“At
present, the affordability gap ranges from a minimum of £4.9bn to £20.8bn if
financial risks materialize and ambitious savings are not achieved”.
Mr
Amas Morse, Head of the British National Audit Office
Alphen, Netherlands. 2
February. What would be the ‘affordability gap’ if deterrence fails? Talk about recognising only as much threat as Britain can
afford. A new report by London’s National Audit Office entitled The Equipment Plan 2016-2026 raises two
fundamental questions: is the defence of Britain now a luxury, and can any British
government forecasts any longer be relied upon?
Indeed, if one needs any further evidence that British government Brexit
figures are more dodgy politics than sound forecasting one only has to see how
Britain’s failing defence budget was creatively ‘made’ to meet the NATO 2% GDP
defence investment guidelines.
The facts of the report
make for sobering reading. The defence budget faces a possible £21bn ‘black
hole’ over ten years. The Ministry of Defence did not include the cost of a
planned fleet of 5 Type 31e frigates
in its Equipment Plan (also published this week) and has no money to keep the
fast-ageing Type 23 frigates at sea.
The cost of the four Dreadnought-class
nuclear ballistic missile submarines (SSBN) currently under construction has
already risen some £576m above projections. There is also a £3.2bn gap in the
funding of the support for future equipment and planned £8.1bn ‘efficiency savings’
have yet to be realized (strange how the number of defence civil servants remains
stubbornly high).
There has also been a
failure to include £9.6bn of forecast costs in addition to the missing money
for the Type 31e frigates. It also
now seems very likely that the planned seventh Astute-class nuclear attack
submarine (SSN) HMS Ajax (HMS Axed?) will not now be built. This at a time when the Russians have
commissioned 15 very capable Akula-class
SSN, 2 super-capable Yasen-class SSN and
5 new Borei-class SSBN. Worse, having
poured billions of pounds into the development of the F-35B Lightning II strike aircraft, and constructed two enormous
70,000 ton aircraft carriers around them, not only does the Ministry of Defence
have no idea of the cost of supporting the aircraft in service, last week the Pentagon’s
Director of Operational Testing described the plane as not ‘operationally suitable’.
In 2015 the Strategic
Defence and Security Review (SDSR) set out a baseline plan for the minimal
defence of Britain and the meeting of its defence commitments to NATO and
others. In so doing it added some £24bn
of additional commitments to be realised over the 2015-2026 period. Since then
there has been nothing but back-sliding and obfuscation from what were already
bare-minimum commitments to a sound and credible defence.
In 2017 National Security
Advisor Sir Mark Sedwill was commissioned to undertake a National Security
Capability Review (NCSR). On the face of it, the NCSR methodologically
sound. He was charged with considering
Britain’s security and defence challenges in the round and how best to
apportion the roughly 7% of GDP London spends on both. Warfare is changing and now bestrides the
civilian and military spectrum from hybrid war to hyper war via cyber war (see
my Future War NATO: From Hybrid War to
Hyper War via Cyber War paper that I co-write in 2017 with General John R.
Allen, General Philip Breedlove and Admiral George Zambellas https://www.globsec.org/publications/future-war-nato-hybrid-war-hyper-war-via-cyber-war/
).
However, the Sedwill
Review is only masquerading as strategy. As the former National Security
Advisor Lord Peter Ricketts warned last week it is a mistake to separate
defence out from the review because for such a review to work it must adopt an
holistic approach across security of which defence is a part, albeit an important
part. Rather, by delaying the defence component of the review my suspicions
have been confirmed: the NSCR is little more than yet another political ruse to
enable this hapless, reality-appeasing London government to renege on yet
another soundly-considered, and yet minimum defence spending commitment. Little
Britain writ large.
To be fair, part of the problem
has been caused by the fall in the value of the pound against both the dollar
and the euro since the June 2016 Brexit referendum. However, at root the problem is one of
political culture and goes far beyond the sliding value of the pound. It is what happen when an accountant is put in
charge of defence strategy. The world is
not a spreadsheet, as Chancellor of the Exchequer Phillip Hammond and his merry
band of creative economists at the Treasury would like it. Nor is it a
fairground attraction that one can hop on and off when financial convenience
serves. It is a real place which is increasingly red in teeth and claw and
which Britain’s wilful decline from defence seriousness makes far more so than need
be.
Now, I have something of
a reputation of a Cassandra because I will not buy into the blind ‘can-do’, ‘it
will be alright on the night’, ‘we will muddle through’ approach traditional in
senior echelons of the British armed forces.
As Dr Julian Lewis, the influential chairman of the House of Commons
Defence Committee rightly points out, if Britain is to meet its minimum defence
commitments the country must spend at least 2.5% GDP on defence. That is not me being Cassandra, rather it is plain,
bloody, Yorkshire common sense.
Strangely, the British Government agrees with me. London regularly warns of growing threats…and
then promptly cuts the resources available to deal adequately with them.
Sadly, it is hard to see
anything that this failing rudderless government gets right these days. This leaves me the British citizen facing a
dreadful choice between incompetents for whom ‘strategy’ extends no further
than getting to next Friday, and a Marxist who believes Britain and its armed
forces are responsible for most of the world’s ills.
Britain’s defence is not
a luxury to be cut at a political whim to meet the damning dictates of serial
short-termism. London had better understand that defence strategic truism before
it is too late! Again, what would be the ‘affordability
gap’ if deterrence fails?
Julian Lindley-French
