It looks like I am the bad news guy today. The following was received via the gunner net:
Lovely new aircraft carrier, sir, but we’re fighting in the desert
Money is squandered on equipment that is useless in either Iraq or Afghanistan - or in any foreseeable theatre
Simon Jenkins
While Lord Justice Scott Baker officiates each week at the Diana inquest benefit gala for tabloid lawyers at the Royal Courts of Justice, a more poignant inquest is enacted in the leafy lanes of Oxfordshire. The bodies of servicemen killed in Iraq and Afghanistan are brought here to Brize Norton airbase and their families are consoled with the brief dignity of an “unlawful killing” verdict.
Here, too, incredulous coroners hear tales of ill-prepared, underequipped soldiers stumbling back from what might be a modern Crimea.
They hear of failed helicopters, unguarded vehicles, lack of body armour and poor medical support. “Unforgivable and inexcusable . . . a breach of trust” were words used of the defence ministry by Andrew Walker, the coroner, last week after another tale of woe.
Britain’s military establishment is plunged into battle over what has been dubbed its “train crash” budget. The Treasury has demanded £1 billion a year in cuts to amend for what appears to be grotesque cost indiscipline. Every lobby has been summoned to the colours: defence correspondents, retired generals, MPs for army constituencies and the Royal United Services Institute. The blood-stained shrouds of Brize Norton are waved across Whitehall.
What is clear is that this government made a colossal error on coming to power in 1997-8. In the Strategic Defence Review (on whose lay committee I served), George Robertson, the then defence secretary, and John Reid and John Gilbert, his junior ministers, flatly refused an open discussion. Having been told to “think the unthinkable”, the review’s authors were told that the three biggest and most contentious procurement items inherited from the Tories were sacred.
They were the Eurofighter project (£15-£20 billion), the new aircraft carriers (£4 billion) and their frigate escorts, and a replacement for the Trident missile and its submarines (£20 billion). These pet projects of the Royal Navy and RAF were protected so new Labour would not appear soft on defence. There was no consideration given to the equipment needs of Tony Blair’s more interventionist foreign policy. The government decided, in effect, to pretend that it was still fighting the Russians (and possibly the Germans).
Those decisions locked the procurement budget for more than a decade. Above all they shut out the army, on which British defence activity has depended ever since. The army’s unglamorous but urgent need for battlefield helicopters and armoured personnel carriers was ignored. So, too, were supplies of such things as grenade launchers, field radios, body armour and night-vision equipment. This year the Eurofighter, carrier and Trident projects all came on stream at £5 billion annually between them and the defence budget has hit the predictable wall.
The first to howl are the chiefs of staff. It is customary at such times for them to stand as one, arms linked like Roman legions in a square. Yet they will never adjudicate on priorities. An admiral will not doubt (in public) the RAF’s need for more jet fighters. A general will never question the need for carriers. An air marshal will cast no aspersions on Trident. All they will do is sing in unison, “No defence cuts”.
Nor do ministers dare to take painful decisions for them. Every cut is across the board. Gordon Brown has let it be known that there must be no talk of cancellations, only postponements. Carriers may be delayed, Astute-class submarines may be reduced from eight to four and Type 45 destroyers from 12 to six. The number of Eurofighter Typhoons on order may be slashed. Strategy can go to the wall but not politics. As one sceptic said last week, “The chiefs have planned to go on fighting the Russians, but to lose.”
During the apartheid regime in South Africa I had a contact in the state arms manufacturer, Armscor, who constantly sang the praises of sanctions. He said, “They have stopped the chiefs of staff from buying glamour kit they don’t need, such as ships and planes, and forced them to develop stuff they do.” South Africa duly made the best field artillery gun in the world (the 155mm G5), the best armoured vehicles (Ratel and Eland) and the best desert boots.
Every debate over British military equipment veers off into chauvinism, into “sovereignty of supply”, British jobs and political image. That is why the army must wait until 2011 for a new flight of British-built Lynx helicopters (at £14m each) instead of buying the bigger American Sikorsky (at £6m) available this year. How many men will die for this crass decision?
As Lewis Page, a former naval officer, claims in his book Lions, Donkeys and Dinosaurs, the defence ministry probably spends two to three times overall what it needs for its equipment. It admits that landing ships are running at 80% over the original price. The biggest current excesses are on Type 45 destroyers and nuclear submarines. More than 10% of the defence budget goes on such procurement overruns. There is the crisis in a nutshell.
It is perhaps no surprise that Lord Drayson, the procurement minister, recently vanished to become a racing driver rather than try to reform a system in which nobody accepts accountability or blame for the most scandalous mismanagement. Weak ministers adhere to the principle of letting each service have its share of expensive kit, because anything else would mean an almighty row.
The old Spanish practices are still in place: Buggins’ turn between army, navy and air force as chief of the defence staff, a comfortable overseas attaché network and uniformed officers shadowing Whitehall civil servants. According to Page there are still more admirals ashore than ships afloat, more air marshals than squadrons aloft.
Britain is still buying weapons of little or no relevance. Carriers, destroyers, frigates and submarines date from the days of food convoys and empire. Interceptor jets are fighting the battle of Britain. Every modern British war is fought by the army (even the Falklands), for which the navy and air force should be refashioned as subordinate services.
The reason this does not happen, in Britain as in America, was well stated in “Kagan’s law”. When the military is asked if it wants more soldiers or a new plane and is told it must choose one, it always chooses the plane. A large item of kit does not talk, lives in a hangar, takes longer to deliver (and pay for) and has fancier lobbyists. Hence there is always upward pressure on naval and air spending and downward pressure on the poor bloody infantry.
The latest version of Labour’s interventionism, adumbrated by David Miliband, involves offering “security guarantees” to unstable democratic regimes to protect them from insurgency. Such wars do not require carriers, nuclear submarines or jet fighters. They require the one thing the government puts lowest on its priority list, a well equipped and highly mobile army.
That army, undermanned and ill equipped, is now engaged in the government’s service in Iraq and Afghanistan. When a British soldier deploys to the front, his or her family receives a letter from the defence secretary promising that he has taken “all measures possible to ensure that the equipment issued to the UK armed forces is both right for the job and right for them”.
This is simply not true. To take one example, a recent article in the Journal of the Royal Army Medical Corps pointed out that British troops were taking longer to get to a field hospital than it took the Americans in Vietnam. Two hours’ delay in Iraq has become seven hours in Helmand. This often fatal delay is almost entirely due to the lack of helicopters, caused by a shortage not of money but of ministry competence.
The British Army is fighting in two countries against forces whose equipment is primitive and who have never posed any military threat to Britain. In both it is losing. Money is squandered on equipment that is useless in either theatre - or in any foreseeable one. For want of that money, equipment vital to victory is forgone.
In a sane world this might be cause for a revision of priorities within the defence establishment. Instead, the brass hats continue to squabble to protect their precious toys and politicians lack the guts to bang their heads together.
It was the sort of thing that made the Iron Duke weep
- simon.jenkins@sunday-times.co.uk
