Britain is spending £40bn a year on wars of aggression it keeps losing

 The British military will withdraw completely from Afghanistan

by the end of 2014 after 12 years of war that has achieved nothing and killed

close to 450 UK troops and countless tens of thousands of Afghans.

Stop the War Coalition

Surprise, surprise. A defence secretary thinks Britain should spend more on defence. The former Pentagon boss Robert Gates is in Britain promoting his old lobby and his new book. He is concerned that Britain's current defence cuts may deprive the Atlantic alliance of "full-spectrum capabilities". They will weaken the world's fourth largest armed force (Britain's, believe it or not) in deterring dreaded foes. George Osborne is supposed to shake in his shoes.

Gates is a careful man. He bears the same Washington scars as his predecessors, Robert McNamara and Donald Rumsfeld, in trying to reform a potent and reactionary defence establishment. The US fields the most awesome military force in history, yet it keeps losing wars and its global paranoia knows no bounds.

In his memoir, Gates is horrified by Barack Obama's micromanagement of America's wars.

The advent of modern surveillance and drone technology means that, "for too many people … war has become a kind of video game", he says, professing himself "even more sceptical of systems analysis, computer models, game theories and doctrines that suggest that war is anything other than tragic, inefficient and uncertain."

Yet Gates retains a conservative belief in extravagant weapons systems as relevant to today's international confrontations. He approves of nuclear missiles and thinks Britain should have more. He criticises it for not having an aircraft carrier in operation, despite the two costly and purposeless ones on order. They are as much use as war horses and Welsh archers.

I occasionally attend defence seminars to immerse myself in exotic surrealism. A recent one comprised soldiers, thinktankers and arms suppliers, all living off the public purse. They were like Macbeth's witches, incanting: "By the pricking of my thumbs / Something wicked this way comes," before stirring quantities of money into their budgetary brew. "Thrice to thine and thrice to mine / And thrice again, to make up nine," they chant, the nine being billions, not millions.

No one at these events ever talks about who is being defended against whom. We are just warned that if the defence lobby does not get its money, "capabilities will degenerate" and allies desert. Assorted "wars", on terror, drugs, human traffickers or whatever will be lost and unmentionable horrors result. The Ministry of Defence is like Benefits Street for slow learners.

Without some idea of an enemy, we cannot judge how much defence is needed where. Not since the end of the cold war has there been a sensible threat to Britain. The defence lobby has cleverly converted criminal deeds by terrorists into threats to "national security". This is lobbying talk, not reality. The truth is that, other than the eccentric Falklands engagement and the domestic policing of Northern Ireland, every war to which British troops have been committed has been an aggression against a foreign state, aggression to which we currently devote some £40bn a year.

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