A request for help that looked designed to be refused

The framework known as Military Aid to the Civil Authorities has endured through floods, pandemics, fuel shortages and industrial disputes largely because everyone involved has treated it as a piece of machinery too valuable to be played with, a channel through which genuine requests meet honest answers without either side pausing to calculate the political dividend.

The events of the past fortnight in the Cairngorms, as reported by the BBC, suggest that this restraint can no longer be taken entirely for granted, and for those who care about the resilience arrangements of these islands that is a quietly dispiriting thing to have to write.

The facts, insofar as they can be established from the public record, run as follows: a wildfire broke out near Glenmore on 15 July and grew, according to the chairman of the local community council, from something the size of a small car into a burn area of roughly 30 square kilometres of heather, woodland and internationally significant conservation ground; a major incident was declared at the weekend; the UK government offered military helicopters for heavy lifting alongside support from stand-by battalions; and the Scottish government declined that offer, with the justice secretary, Neil Gray, explaining that the specific requirement on the ground was for waterbombing helicopters, that every commercial waterbombing aircraft in the country had already been committed to the fire, and that the military simply did not hold the capability being sought.

Up to this point the minister’s conduct is arguably a model of how such judgments ought to be made, since ministers are obliged to specify what responders actually need rather than gratefully accepting whatever happens to be on offer, and if fire commanders had concluded that personnel numbers were adequate and the shortfall lay in aerial suppression, then declining battalions of soldiers reflects discipline rather than any dereliction of duty.

What sits rather less comfortably is what Mr Gray conceded on BBC Radio Scotland, namely that he had heard informally, before any formal request was submitted, that the UK military possessed no waterbombing capability, and that he proceeded to submit the request regardless, received the answer he had every reason to expect, and then observed publicly that “people might be concerned to learn” of the gap. One need not be a cynic, merely a reasonably attentive reader of Scottish politics in a season of strained relations between Holyrood and Westminster, to notice how that sequence appears from the outside.

It is worth adding, before that framing hardens into received wisdom, that the minister’s flat assertion about UK military capability does not entirely survive contact with the order of battle, because the armed forces have in fact been dropping water on wildfires for decades, just not from British soil. No. 84 Squadron at RAF Akrotiri conducted aerial firefighting over Cyprus with underslung Bambi buckets throughout the Griffin era, Chinooks of 1310 Flight dropped some 450 tonnes of water on the largest Cypriot wildfire in generations in July 2025, and this very month three new H145 Jupiter HC2s arrived at Akrotiri under a £148 million programme whose principal summer tasking is precisely the waterbombing Mr Gray says the military cannot provide.

There are entirely respectable reasons why those aircraft could not have been surged to Speyside, since they exist to protect the Sovereign Base Areas at the height of the Mediterranean fire season, sit more than two thousand miles from the Cairngorms, and were in any case still working up on a new type, but a capability that is committed elsewhere and held at the wrong scale is a rather different thing from a capability that does not exist, and a justice secretary constructing a public grievance around the latter claim owed his listeners the distinction.

The Scottish Conservatives have denounced the episode as a cynical stunt, which is a partisan characterisation this column need not adopt wholesale, not least because there exists a perfectly legitimate case, familiar to anyone who has spent time in resilience planning, for converting informal soundings into formal requests: paper trails matter in the aftermath of any major incident, informal answers occasionally prove wrong, and a minister who failed to exhaust every conceivable avenue would rightly face criticism once the smoke had cleared.

The decision to formalise was not, in itself, the offence; the offence, if that is not too strong a word, lay in the framing that followed, because a minister acting on purely operational logic confirms the position, thanks the responders and returns to the business of the emergency, whereas a minister who elects to draw public attention to a capability the armed forces do not possess, in the middle of a live incident and while declining the assistance actually on the table, has made a communications choice whose costs extend well beyond a single news cycle.

MACA runs on trust, and if devolved administrations come to regard formal requests as devices for the manufacture of grievance, while Whitehall comes to suspect as much, then the machinery that has moved helicopters and ambulance drivers through past emergencies becomes markedly harder to operate at the speed such emergencies demand.

None of which should be read as absolution for the UK government or the wider defence establishment of course, because the substance of Mr Gray’s observation happens to be accurate and merits attention entirely on its own terms. Here is a state that has watched its Mediterranean allies burn through successive summers, whose own climate projections point unambiguously towards longer and drier fire seasons, and which has proved perfectly capable of building, equipping and funding a standing aerial firefighting force when the ground being defended is a pair of bases on Cyprus, yet holds not a single equivalent asset for the homeland and tolerates a domestic commercial market so thin that one Highland incident absorbed it completely, while nations such as Greece, France and Spain treat fixed-wing and rotary waterbombing as core instruments of national resilience rather than as a niche export posture.

The question raised by the Cairngorms is therefore why the calculus that justifies £148 million of Jupiters for the Eastern Mediterranean has never been run for the Highlands, the Pennines or the heathland of the south.