivers, planners, logistics, bodies, communications, engineers or just a large number of reasonably fit people who will turn up when ordered and do what they are told? The answer increasingly seems to be the same.

But being able to use the military as the nation's emergency Swiss Army knife does not mean we should.

Imagine being the squaddie involved. You have spent the week doing your actual job, perhaps training for the increasingly serious possibility that Britain might one day require its Armed Forces to fight a peer adversary.

You've got your weekend planned. Maybe you're going home to see your family, maybe you've booked something, maybe you're just looking forward to two days where nobody is shouting your surname across a vehicle park. Then the message comes down. Military Aid to the Civil Authorities. Weekend cancelled. Pack your kit. You're going to help tackle the fires.

Fair enough. That's part of service life and nobody joining the military expects a nine-to-five job. There will always be genuine national emergencies where the military has capabilities nobody else possesses and it would be absurd not to use them.

But if we are going to pull troops away from their training, their families and their actual military role, the absolute minimum we should be able to offer them is the equipment required to do the job properly. If soldiers are going to be deployed to fight wildfires and cut firebreaks, they should arrive with serious wildfire equipment, protective clothing, proper cutting tools, vehicles and specialist support. They shouldn't be left looking as though somebody has raided B&Q on the way to the incident.

There is also a bigger problem here. Britain badly needs a proper national civil resilience capability.

Not another headquarters full of people producing PowerPoints about resilience. Not another committee. Not a rebranding exercise and not a new acronym attached to an existing department. I mean an actual operational organisation, with people, vehicles, equipment, communications, logistics and regional bases, whose job is to respond when the country faces exactly this kind of emergency.

Call it a National Resilience Corps, Civil Protection Service, Emergency Response Force or whatever Whitehall eventually decides sounds least frightening on a focus group. The name doesn't matter. The capability does.

Staff it with professional full-time personnel supported by reservists and volunteers (and people will volunteer for this). Give it high-volume pumps, wildfire equipment, generators, drones, temporary communications systems, engineering kit, medical capability, transport and the ability to establish command posts and emergency accommodation at short notice.

Train people specifically for floods, fires, severe weather, infrastructure failures and the other entirely predictable disasters that periodically hit Britain.

Because they are predictable. We know there will be floods again. We know there will be major fires again. We know storms will knock out power and communications. We know there will be disease outbreaks, industrial accidents and infrastructure failures.

None of those things should come as a surprise, yet every time something large enough happens we seem amazed to discover that local resources have limits, before eventually turning towards the Ministry of Defence.

The military should remain available when an event genuinely exceeds civilian capability. Of course it should. If thousands of people need moving, if military helicopters are required, if engineers have specialist equipment nobody else possesses or if the scale of a catastrophe is such that every available national resource is needed, send them in. But that should be the reinforcement, not the plan.

There is another reason this matters. We keep being told, correctly, that Britain's Armed Forces need to concentrate on warfighting. Russia is not becoming less aggressive. The threat from hostile states is not disappearing. Ministers talk constantly about readiness, deterrence and preparing the country for a more dangerous world.

You cannot simultaneously tell the military that it needs to be more lethal, better trained and ready for war while treating it as the government's emergency labour agency whenever another part of the state discovers it hasn't got enough people.

Every day spent cutting vegetation, driving ambulances during industrial action or filling some other civilian capability gap is a day somebody isn't doing the thing we actually employ a professional military to do. Sometimes that trade-off will be justified. It should never become routine.

And if the situation really is serious enough that we need soldiers out there creating firebreaks, then for God's sake equip them properly. Britain asks a lot of its Armed Forces.

Asking them to give up their weekend and head towards a national emergency is reasonable when circumstances demand it. Sending them there with hand shears rather neatly illustrates why our approach to national resilience needs a rethink.

Personnel from 101 Operational Sustainment Brigade and the Queen’s Own Gurkha Logistic Regiment deserve huge credit for deploying at short notice to support South Wales Fire and Rescue Service, digging firebreaks, clearing combustible material and helping wherever needed. So well done to every soldier, firefighter and emergency worker involved.

My criticism isn't of them, it is of a system which too often relies on the military turning up, improvising and making do.

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