“To
make war all you need is intelligence. But to win war you need talent and
material”.
“For
Whom the Bell Tolls”
Ernest
Hemingway
Alphen, Netherlands. 18
August. Last week the ship’s bell of HMS
Hood was recovered from her 1941 wreck-site deep down in the dark, icy depths of
the Denmark Strait. What lessons does the loss of HMS Hood have for the vitally important and critically ‘strategic’
Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) which London is currently
preparing?
She was “The Mighty Hood”. Between 1920 and 1938
this massive battlecruiser was the world’s largest warship. At 860 feet (262.3
m) in length, Hood was armed with a
main armament of eight 15-inch (38cm) diameter guns that fired shells weighing
1350 kg. The ship herself weighed in at 47,430 tons whilst her sleek hull and
elegant lines made her perhaps the most beautiful warship ever built. Sadly, on
24 May 1941 in the Denmark Strait in what is today called the High North an
armour-piercing 15-inch shell from the German fast battleship KM Bismarck penetrated Hood’s aft 15-inch shell magazine and
ignited an explosion so powerful that it broke the bow and stern away
from the amidships section of the ship. Indeed, such was the force of the
explosion that some 365 feet (115m) of Hood’s
hull effectively disintegrated. Three members of her crew of 1418 were rescued.
The sinking of the Hood was an example of what happens when
there is a mismatch between strategy, commitments and resources. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s the Royal Navy
faced a series of massive cuts but no major commensurate reduction in
responsibilities. During the 1920s the cuts were driven by a mix of pious hopes
for disarmament and post-war economic pressures and persisted into the second
half of the 1930s. However, the Mighty
Hood sailed on, flying an increasingly-tattered flag for Britain. Naval technology was moving on but not the Hood.
By the late 1930s Hood was the flawed heir to a bygone Edwardian
age – a vulnerable battlecruiser in an era when fast battleships were being
built with superior protection and modern firepower that could also match her
for speed. She was of course meant to be modernised but somehow it never quite
happened and the myth of her ‘might’ became reality as both politicians and
public slowly came to be believe that she too was a fast battleship.
However, by 1941 Hood was a museum-piece and in no real
state to fight the fast super-battleship Bismarck
or indeed fight alongside the over-new and unworked-up HMS Prince of Wales. Indeed, the merest of comparisons of Hood and ‘PoW’ is enough to demonstrate how
far warship design and technology travelled between 1916 and the late 1930s.
Fast forward to 2015. Hood blew-up because of repeated
government failures to look at the long-term defence and strategic influence
role of the British armed forces and properly invest. Having fought the
war-to-end-all-wars London too often opted for short-term political and bureaucratic
convenience rendering British ‘strategy’, power and influence more bluff than
substance. That same old habit is also apparent
in the SDSR 2015 process as I warned it would be in my 2015 book Little Britain? Twenty-First Century
Strategy for a Middling European Power (www.amazon.co.uk).
There is some good news. The
new government agreed in July to commit to spending 2% GDP on defence to at
least 2020 with a 1% year-on-year real-terms increase in defence expenditure.
In principle such a release of funding over expectation should mean that the
future force at the heart of SDSR 2015 could begin to be properly considered in
light of strategic change and strategic requirement and some move made towards
balancing ends, ways and means. Specifically, the growing tensions between
capability and capacity, technology and manpower could begin to be met.
However, well-informed
sources tell me that whilst the heads of the Navy, Army and Air Force are
united in their efforts to ensure SDSR 2015 is a properly-balanced strategic
review the bureaucrats charged with leading the effort are not. As one very
senior colleague put it to me last week; “…we are chasing a powerful (and
arguably irreducible) pre-SDSR position”. Either the political leadership has
lost control of the process to bureaucrats who after years of cuts know only how
to cut and not to think (and grow) strategically (possible but unlikely), the
whole SDSR effort is an exercise in political sleight of hand and that in reality
the ‘defence’ budget is about to be siphoned off to a whole raft of other areas,
such as intelligence (quite possible) or SDSR 2015 is a Faustian combination of
the two (most likely).
My suspicions were
further roused when last week ‘experts’ were invited to submit their ideas but
in no more than 300 words or 1500 characters. This is nonsense and demonstrates
clearly that far from being an exercise in strategic defence SDSR 2015 is in
fact yet another exercise in strategic pretence. If that is so the ‘strategic’ implications
will be profound.
Take the Royal Navy of
which Hood was once flagship. The
Navy is committed to fulfilling the roles the Government has established for it.
These are the three so-called “twin strategic peaks” (don’t ask me) of a continually-at-sea-deterrent
(CASD), Continuous Carrier Capability and Continuous Amphibious Readiness
(perhaps the Navy is being asked to choose two of the three roles so as not to
embarrass ministers). To meet these
national requirements the Royal Navy needs at least 2500 more personnel but
there seems precious little evidence that the government is committed to
funding the very roles it is calling on the Navy to perform. Pretty much the same can be said for the
other two Services.
Let me be blunt; if indeed
SDSR 2015 is yet another exercise in strategic pretence like that of its
forebear SDSR 2010 there may well be young British men and women out there
today who in future years will find themselves facing a similar fate to that of
their grandfathers-in-arms in HMS Hood
– be they in the Navy, Army of Air Force – under-equipped, under-gunned and
over there.
My friend and colleague
Professor Paul Cornish has argued that whilst Britain might not need grand
strategy in the formal sense it needs to demonstrate that its leadership has
the capacity to think grand strategically. SDSR 2015 is the chance to do just
that but only if it is led from the top with vision and determination.
Thankfully, there are signs that Britain’s current political leadership have realised
that a narrow focus on the balance sheet enshrined in SDSR 2010 came close to
breaking Britain’s military by destroying the all-important relationship
between ends, ways and means. The mood music around SDSR 2015 is far more
favourable than SDSR 2010. However, far more needs to be done.
SDSR 2015 must above all
answer a critical question – what type of future force should Britain aspire to
have given its power and responsibilities in the world? Sadly, I fear the review will again dodge rather than address that question. Therefore, today I call for a Shadow SDSR 2015 to be drawn up by a
group of experts, retired officers and bureaucrats to hold the official SDSR
2015 to strategic account and stop the politics that is being played not just
with Britain’s defence but that of our NATO and EU allies and partners.
My senior colleague also
said last week that Britain’s armed forces “…are a measurable extension of the
national character, a demonstrable reflection on industrial and economic
authority, and a centre-piece of the visible face of a nation that still has
the embers of global ambition”. Amen to that.
On 27 May 1941 three days
after the Hood action and after an
epic sea and air chase the Bismarck was
cornered by the heavy battleships HMS
King George V and HMS Rodney and
sunk. Of the 2200 men aboard only 114 survived. In June I was privileged to be
given a tour of Kiel Sound the home port of the Bismarck by the German Navy. This blog is written in
honour of all the British and German sailors who perished in those freezing
North Atlantic waters back in May 1941. Once enemies, now friends. It is also
written in the hope that just for once those charged with SDSR 2015 will put
strategy before politics and and principle before bureaucracy in the search for
a proper and reasoned strategic balance between military capability, capacity and
affordability.
In the late 1930s my
grandfather served on Hood. However,
he was a destroyer man at heart and soon transferred back to his beloved
smaller ships, although he lost friends when Hood blew up. This week he and my great-uncle Walter, who was killed
in action with the Royal Navy in 1943, will both be resting a little easier
knowing that Hood’s bell, the soul of
that great ship, will finally make it back to her home port some seventy-four years
after she left. The bell will be given pride of place at the National Museum of
the Royal Navy in Portsmouth.
Thankfully, 2015 is not
1941 but nor is it 1990 (defence premiums) or even 2008 (imminent financial
collapse). It is the dawn of a new contentious strategic age not entirely
dissimilar to the strategic age which forged HMS Hood and the national interests she was designed to serve. HMS Hood’s motto was “Ventis Secundis” –
“With favourable winds”. With ‘favourable winds’ SDSR 2015 can still live up to
all it needs to be…but only with favourable political winds.
Julian
Lindley-French
