(What we're arguing about: An F-35C launched by EMALS at NAS Lakehurst, NJ - Look Mum, no Steam!)
It seems that the UK MoD's trials and tribulations with the 2012 Planning Round (PR12) which have been referred to here before, are now so serious that it can't be announced before the Easter recess. In other words, the MoD is tacitly accepting that it won't be able to start the 2012-13 financial year with a plan that is costed and deliverable.
Well done.
To the cynics out there who could point out that this is hardly anything new, you have a point. Indeed, it is so consistent with previous MoD fiascos that one could be forgiven for thinking that Liam Fox - he of the "broadly in balance" budget fiasco was still in charge.
Fortunately he isn't. But "Spreadsheet Phil" Hammond needs to get the budget balanced without undermining the UK's semblance of a strategy. And for as long as this involves the carrier programme, the correct answer is F-35C, EMALS and traps - a cheaper, less complex aircraft that takes twice the bombload half as far again, or half again as many bombs twice the range of the F-35B jumpjet.
If we're serious about Carrier Enabled Power Projection (CEPP), then the F-35C is the correct way forward. Find the money and move on.
(And if you're having difficulty with the money, you could always cancel Trident.)
(F-35B - the most expensive way of getting half the bombload two-thirds the range of F-35C)
Those of you who read this regularly will know that the 2010 Strategic Defensive and Security Review (SDSR) made the sensible choice to replace the Joint Strike Fighter (F-35B) Short Take Off and Vertical Landing (STOVL) variant with the carrier variant for use on the UK's new aircraft carriers. At the time, SDSR said of this (very welcome) decision:
"The last government committed to carriers that would have been
unable to work properly with our closest military allies,"
and
"It will take time to rectify this error but we are
determined to do so. We will fit a catapult to the operational carrier
to enable it to fly a version of the JSF with a longer range and able to
carry more weapons. Crucially, that will allow our carrier to operate
in tandem with the US and French navies."
But as we pointed out in CentreForum's "Dropping the Bomb" paper last week, there is no reason to do this if you were prepared to cancel Trident. Here's the table from page 52:
(We are here. Infidels are here, here and here. Apostates over there. Good. Points? Questions?)
Those kray-zee Iranians.
Just when Christmas television looked like getting everyone down, up popped the comedy act that is North Korea* to entertain us with their choreographed grief (though believe me, if I were living in Pyongyang, I'd have cried and wailed with the best of them just in case someone decided that I had been insufficiently upset and felt that a little reeducation was in order.)
Not to be outdone by their former colleagues in the Axis-of-Evil, Iranian Admiral Habibollah Sayyari says it would be "very easy" for his navy to shut down the Strait of Hormuz (SoH) if the nasty west (and especially the nasty EU led by the confounded British, whose hand is behind everything bad in the Islamic Republic, I'm reliably informed) has the temerity to impose oil sanctions on Iran for its repeated violations of the NPT, which the IAEA noted in their 18 Nov 11 Resolution. And here's a nice piece from the good people at APM's Marketplace - they do a great daily podcast, too.
Excellent, certainly a move that's all about the spirit of the season, and likely to bring everyone together and allow us all to get along better and all of that.
But is it feasible?
(Ah. Rather narrow then.)
The strait is about 34nm across at it's narrowest point, and more importantly, the commercial traffic goes through the two 2nm corridors marked on this helpful map. And given the major Iranian naval base at Bandar Abbas is nice and close, in principle Iran's two naval arms - IRIN and the IRGC(N) - could make a stab at "closing" the SoH if they so chose. However, this overlooks a couple of things.
First, legality. Such a blockade would be illegal (states have the right to peacefully sail through straits worldwide) - something established in customary international law and in the 1948 ICJ Judgement in the Corfu Channel case - unless it was an act of war. An Iranian declaration of war against the rest of the world seems somewhat unlikely, and so in the absence of a UNSCR allowing for Iran to close the SoH (inconceivable), then the Iranians would be acting illegally.
Second, actual capability. Does Iran really want to take on the US Navy and her allies in a shooting match in the SoH whether on the water or from shore based missile and artillery batteries (or both?)? I can't see it - the Iranians could get lucky and cause some damage to naval vessels escorting oil tankers or patrolling the Straits - but the risk of retaliation sinking the rest of your fleet (or worse, starting a broader war) is such that you'd have to be nuts to try it. And this blog (at least) doesn't think that the Iranian regime irrational - more than anything else, it is solidly focused on it's own survival.
So, nothing to see here - let's all get back to the Christmas specials on telly. But not a clever move by the Iranians, and I suspect, not one that they're going to enact, irrespective of their domestic posturing.
Finally, in the spirit of goodwill to all men, in the unlikely event that this does kick off, please don't ask the Royal Navy how many spare ships it has to send out to help out in the SoH. You may get an answer similar to asking the RAF how many maritime patrol aircraft they can quickly send. Seen from here, the choices made in SDSR 2010 are looking less clever by the month.
*As long as you don't live in it or near it, clearly.
(Hunter PR 11*. Like MoD PR 11 but much more elegant...)
Planning Round 11 - PR11
I accept that it's boring bureaucracy, but process is vital in Government, and never more so than when dealing with budgets and finance. What's critical to remember is that the settlement reached in a Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) / Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) is in a very meaningful sense Churchill's "End of the Beginning", rather that an end in itself: all that has been agreed at this point is the budget "envelope" within which the Department will have to operate for the length of the budget deal.
What then happens is the process of converting the CSR / SDSR settlement into something that actually can (at least theoretically) be implemented by the MoD. This is a critical, and often under-rated / misunderstood step - many a drip slip betwixt cup and lip and all of that. It is also where the painful decisions become crystallised - where the metaphorical rubber really does hit the road.
In the MoD a key part of this process is known by the catchy title of "Planning Round XX". This process costs lots of options, prioritises them, chooses which elements to fund and which cuts to make to make the proverbial quart fit into a pint pot, and ultimately spits out an answer that is the operational annual budget of the MoD; the work for next year is PR 11.
What was done?
The first pass results were announced by Liam Fox on 18 July 2011. As Chalmers points out, this is effectively another Defence Review less than a year after the SDSR was completed, underlining that the SDSR did not resolve the funding dilemma - and was therefore unimplementable. It is hard to imagine a more damning indictment of a review of SDSR's scale and ambition.
Some good news came in July - there was a planning commitment that the MoD equipment procurement and equipment support budgets would increase 1% in real terms from 2014/15. Of course, this is an attempt to bind a future spending review - and indeed a future Parliament in a way that A. V. Dicey et al would decry as unconstitutional interference with Parliamentary Sovereignty - which may or may not work; not the least reason is that if the economy doesn't turn around the pressure on the post-Afghanistan MoD budget will all be one direction.
In return for jam tomorrow, MoD has agreed to make what Chalmers calls "further difficult decisions on capability reductions, notably in Army personnel numbers." Specifically, this means bringing the Army down to 84,000 by 2020, a figure that was bandied about in the SDSR process. But the problem is that what these reductions are to be hasn't been announced, which implies that it hasn't - or at least the phasing and the force mix - hasn't been agreed. The answer to maintaining capability by cutting numbers is to shift to (cheaper) reservists from (expensive) regulars, with £1.5bn over the next decade to fund this. What impact £150m p.a. will have is not yet clear.
UK Future CapabilitiesPit Falls Overspends
(Type 26 Global Cocktail Party Platform Combat Ship)
(F-35C Lightning II - shiney, American, over-budget, late)
(RN Trident II-D5 SLBM Launch. No, you don't get to see the "cool" submarine thing.)
The most obvious risks in a strategic steady state - ie, without any new unplanned for threats or wars - are the three biggest ticket items - replacement submarines for Trident, F-35 Lightning II strike fighters for the FAA and the RAF, and the future frigate, Type 26.
Trident is perhaps the easiest to discuss because it is so binary as a programme - it is largely independent of the rest of the MoD force structure in that though it has supporting assets, at a pretty profound level you either do Trident or you don't. And therefore you can consider the £30 - £100bn bill with a degree of isolation from the rest of the budget. It is also a significant technical risk given that it is a new UK submarine design, as with the unfortunately named "Astute" class, this is an area of significant weakness in the UK defence manufacturing base.
(All of this for 20 sorties a day? Really? Really?!)
F-35C is connected to other programmes, most obviously the carrier. It is also different in that the UK is a bit part player in the US programme, and the US will make F-35 work for the USAF and the USN, because without it, their qualitative edge over "near peer" adversaries will erode. The cost, however, is vast, and initial (optimistic) UK procurement figures of 132-150 F-35s simply will not happen as the unit cost seems destined to be around the £100m mark. At that price, 60 airframes - or enough for just four 12 aircraft squadrons plus a training flight - is a £6bn+ programme - similar to the aircraft carriers.
It is easy to see why Chalmers cites an MoD decision to routinely deploy the UK carrier with only 12 aircraft (versus the 36 originally intended). Unfortunately, 12 aircraft the work of 36 cannot do, and the MoD has scaled back the sortie-generation requirement of the carriers from 72/day to 20. 20?! Given that the cost spiral and delayed service entry date for the F-35C was known and knowable in 2010, it is hard to understand how the carrier programme could have made prioritisation sense if it is only expected to produce 20 sorties per day. Charitably, all that can be assumed is that the planners were planning on having more than four squadrons of F-35C in total, making it more likely that the FAA could have 36 aircraft and crews trained and deployable. Except that if there are only four 12 aircraft squadrons in toto, this is not going to happen. From this, it is hard to understand why the UK is pursuing the carrier programme at all.
(Type 45: Stalin's maxim that "Quantity has a Quality all its own" doesn't work in reverse...)
Type 26 is much easier to argue for and against. The UK needs a new frigate. It is not clear that the UK needs to go to the trouble of developing one for what will never (sadly) be more than 20 hulls, and may well end up being half of that. Given that the Canadians are not interested in a collaborative programme, the Brazilians may buy one and then build their own, and there is lots of competition, it would surely make more sense for the UK to buy off the shelf from Europe (FREMM, Lafayette or F124 would do nicely). And before anyone shouts "HORIZON was a disaster", if we had proceeded with it, the RN should have been able to afford 9 or 10 instead of the 6 Type 45s they're going to operate at £1bn each.
Tough choices. But they need to be made if the UK is going to get maximum value for money from the small defence budget: MoD is not there to create or sustain jobs for BAES.
So, with the greatest respect to Malcolm Chalmers, it is hard to see how he can conclude that, "the MoD now appears to be well on the way to closing its £74 billion funding gap" until the cuts are detailed and the numbers and the underlying assumptions can be independently verified (as the NAO is now empowered to do.) Let's see how they get on, but I'm a long way from convinced.
* Ok pedants, I know the RN used the Hunter PR 11s as trainers and not operationally, and that therefore they should probably been designated T(PR) Mk. 11 - or indeed T(PR) Mk. 12 as they were based on Hunter F Mk. 4 airframes, not the FGA Mk. 9 that begot the RN's GA Mk. 11. If this is a burning concern, I suggest you complain retrospectively to the Chief of Staff (Aviation and Carriers) and Rear Admiral Fleet Air Arm, as he's presumably less busy than he was, given the scrapping of the Harriers and the Carriers...
(Ministry of Deficits? Not quite an anagram, but there you are...)
Prof. Malcolm Chalmers of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI, MoD's favourite thinktank) published a new paper this week on UK Defence spending, and it makes interesting reading. In this post, we'll look at what was said about the numbers and the Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR); in the next one, we'll look at implementation through Planning Round 2011 (PR11).
Labour's Legacy
The first (and most important) point is that the the out-going Brown Administration left the MoD in a terrible positon. Depending on how you ask the question, the scale of the 10-year budget shortfall between 2010-11 and 2020-21 was either £27bn (a difficult £2.7bn p.a. - or roughly 8% of the MoD's baseline budget) if you allowed for 1.1% real growth, or a terrifying £51bn (an impossible £5.1bn p.a. or more than 14% of the annual budget) if the budget had been maintained at 2010-11 in real terms. And these were estimates which assumed that this programmes in the budget would (for the first time) run on time and to budget. (Ah. Ish?)
(Bob Ainsworth MP, Labour's last Defence Secretary - "ineffective" might be the politest word.)
In fact, despite Labour's recent attacks on the Government over the cuts, for Labour to close this funding gap, spending would have had to increase at at least 2.2% per annum for the next decade. Ignoring austerity and the fiscal realities that go with this, this is a level of increase unknown since 1985, and more than twice the 1.1% growth that they actually invested over the course of their 13 years in power. As Chalmers notes,
"... as a result, the MoD found it increasingly difficult to fit an ambitious forward programme within a much less ambitious – albeit still slowly growing – budget."
Indeed. Worse, Labour in general and Bob Ainsworth in particular made a number of pledges to purchase equipment late in the Brown Administration that sounded good - e.g. another 22 Chinook helicopters - when they must have known that there was no money to pay for them. This was either breathtakingly cynical politics of the worst kind, (with the results measured in the dead and maimed), or it demonstrated a criminally complete lack of knowledge, competence, control and responsibility. Either should have been a resigning - or sacking - matter.
So not only should Labour apologise for their past record, they should also probably shut up about the whole thing for a decent period, until they've actually got a grip on the big questions (e.g. UK's role in the world, Trident, funding this defence business).
May 2010 - A new dawn. (Or at least a Defence Review)
(We're on the same side. Honest.)
SDSR was the long overdue defence review that built on the hodgepodge of the period since the 1998 Strategic Defence Review (SDR 98) and 2002's New Chapter. And the £51bn hole in the budget over the next decade needed to be addressed at a time of an unprecedented fiscal squeeze. Enter Liam Fox, stage right.
But austerity isn't fun, as the current Government is finding out. Liam Fox successfully fought for a smaller cut than the Treasury wanted, but was only partially successful. Defence did do comparatively well - it had an 8.5% real terms cut by 2014-15 rather than the 10-15% that most external observers were expecting; at some level this is a comparative triumph. However, this was on top of the £51bn that MoD was already in hole over the next decde, and led to two problems.
First, due to the 8.5% cut that the MoD received in the austerity budget of the 2010 Comprehensive Spending Review, the 10-year deficit increased to an eye-watering £74bn.
Second, the Treasury (very sensibly, in my view) got the funding of Trident replacement back into the defence budget, rather than being a freebie provided by the Treasury. This added between £25bn and £50bn to the Departmental deficit through to 2030 - and as the majority of these costs come after 2020-21, they are not included in the £74bn figure. It can be inferred that HMT was trying to achieve two things - first, not to pay for it, and second to make Trident compete against other defence priorities. The first worked beautifully, but the second failed, as Liam Fox moved Trident into the untouchable box, significantly decreasing the flexibility of the overall budge - by at least £7bn over the years to 2020.
Clearly something had to give. Actually, quite a lot of somethings had to give; here's a flavour.
(Nimrod MRA4: all 11 scrapped to save £200m p.a. after spending £4bn. Would have been quite useful, too.)
(Type 22/3 frigate HMS CUMBERLAND - first UK ship to Libya, scrapped on return.* The other three 22/3s went too, taking the surface fleet to 19 FF/DD - compared to 35 in 1998, and 65 in 1982's Falklands War.)
(Harrier GR9 - more mourned by RN rather than RAF, as it ended UK carrier ops until 2022(ish). (Maybe).)
(CVS HMS ARK ROYAL - scrapped, along with her jets.)
(Sentinel R1 - brand new, now permanently deployed to Afghanistan, to be scrapped in 2015)
The eagle-eyed amongst you will note that there is not heavy on land forces - the Army and Royal Marines were largely left alone until after the withdrawal from Afghanistan that has been pencilled in for 2014. This will move the subsequent pain for them until the defence review after the 2015 election. And this ignore the 40,000 MoD civil servants and 22,000 servicemen and women who will lose their jobs in the next three years, along with a slew of new programmes.
(Truth is stranger than fiction...)
SDSR Process
So how did this happen? And why were such apparently random choices made, such that the RN will have one and a spare aircraft carrier, (with no aircraft - cunning, huh?), and the RAF has so many PFI-funding air refuelling tankers that they will have nearly two per fast-jet squadron? Some of the answer will be in the process.
It was long suspected, but Chalmers' paper is the first time that I've seen it (semi-officially) confirmed that the MoD was deeply engaged in Op OSTRICH, ignoring the HM Treasury's (HMT) request that all Departments study the impact of 10% and 20% cuts in their budgets. Until the last three weeks of the Review, MoD appears to have had a single case of 3% cut, and MoD
"believed – or at least hoped – that the Treasury was bluffing, and presented no detailed plan for how to make steeper reductions."**
Ah. Taking on HMT in a game of chicken is always a cunning plan. They will blink! Until they don't. Oh. The effect was predictable... Chalmers again:
"... [this] had the effect of increasing total ten-year required savings by £17 billion. This not only required much deeper savings in 2013/14 and 2014/15, a challenge which the MoD has still not fully been able to meet. As importantly, it reduced the baseline for spending levels for the rest of the decade."***
The MoD may cry foul and grumble about mixed political messages, but the reality is that probably didn't believe things could get this bad, and the culture in the MoD meant that the level of prioritisation that would've been required simply didn't exist, as the subsequent Levene Review into Defence management found. This set the stage for the final stages of the SDSR debacle.
(They have to agree as well, you know....)
SDSR Endgame
Chalmers recounts the MoD's long term plan to meet the Treasury's numbers was intertwined with the repatriation of the Army units from Germany. This would've seen the Army reduced by 20,000 to 82,000 by 2020 primarily by withdrawing from Germany without replacing those numbers - the point being that building a significantly increased infrastructure for the returning Army units would have been prohibitively expensive, which is the primary reason that it hasn't happened since the end of the Cold War. An elegant administrative solution.
Except that Number 10 didn't buy it.
Essentially, No 10 wouldn't go for cuts in the Army whilst there was a war on in Afghanistan. In fact, there were some cuts - 7% of the Army's regular strength to 95,000 by 2015 - but the weight of the cuts went on the RN (14% personnel cuts) and the RAF (17%). It was also in this end game that Nimrod / LRMPA and Carrier Strike (HMS ARK ROYAL and the Harrier GR9s) were binned without replacement. There is reportage that this was all a last minute fix to save the Tornado GR4 strike aircraft instead of the Harrier GR9s achieved by an RAF end-run, but even if true, in operational terms it was probably the correct decision.
All that was left was for the senior leadership to trumpet the strategic nature of the SDSR. But the façade cracked under the internal contradictions - aircraft carrier minus aircraft, doing the same or more with less.
The bigger problem was that all of this pain still didn't close the £74bn gap. This would be the job of PR11, of which more shortly.
*I'm told it is possible to take a phot of a ship without it wiggling about at high speed, but as I was repeatedly told, (as your author is a slow learner) "Tobbes, what's the point of that?"
(A good book. In fact, a great book - go read it.)
In part one and two of these random musings (do they qualify for capital R and capital M at this point? I leave that to you, dear reader...) we looked at the history and the future choices for the UK nuclear weapons. Now, enough of my quasi-academic pontification: what would I actually *do* if I were in charge? And Why?
The first point is that though the world is an unstable place with active proliferation attempts by non-nuclear States that are not UK or western-aligned, it is not clear that the Irans or North Koreas of this world have either the capability or intent to attack the UK with a nuclear armed missile, nor is it clear that they are not deterred by the US nuclear guarantee to NATO.
Really? What surely they're all crazy mullahs / mad Stalinists?
Well, let's assume that Iran successfully builds a nuclear weapon, and successfully integrates it with one of their current missile systems - e.g. Shahab-3 or the Ghadr-110, and then moved these missiles up to NW Iran, could they even hit the UK?
Courtesy of Great Circle Mapper (hours of fun!), here's the range of the 1200nm Shahab-3 (Meteor-3) from Tabriz:
And here's the 3,000km range of the Ghadhr-110:
As you can see, neither can hit the UK, though if they were accurate enough, they could hit Cyprus with the UK's Sovereign Base Areas. I've no idea of the Circular Error Probable over the 780nm from Tabriz to Akrotiri - but given that the Iranian attacks on Baghdad (and vice-versa) during the "War of the Cities" was not notably precise (not surprising as the SS-1 SCUD derivatives used - themselves derived from Hitler's WWII V-2 rockets - are prone to wander off by themselves), it is asking a lot of Iranian missile design to be able to develop a precision strike capability to hit Akrotiri today. As range increase, accuracy falls away sharply, so I would predict that hitting Rome with a Ghadhr-110 will be something of a crapshoot from Tabriz.
Of course, it is likely that given time, money and imported technology from wherever, the Iranians could produce a longer range missile. And according to Wikileaked US State Department cables, Iran has some 19 North Korean BM-25 Musudan missiles, with a range of 4,000km / 2,485 miles. Fired from Tabriz, BM-25 could, theoretically hit Heathrow 2,424 miles away.
(And no, this blog is not advocating urban regeneration of Hounslow and Feltham by Iranian missiles irrespective of how desirable such regeneration may be.)
All of which assumes that the Iranians and North Koreans would want to.
And that's the crux: If Iran had the capability, and was able to prepare and launch a BM-25 with a nuclear warhead against London, and did so, then Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty - all of that armed attack on one is an attack on all business - would presumably be invoked, and Iran would suffer a devastating US nuclear counter-attack.
So: one element of the rationale facing the UK in the £100bn like-for-like replacement of CASD by new SSBNs and Trident is that there may be some Iranian or other nutters who decide on national self-destruction, or who are going to nuke the UK and don't expect the US to shoot back. I would posit that the likelihood that the Iranians decided not to nuke London based on the UK SSBNs is in fact vanishingly small, as the Iranian and North Koreans are - just like the Soviets in the Cold War - focussed on the survival of the regime above all else. (So was Hosni Mubarak. Oops.) But nothing is going to overthrow the regime more surely than lobbing nuclear weapons on rockets at western cities - therefore, it isn't going to happen.
"Ah", I hear the realists cry "But these people are millenarian nutters for who death is not a problem." And thus they aren't rational.
Perhaps.
(V. I. Lenin. Old-skool millenarian nutter. Innit?)
There are two responses to this: first, that the Soviets were ostensibly (and officially) millenarian nutters who wanted to change the world, but yet they were deterred, largely by America's nuclear arsenal. Secondly, if these millenarian nutters are actually not rational, then presumably they can't be deterred, so the UK SSBNs are useless anyway. This second argument obviously also applies to the nightmare scenario of Al Qaeda getting its hand on a nuclear device - because they can't be deterred and they don't have any territory to nuke anyway.
Which leaves proponents of CASD replacement saying something like, "Well yes, but we might need it, and in any event we're a great power and need the accoutrements of Great Powerdom, like nuclear weapons." Which, all you astute readers out there will have noticed, is precisely the circular argument that this debate started with in 1946.
So actually neither argument supports the idea of replacing Trident with CASD. Hooray, we've just saved £100bn.
Or have we?
I think we probably have. My personal position is that there is no obvious, credible threat - threat comprising of technical capacity and intent - to the UK posed by nuclear weapons. Further, the £100bn - and the £20 - 30bn of capital costs over the next decade to replace the existing SSBNs - will totally distort an already badly stretched (read: broke) UK defence budget, and to go ahead with the SSBN replacement will mean that other, useful - and in some cases critical - capabilities will have to be cut to fund it. This is madness.
(WE177 - small. Large bang, however. Make sure you mean it before you let it off; unintentional detonations probably best avoided, and are likely to create lots of paperwork. Paperwork like this is always bad.)
So my solution?
Scrap Trident - indeed, bring the existing SSBNs in now and stand down CASD, saving the current operating costs. Retain the nuclear engineering knowhow and bomb-making capability at Aldermaston and Burghfield to provide technical expertise in disarmament and nuclear verification, and in extremis, the ability for the UK to fabricate an air-dropped nuclear weapon in 12-24 months - after all, the WE177 plans presumably still exist, and if requried, fabricating new weapons should only be an engineering task. In other words, the UK would assume a position similar to that of Japan - no weapons, but a clear technical breakout capability if required.
And this would also mark a coherent step towards nuclear disarmament, making the UK the first Permanent Member of the UN Security Council to give up deployed nuclear weapons.
Vanguard-class SSBN - one of the UK's four current SSBNs
Part 2 of 3
In which we look at the options..
Current Position
Today, somewhere at sea, one of four Royal Navy Vanguard class nuclear powered ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs in Navy-speak) is currently busy avoiding detection, carrying 48 warheads on 12 Trident II D-5 SLBMs. Having at least one UK SSBN at sea ready to fire has been maintained since 1968, so-called Continuous At-Sea Deterrence (CASD), a very proud record for the RN. Indeed, mathematically the RN required 5 SSBNs to achieve CASD, so achieving this with four SSBNs for more than 40 years is from a technical and operational perspective very commendable - well done them.
The British submarine's 48 warheads are independently targetable, which makes an SSBNs nuclear payload both highly survivable and enormously destructive. As detailed in SDSR, the UK's warhead stockpile will decline from 225 warheads today to no more than 180 by mid-2020s, and the total number deployed at any one time will decline to 40 warheads on 8 missiles. The UK claims that this is in line with the UK's commitments under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NNPT).
The Vanguard class entered service in the early 1990s, and were designed for a 25-year life. Given a nine-year life extension programme as currently anticipated, the submarines will need replacement from 2028. Building nuclear submarines is a complicated business, meaning that the UK needs to make a decision no later than late 2015; helpfully, this is immediately after the next election (May 2015), which allows the Conservative Lib-Dem coalition to avoid a divisive decision on the future of the UK nuclear weapons programme; the Tories want a like-for-like replacement of Trident, and the Lib-Dems do not, but what the Lib-Dems do advocate is not entirely clear. Some, like the out-going Labour Government want to reduce the SSBN fleet to 3, making CASD probably impossible to maintain, others favour a cheaper cruise missile on existing attack submarines (SSNs) or aircraft, and yet others advocate getting out of the nuclear weapons game altogether. I'll use the NAO's 2008 Trident Replacement study and the House of Commons library's papers for the policy and the numbers.
What, then, are the UK's options? Fear not, we'll return to the UK's needs in part 3.
UK Options
Ignoring impossibly expensive options, like building a full nuclear triad of land and submarine based missiles and manned bombers, there are five main options. First, like-for-like replacement of Trident, maintaining CASD. Second, limited Trident replacement not including CASD. Third, nuclear tipped cruise missiles either from attack submarines or from aircraft. Fourth, air dropped bombs. Fifth, no fielded capability, but with a breakout capability whereby the UK could have a an air-dropped bomb in 12 - 24 months.
(No, not no to cruise. No to nuclear cruise - conventional cruise is much too useful to be jeopardised).
We can reject the third option immediately - nuclear armed cruise missiles. This is because the UK's existing cruise missiles - Tomahawk from submarines and Storm Shadow from Tornado aircraft - are useful in their different roles, and though each were designed to have an optional nuclear payload, it would be extremely dangerous to have both conventional and nuclear tipped versions of the same cruise missiles.
Why?
Simple: if you're on the receiving end of a cruise missile attack, and you cannot tell whether the missiles are conventionally or nuclear armed, then the incentive is to assume you're about to get nuked and therefore fire your nuclear missiles off. This is called the "signalling problem" and actually makes the world materially less stable. Consequently, the UK should not invest in nuclear cruise missiles for as long as it has conventionally armed cruise missiles. And it will for a long while as conventional cruise missiles are very useful.
Option One: Like for Like Replacement, maintaining CASD
Replacement - with four SSBNs and 12 - 16 missile tubes, each containing an upgraded Trident II missile, and mounting four independently targeted warheads. These could be based at Faslane as now, or to save some money, move them to Devonport, Plymouth or Portsmouth, closing HM Naval Base Clyde, Faslane. Likely bill - £20bn for the submarines, £100bn or so over 30 years for the whole system to 2045.
Option Two: Smaller replacement, breaking CASD
It is suggested that the UK could make do with three - or possibly only two - SSBNs, by electing not to have CASD. This would see SSBNs in port or at sea for training, and sortied for deterrent patrols at a time of heightened tensions. The level of savings is unclear, and it provides no guaranteed survivability against a first strike. This option also has signalling problems as the fact that an SSBN was put to sea in a time of tension could be interpreted as a major escalation.
Option Four: Free Fall Air Dropped Bombs
A return to Britain's starting point in the nuclear weapons arena, this option would see the RAF - and possibly the Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm (FAA) off the carriers in future - using manned aircraft dropping free-fall nuclear bombs. In the short to medium term this would from Tornado strike aircraft or from multirole Typhoons, and in the longer term the Joint Strike Fighter. This would be considerably cheaper than the SSBN option as it would be an additional role for existing aircraft used primarily in other roles, but would be much less survivable from a surprise first strike, could require forward basing rights to strike targets at intercontinental ranges, and compared to an SLBM, aircraft are significantly easier to attack en route to target.
Option Five: Exit the nuclear club If the UK does not need to have nuclear weapons, then it would be considerably cheaper to exit the nuclear club and retain a breakout capability at Aldermaston. This would mean the ability to fabricate existing designs on air-dropped nuclear weapons with 24 months notice, and in the meantime the scientists and technicians could be put to work in disarmament verification and cooperative threat reduction.
So, some options. In part 3, we'll look at the UK's needs and make recommendations.
