(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:
(Shameless self promotion, I know... deal with it!)
Forgive my lack of posting - I've been totally consumed by getting CentreForum Trident paper finished. And now it is - you can get it here - and there's been lots of interesting media coverage. I'm deeply indebted to many people - the acknowledgements are there for a reason - but the one I most liked was from the UK communist Morning Star; only the comrades know the truth. (NB Irony Alert!) We also made the wonderful ArmsControlWonk - with thanks to Dr. Jeffrey Lewis.
(Ainsworth addresses the Commons
in December 2009 on defence cuts. He might have said
"I've done some sums, and they don't add up. But don't worry, I'm not
going to be here after the election to worry about that.")
Apologies
for the lack of postings from here at SRM HQ - I've been very busy and,
as they say, all will be revealed shortly. Thus, it is with apologies
that this follow up to part one has been delayed - but here we are now.
The
figures are stark: the UK MoD is broke, and despite the cuts from the
2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) that we've discussed here and here
before, there are reasonable grounds to assume that there are more cuts
to come. Indeed, whilst Liam Fox told Parliament on 18 July 2011 that
the defence budget was "broadly in balance", it must be assumed that "broadly in balance" actually means "not actually in balance, so more cuts are required".
But this is not news. Indeed, prior to the 2010 election, Labour belated recognized that they'd blown the budget. This was made powerfully clear in Bernard Gray's report, which famously described the budget as undeliverable under any likely future budget. This was demonstrated in his chart on p. 94:
(Not ever going to work)
Moreover, Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls has made clear that Labour will accept the Coalition's cuts, meaning that Jim Murphy and his team need to meet the same challenge as the Government - find £74bn over ten years to balance the defence budget. And that will mean a proper discussion of what the UK is going to do with it's place in the world, setting the Government's aspirations, and then providing the budget to cover them.
Under
normal circumstances, political U-turns are mocked by political
opponents and denied by the U-turnee. Occasionally, U-turns are
emblematic of a new leaf - classically, Labour's repudiation of Clause IV under Blair in 1994 - and last week we saw something unusual; a Labour shadow Minister in favour of spending cuts, and in particular, defence cuts. Step forward, Jim Murphy MP.
I'll
deal with the specifics of the proposed Labour cuts in a future post -
suffice to say, they are a long way from both a mea culpa for the damage
of the unfunded promises of the Labour 1997-2010 years, but they are a
start for Labour to make a credible economic policy.
But
in reviewing Labour's record, I thought it would be fun to look at how
long Labour's Secretaries of State for Defence were actually in office,
and compare that with their Tory predecessors under Margaret Thatcher
and John Major - ie, back to 1979. The point is that there is such a
steep learning curve as a Secretary of State - especially for those with little or no background
in defence - that the first six months or so Ministers will be learning
as much as doing, with being really effective from about six months in.
So how did they do?
Two
things are striking: first, Geoff Hoon's five-and-a-half years in
office was remarkably - and abnormally - long. It wasn't a complete
triumph, as Hoon presided over the mini Defence Review known as the "New
Chapter" to the 1998 SDSR post the terrorist attacks of 9/11 - and then
allowed the UK's forces to become completely over-stretched in Iraq and
Afghanistan, whilst presiding over the disastrous procurement
performance that would come to dominate the MoD's budget (and with it,
everything else.)
Second,
once you take Hoon out of the equation, Labour Defence Secretaries
served for an average of 65 weeks - suggesting that they may have had
about six months cognizant of the issues to drive the change required.
(John Reid is probably the honourable exception as he had a good defence
background in opposition, but he was still in post for only a year,
meaning that he wasn't about long enough to deliver change.) Worse, as
the budgets reached breaking point under Gordon Brown's premiership, he
was keeping his Defence Secretaries in place for about half the
historical average - as well in Bob Ainsworth having picked a singularly
unimpressive Secretary of State. More damningly, as Ainsworth was the only one who was promoted from inside MoD, he should have had the best handle on the Departmental challenges, but he was probably the poorest of the lot.
So what does this mean? Possibly not much, but it does point to
the comparative lack of importance and oversight that the two Labour
governments gave to ministerial stability after George Robertson got
sent off to run NATO. And that lack of consistent leadership from the
top bears much of the responsibility for the mess that MoD was in by the
2010 Election.
(HMS Resolution, the UK's first SSBN arriving at Faslane in 1967 for the first time)
The good people involved wrote a book "The Nassau Connection" explaining how they did it - or at least how they managed the project.
(A short book. Sadly out of print.)
It's a short book, at just over 100 pages in a sparse civil service style, and is very interesting. So if you want to build something to replace this:
(HMS Vanguard, the first of Trident submarines arrives in 1994)
You'd do well to read this most interesting little book. Equally, if you think this is a silly idea (or even a very silly idea) then there's plenty of food for thought in this book, too. I'll post a fuller review shortly.
(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.
(FV 107 / Scimitar / CVR(T) Mk. 2 in Afghanistan: the first of six replacement studies started in the early '80s.
Several hundred million pounds later, the UK has actually delivered um, no vehicles)
Few commentators on UK Defence are as well informed - or sadly, less well known outside of the narrow confines of defence spotterdom - than Francis Tusa, editor of the Defence Analysis newsletter. So it was with great interest that I heard that Mr Tusa had a programme on Defence Procurement on BBC Radio 4 - well worth a listen.
Much on "The Conspiracy of Optimism"; the fact is that the UK has been trying to get a quart into a pint pot, mostly by underestimating the costs of the equipment at the beginning. Essentially, very few equipment programmes are ever cancelled, and as a result if you can get it into the MoD Equipment Programme (EP) then the cost rises will simply be absorbed at the end of the process. (NB to the defence industrialists whining about everything - BAE Systems,
that's you amongst others - is just ridiculous: the MoD is not
there as a industrial policy - it is there to deliver combat effect in
support of foreign policy goals at a time and place of the Government's
choosing.)
(Lots of bits. From lots of Constituencies. And not yet assembled....)
Except that costs are generally not absorbed or mitigated, as the costs are allowed to rise and the stock MoD answer is to S L O W things down. Right down. Very S L O W L Y indeed (but remember, nothing gets cancelled, right?) This drives the costs through the roof, but makes it affordable in the next 12 months. How much more expensive? Well, effectively doubling the cost of the Carrier programme for instance, leaving the UK in the absurd position of having one and a bit aircraft carriers with no actual aircraft to fly off them. Well done.
So, Bernard Gray (the new broom at Defence Equipment and Support (DE&S)) wants new skills and expertise into the procurement game. Good. But the biggest challenge is surely that irrespective of the MoD getting it's house in order (which is a good idea, but is unlikely in the short-term - and the cultural change required is enormous), it is just as much about the UK government deciding what it wants to achieve internationally - and then paying for it.
Very, very, difficult choices in 2012. Happy New Year, MoD.
("Minister, I'd like to drop this bomb on Libya this afternoon if we can afford it..."
"Dunno, let me get back to you.")
Briefly, those disreputable lefties at the Guardian have come up with a scoop, with an authentic-looking paper on cutting senior officers and civil servants in the UK Ministry of Defence. Naturally, the MoD are refusing to comment on leaks (which is sensible, and not just because there have recently been times when arguably they wouldn't have done anything else), but the numbers are remarkable.
Not, I hasten to add, because we didn't already know that there were lots more senior officers than the UK's force size would suggest, nor because we weren't all too clear that the MoD had a largely unreformed management structure, in which classic pyramids abound (if I'm a 1-star officer, then I must have one or more Captain / Colonel / Group Captains working for me, who in turn need the full array of Lieutenant Commanders / Majors / Squadron Leaders working for them who in turn etc etc).
No, on a first pass, the most notable factoid (assuming, as seems likely, this leak is real) is that the numbers of senior officers really grew after the end of the Cold War in 1990. Not sure yet whether this is absolute numbers or merely as a proportion of the forces - I'll get back to this later in the week.
In the meantime, I'll leave you with the ever-prescient words of Bremner, Bird and Fortune:
(The Muppets' take on SDSR. As opposed to the take of the muppets who actually did SDSR.)
I was reflecting on Trident with a friend the other day, and unusually, we agreed on something: that the key questions are all about prioritization and the UK's role in the world, with the international legal questions playing a constructive but not definitive role. Indeed, dear reader(s)*, I (sadly) accept that the UK will attempt to finesse any argument on NPT Art VI based on whatever the Government decides it wants to do - though I broadly accept Daniel Joyner's argument on Art VI, and specifically Christine Chinkin's 2005 Opinion on the UK's obligations under the NPT, and that replacing Trident would be inconsistent with the UK's NPT obligations.**
The question my friend and I sparred over was whether there was a case for Trident replacement based on the uncertainty of the world situation, and the possibility / probability of further proliferation of nuclear arms; specifically, should Iran go nuclear, would this prompt Saudi acquisition of nuclear capability as Sir Malcolm Rifkind MP suggests, leading to the nuclearisation of the rest of the Middle East?
(DF-21C. Presumably Saudi ones at least get a different paint scheme.)
I am the first to agree that there is little to be gained in terms of regional security by the proliferation of atomic weapons to Iran and Saudi Arabia. Indeed, as the Atlantic Magazine points out this week, the insecurity of Pakistan's atomic arsenal is perceived as one of the three most serious national security threats to the US; the notion of Saudi buying an atomic capability from Pakistan (or more implausibly, Israel) to mount on its recently acquired Chinese Dong-Feng 21 (CSS-5) MRBMs is plausible and worrying. But the should the expectation that Iranian nuclearisation and Saudi response mean that the UK should go ahead and replace Trident?
In a word, "No".
Why?
The rationale for an independent UK nuclear capability has historically been based around the perceived need for a second-decision making pole in a superpower exchange: bluntly, would - when push came to shove - the US initiate a tactical / strategic nuclear exchange which would result in the destruction of the American homeland to respond to a conventional Warsaw Pact invasion of Western Europe? In case the answer was "no" - or "possibly no" - then the case for a British (and French) nuclear force that could inflict enough damage on the USSR to deter the Soviet Union from trying it on - the fabled "Moscow Criterion" - was intellectually defensible.
However, it was only required because the US could have been subject to nuclear blackmail - something that none countries of concern (Iran, Pakistan, North Korea) have demonstrated. And it is instructive to see how far from this position these countries are: the closest would be North Korea if it were able to deploy a reliable Taepo-Dong 2 ICBM force with which it could hit the US west coast - which is about a million miles from the current position of two public test flights that ended in failure, and no evidence that the required small (under 500kg) nuclear warhead exists in North Korea. If Pakistan can produce the Tamiur ICBM (yet to be tested, much less deployed), the reported 7000km design range does not bring the US within range - see below:
(OPAB is the ICAO code for Abbotabad - Osama bin Laden's last home town.
7000km is the lighter area - excluding all of the USA.)
As such, Tamiur poses no threat to the US and therefore there would be no cost to the US in responding to (the currently - and for the foreseeable future - technically impossible) proposition of a Pakistani nuclear ICBM attack on the UK. Consequently, the fear of nuclear blackmail leading to strategic decoupling of US from NATO from a Tamiur-style ICBM is simply non-existent. (It is accepted that Pakistan could put an atomic weapon in a shipping container and deliver to target on a truck - but unless you're prepared to retaliate on suspicion of the source, Trident is no use to you.)
It is also hard to see that the US/NATO gains much from UK Continuous At-Sea Deterrence (CASD) given the very limited number of warheads that UK Trident now carries. Indeed, the gang over at Arms Control Wonk argue persuasively that even if the US defence cuts from the failure of the Budgetary Super Committee disproportionately fell on the nuclear forces - leading to the removal of a land-based ICBM and cutting SSBN(X) Trident submarine replacement to 10 boats from 12 - then the US could still configure its forces to max-out the New START limits. With 1550 warheads, it's hard to see what difference 48 UK CASD warheads makes to the decision-making of, say, North Korea or Pakistan now or in the next 20 years.
It is on this basis that I'm coming to the position that the UK gains very little in security terms from retaining Trident; it does however cost at least £30bn that could make a significance difference to the UK's conventional forces, which, as we've discussed ad nauseam here is actually what could make a significant difference to the UK - and to NATO and the UK's non-NATO partners. Moreover, until the UK brings the new aircraft carriers into service - preferably with some aircraft to fly off them - UK conventional long-range short-notice conventional force projection is limited to two cruise missile systems: the RN's with BGM-109 Tomahawk from its attack submarines (SSNs) and RAF Tornados with Storm Shadow. Both systems are excellent and provide complementary capabilities. Indeed, HMS ASTUTE recently completed the first of class firings of Tomahawk in the USA.
As good as these systems are, there are clear limitations - Storm Shadow is comparatively short-ranged (reportedly under 300nm) meaning that some credible target sets will require the Tornados to overfly defended territory with attendant greater risks, and will in any event likely require local basing rights for the Tornado launch aircraft. Tomahawk is long range (more than 1000nm) but the RN is suffering from an acute lack of SSNs with the older Swiftsure-class boats now retired, and the first of the Trafalgar-class also struck without the replacement Astute-class SSNs ready to replace them. Moreover, the Trafalgar-class's maximum warload of 30 torpedoes and Tomahawks means that the total number of missiles is actually available against any target set is likely to be less than this. And though stealthy, a submarine can only be in one place at once.
(USS Ohio undergoing SSBN to SSGN conversion)
Decomissioning Trident could address both of these problems. As part of the 1992 START II Treaty, the US Navy would have to reduce its total SSBN fleet to 14. However, instead of scrapping them, it converted four of its 18 Ohio-class SSBNs to carry up to 154 Tomahawks instead of Trident missiles. The result is an impressively balanced, stealthy, strike platform, which provides far more relevant capability to today's - and tomorrow's - conflicts than the Trident missiles formerly carried. Better still for the UK, given that the UK's Vanguard-class SSBNs have the same missile compartment design - though mounting 16 rather than 24 tubes - conversion to Tomahawk carriage should benefit from the considerable work already completed by the US Navy. A full-up Vanguard-class SSGN could carry 106 Tomahawks - more than three times the theoretical maximum number on a Trafalgar-class.
SSGN conversion and already anticipated life-extension to the Vanguard-class would allow the UK to have a deployable, long-range conventional precision strike platform through to the full operational capability of the Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers in the mid-2020s. Food for thought!
* As per ES, it is essential to provide grammatical certainty
** This raises the interesting question of what would happen if the Finance Act which provided funding for Trident were the subject of a Judicial Review....
(RNAD Coulport - where the UK's nuclear weapons are stored before being mated to Trident missiles)
What should the UK's future policy be on replacing of Trident? And how should the IAEA's November 2011 report on Iran affect the UK's position?
These aren't easy questions, going as they do to the core of what the UK's role in the world is / should be over the next 30 years, and what the British people are prepared to pay for this role. Indeed, if the last 30 years are any guide to the next 30, then UK politicians will find it far too easy to ignore the cost of their global ambitions, and in effect hoping that their unfunded strategic bluff will never get called.
Indeed, this was British policy in the 1920s under the so-called "10-year Rule", which postulated
in Professor Vernon Bogdanor'swords, "that they should plan on the assumption there would not be a war for the
next 10 years because the view was that large armaments led to war -
this was only abandoned in 1932." Helpfully, the 10-year rule was also much cheaper than rearmament. And arguably, (Afghanistan aside), the UK's 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) has in effect attempted to reinstitute the 10-year rule with a strong focus on what it calls "Future Force 2020", in which painful cuts today will, in the words of the RAF PR machine lead to:
"The longer-term vision for the make up of our military – Future Force
2020 – will be secured by this one-per-cent-a-year real terms increase
in the planned equipment and equipment support programme."
Except that there is little confidence that the money required is available, given that at the beginning of the SDSR process there was at least a £42bn hole in MoD's procurement finances in the period to 2020. Helpfully, much of the capital spending on the Trident spending would occur just beyond this horizon, and is thus helpfully excluded. Hence, a more realistic assessment of the position is that it is even more unhealthy than this looks.
The time for such a muddled "strategy" - if it ever existed - is well and truly over. Instead, what is required is a careful assessment of the what role the UK wants to play internationally, and how it should go about getting there from here - accepting that "here" is not an optimal starting point. Moreover, given that it will cost at least £25 - £30bn in capital spend between now and 2025, the replacement for Trident has a central role to play in any such discussion - something that Dr. Liam Fox MP as the Secretary of State for Defence at the time of SDSR explicitly overruled by insisting that Trident would be replaced (and implicitly, whatever other cuts were required would be borne to protect the Trident programme.) As we've seen, the required cuts were deep, wide-ranging and rushed: it is therefore of little surprise that in the next decade Britain's conventional forces will become dangerously unbalanced (e.g., an RN capable of deployed a carrier battle group sans aircraft, but only if they stopped doing almost anything else; no fixed-wing maritime patrol assets to support maritime ops; 14 extremely expensive PFI air-refuelling tankers and down to 8 squadrons of fast jets. And this is before we get to the Army...).
So what? And more importantly, so what about Trident?
Well, it's difficult. We'll come to that in Part II. But here's a teaser....
(USS Ohio SSBN-726 undergoing SSGN conversion.
Note the former Trident tubes open behind the sail)
(Commas are important. And box two contains a chameleon; do keep up at the back.)
Grammar? Oh dear.
At the risk of dredging up bad memories for an entire generation, (myself included), I'm sorry to confirm that our 4th-grade teachers were correct: grammar matters. And it is especially important to lawyers when it comes to interpreting legislation and Treaties. For international law, the sacred text in interpreting treaties is itself a Treaty - the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT) which came into force in 1980.
"Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control."
This is a very long sentence. With a single comma.
It could be interpreted in a couple of ways:
First, it could mean that State Parties are are obliged to
pursue good faith negotiations on ceasing the nuclear arms race, and
nuclear disarmament as well as pursing a treaty on general disarmament under strict and effective international controls.
Second, it could mean that the State Parties are obliged to pursue good faith negotiations on ceasing the nuclear arms race, and nuclear disarmament within the context of a treaty on general disarmament under strict and effective international controls;
Grammatically, the first interpretation makes more sense than the second, because the comma separates the first clause
"negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to
cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear
disarmament,"
from the second
"and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control"
making it clear that the two are separate notions.
This construction would mean that the Nuclear Weapons States (NWS) were obliged to disarm independent of a treaty on general disarmament. Under this understanding, it would hard to argue that spending £30bn - £100bn between now and 2042 on a replacement for Trident would qualify as "nuclear disarmament", and that as such, such a purchase would be in direct contravention to the UK's international obligations, and would therefore be illegal as a matter of British law.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the UK Government favours the second interpretation, tying as it does nuclear disarmament to a future treaty on "general and complete disarmament". As this happy state of affairs is yet to occur (CCW, CWC and BWC notwithstanding) - and the use of the modifier "complete" sets the bar extremely high - so the logic goes, there is no requirement for nuclear disarmament, however desirable this may be. Conveniently, the second formulation does not make it illegal to procure a replacement to the existing UK Trident SLBM system.
(Minimum deterrence looks a lot like maximum deterrence but with fewer missiles.)
But what's interesting is that over the last decade or so, UK Governments have clung to their tortuous grammatical interpretation whilst publicly demonstrating that the UK is making reductions in its nuclear forces (even as they spend £1bn per annum to reinvigorate the AWE Aldermaston nuclear weapons design and production infrastructure). This appears to be an odd halfway house, as it attempts to demonstrate that the UK is moving towards nuclear disarmament whilst retaining what Whitehall describes as a "minimum credible deterrent".* Moreover, to scrub up its disarmament credentials, the UK draws attention
to its ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), and
the fact that irrespective of the stalled Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty
(FMCT), the UK is no longer producing fissile material for military
purposes.**
Indeed, the UK Foreign Office goes so far as to describe the impact of the 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) thus:
"In this Review the Prime Minister, David Cameron, and Deputy Prime
Minister, Nick Clegg, committed the UK to maintaining a credible
deterrence by:
reducing the number of warheads onboard each submarine from 48 to 40
reducing our requirement for operationally available warheads from fewer than 160 to no more than 120
reducing our overall nuclear weapon stockpile to no more than 180
reducing the number of operational missiles on each submarine
These reductions illustrate that whilst the UK believes in
maintaining a minimum credible deterrent this is kept constantly under
review and is fully in line with our international obligations under the
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty."
But it is onlyin line with the UK's "international obligations under the
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty" if the second, grammatically tortuous, interpretation of NPT Art VI is accepted.
So who is right? And does it matter?
On which interpretation is correct, I'm not sure yet. But it certainly matters, as if the first interpretation is correct, then the UK Government could find themselves explaining a breach of their international obligations. Against this backdrop, I'm very much looking forward to reading Daniel Joyner's new book, especially after some of the critical reviews. I'll write again when I've read it and reflected.
* As mentioned before this blog does not accept the bald assertion that the UK Trident system currently deters anyone or anything, and therefore doesn't use the term.
** The cynics may observe that it's easy to be in favour of a narrow FMCT if you've got all the highly enriched nuclear fuel that you would ever need on hand, especially if it is already outside of IAEA safeguards.
(One of the few photos to make Type 45 DDGs - left - at £1bn each look comparatively inexpensive...)
As some of you know, I'm currently sitting on as a juror, meaning that these posts are somewhat erratic. For this, my apologies - we should be done next week.
However, this is the first post in a new series on the options and legal issues occasioned by the UK's impending decision on whether or not to replace the Vanguard-classballistic missile submarines (SSBN) in June 2015 as part of renewing the UK's nuclear weapons programme. A future UK SSBN would carry the UGM-133 Trident II D5 submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM), which has been life-extended to their expected out-of-service date of 2042. In short, the (so-called) "UK Nuclear Deterrent"* could easily be assumed to be required and simply treated as a technical and management challenge that just requires the MoD and the defence industry to get on and build the submarines.
As a system, Trident remains impressively reliable, with USS NEVADA conducting the 135th consecutive successful test launch in March 2011, an unmatched reliability record for SLBMs, and one which contrasts vividly with the Russian's on-going problems with the SS-NX-30. Moreover, as a result of the 1962 Polaris Sales Agreement as amended for Trident under Regan and Thatcher in 1982, the UK has a privileged position vis-a-vis the other nuclear states, it does not have to develop an indigenous SLBM delivery system, making UK Trident comparatively cost effective.
(Not your average SLBM showroom)
Trident is, in the famous words of Sir Humphrey Appleby "the nuclear missile that Harrods would sell you". Perhaps, but as (the ever) hapless Jim Hacker replies, "... it costs £15bn and we don't need it." Allowing for inflation from 1986, this is roughly the discussion that the UK faces today.
But as much as I revere "Yes, Prime Minister", there are also financial, strategic and legal elements at play in the decision, and this blog will present commentary of them over the next few months.
*You will never see this blog refer to the UK nuclear weapons programme (UK NWP) as the "UK Nuclear Deterrent" as this implies a value-judgement that has yet to be demonstrated, namely, that someone or something would, but for the existence of the "Deterrent" want to attack the UK, and have therefore been successfully deterred.
(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?"
