“The
want of money puts…the navy out of order”.
Samuel
Pepys, Surveyor-General to the Navy Board, 1666
Alphen, Netherlands. 19
September. It was a broadside. In an interview in the The Sunday Times, Admiral (Ret.d) Sir George Zambellas, who until
April 2016 was First Sea Lord or Head of Britain’s Royal Navy, warned that
Britain would have the military capacity of a “Third World nation”, if ministers
do not invest more in the Britain’s armed forces. After years of defence cuts
the Royal Navy he commanded was “hollowed out”, and that it had reached the “…bottom
of the efficiency barrel”. He also said that “someone has to speak out” about
the “capability gaps” in Britain’s defences. Regular readers will know that I
have long been ‘speaking out’ for years about this problem. Indeed, in 2015 I even
wrote a book about it – Little Britain,
which is brilliant and (still) very reasonably-priced. The difference is that
Sir George really is ‘someone’. He is also someone that I have the honour to
call ‘friend’. How has the Royal Navy come
to this sorry point?
Strategy-defying politics
(of course) is a major cause of the Navy’s malaise. Someone from ‘the ministry’,
grandly entitled Mr or Ms “Senior MoD Source”, parried Sir George’s criticisms in
The Sunday Times by suggesting that, “…many
of the challenges the navy faces today can be traced back to the decisions of
the first sea lord. His criticisms come from someone who lives in a glasshouse”.
Nice try, old trick. In fact it is a ‘Mr’,
and ‘he’ does not get off that lightly. You see, like many ministries of
defence in many European countries, the primary mission of the Ministry of
Defence in London is not the sound, strategic defence of the United Kingdom,
but rather the political defence of the Government, or more specifically, the
minister, Michael Fallon.
However, the real problem
is both structural and strategic. London
is trying, and failing, to circle a threat-strategy-capability-money square. To
be fair, at least London is still (sort of) trying to circle that square (and
not the other way around). Most of Britain’s European allies have simply stopped
trying to square defence circles, by simply scrapping the square.
In 2015 the National
Security Strategy (NSS) and the Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) laid
out the threats, risks, and challenges Britain faces. The Government then
decided how much money it could devote to meeting said threats, risks, and
challenges. London then divided said
money into which bits would go to which bits of its broad security and defence
policy, an eclectic mix of ‘instruments’ ranging from diplomacy, intelligence,
aid and development, to (finally) defence.
Unfortunately, NSS 2015 and
SDSR 2015 took place against the backdrop of a government forced to divert huge
amounts of public money to prevent the banks from collapsing in 2009. Indeed, criminal bankers (very few of whom
have actually paid for their alacrity) did more damage to Britain’s defences
than any recent enemy. However, the
problem was further compounded by a government committed to relatively low
levels of taxation at a time of enforced high spending. In other words, the search
for sound money came at the expense of sound defence.
So, how is it that Mr Senior
MoD Source can blame Sir George for a mess that has been years in the making,
and the roots of which go back through years of successive governments only
recognising as much strategic threat as they believed they could politically
(and domestically) afford? Here one comes to the clever politics/dumb strategy
bit. The Service Chiefs, of which until recently
Sir George was one, are responsible for the individual service budgets of the Navy,
Army, and Air Force respectively. This makes said Service Chiefs convenient political
scapegoats for the ambition/threat/spending/capability disconnect that is of the
Government’s own making. In other words,
it is a system primarily designed to protect Minister Fallon from political
criticism. It is also a system that ‘gets away with it’ only so long as there
is no major crisis. Come a major crisis, as looks increasingly likely, and
Britain’s leaders and it defences would soon be found wanting.
The
Sunday Times made a brief comparison between the Royal
Navy of 1982 and that of today. In 1982,
the Navy had 80,000 personnel, in 2017 29,500. Yes, the Royal Navy will soon
have two very large aircraft carriers, far bigger than the two (soon to be
three) it had in 1982. However, the ‘RN’ will only have 6 destroyers to protect
the carriers, compared with 17 in 1982, 13 frigates compared with 38, and 10
nuclear-powered attack submarines (if that!) compared with 26. In other words, and
given that only a part of the Navy can be used at any one time, due to
maintenance, refits et al, a deployed British maritime-amphibious force,
organised around one of the two ‘command’ carriers, would pretty much swallow
up the entire available Royal Navy! Not only that, even the ships so tasked would
lack vital systems, defences, sensors, missiles, and critical enabling support.
The hard reality to which
Sir George alludes is that the Royal Navy of today is simply too small for the
roles and missions which the Government requires it it to perform. This is to exert
some reasonable degree of sea control and sea presence, both as part of a
credible deterrence and defence policy, as well as providing proof positive of
Britain’s continuing power and influence on the world stage.
The Government is at
least aware of this problem and has come up with a new wheeze, what Zambellas
calls, “Fallon’s Frigates”. The Type 31e
(I think the ‘e’ stands for ‘economy-class’) frigate, the construction of which
Minister Fallon announced amidst some fanfare, will be small, cheap, throw-away,
one-hit, all operations short-of-war ships that would not last very long in a
real shooting war. A shooting war which Prime Minister May recently admitted is
now possible.
“You [London] have a choice now”, he said. “You
either put more money in, or you stop doing serious things”. The Government’s
response? “Our budget is growing and, for the first time since the Second World
War, so is our Royal Navy”. First, the British defence budget is NOT growing in
real terms, given the pace of defence cost inflation. Second, whilst there
might be a marginal planned increase in the number of ‘hulls’ available to the Royal
Navy it is ‘planned’ over an absurdly long-time – i.e. over a budget cycle, not
a strategic cycle. Third, unless
real-time investment takes place in the fighting power of those ‘hulls’ the Royal
Navy will continue to be as weak in relative terms to other powers (the real
strategic equation) as at any time since Pepys.
The easy answer is to
simply pin the blame for all of the above on years of savage defence cuts.
However, there is another profound cause that goes to the very heart of the question
that dogs Britain today; does Britain any longer wish to be considered a
serious power, let alone a world power?
Julian Lindley-French
