New RAF aircraft.... leased under UORs

(Not all RAF BAe 146s are created equal - here's the rest of the fleet from 32[TR] Sqn)

Some interesting news at a time of further UK MoD cuts: the RAF is to lease two BAe 146-200QC airliners to fly personnel and equipment around Afghanistan. The idea is to take the pressure off the RAF's small C-130 Hercules fleet, which has been on almost continuous operations since the initial deployments to the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. Indeed, it was the operations tempo that led to the C-130K fleet finally being retired without replacement - as the Airbus A400M is running behind schedule and over budget.

What's interesting here is that this is being procured under an Urgent Operational Requirement (UOR) which is normally funded directly from the Treasury via an additional appropriation for operations. (This is in addition to the actual additional cost of fighting - known as Net Additional Cost of Military Operations, or NACMO).

(UORs inbound!)

Now, back in ancient history (known as "2001") UORs used to be funded in full, with very few questions asked. This - and the failings of the conventional acquisition system led the UPR system to be the front-line's preferred route of getting the tools needed for the job in hand, and the costs exploded. This was made worse because UORs were by their nature temporary for a single conflict, meaning that the equipment would be withdrawn from service a maximum of 12 months after the end of the conflict - or the MoD would have to find the cash in their existing budget to sustain the equipment (known as bringing it into core MoD capability).

What this meant for the UOR kit was that there were rarely examples in the UK for large-scale training, spares were kept to a minimum (as it was a temporary expedient), and there was none of the conventional engineering and training support associated with conventionally procured equipment. But if the genius point for the hard pressed front line was that off-the-shelf kit arrived and worked (more or less), the fact that the Treasury's reserve paid for it made it a boon for the accountants faced with a deluge of overspends in the procurement budget. (And to the extent that defence industrial policy matters, off the shelf kit was often built outside the UK - often in the US, which didn't help Britain's defence industry too much.) 

And the sums were vast: the UK NAO estimates that UORs for armoured vehicles from 2003-11 consumed £2.8bn - in total, equivalent to about half of the annual equipment budget - whilst £1125m was spent on conventional programmes for similar vehicles, £718m of which actually resulted in ZERO actual armoured vehicles being procured in the conventional route. The net result is that the British military will be short of armoured vehicles until at least 2024-25.

Things got so bad during the mid-2000s with Iraq and Afghanistan, the Treasury finally said no, and told the MoD that there would be a cap, and that instead of UORs being "extra free money", above a ceiling, Treasury would reclaim the UOR cash from future years appropriations, further dragging the MoD's long-term planning into the mire. 

So how does this affect two secondhand BAe 146s?

("I don't care if they go up-diddly-up-up, etc"... a C-27J swoons)

At one level, not at all. The UK is going to withdraw combat forces from Afghanistan in 2014 and it would pointless to procure this niche capability if we were to find it unnecessary in less than 24 months’ time. Indeed, this is precisely the situation the United States have found themselves in scrapping the Joint Cargo Aircraft (JCA)programme, with the expensive embarrassment of having purchased brand-new C-27J Spartans. Instead the UK will spend £6m + defensive modifications to provide a useful intra-theatre airlift option. So far, so good.

But it underscores the lack of planning and delivery of core MoD capability - in this case A400M tactical airlifters - continues to cause the panic button to be hit and UORs to be required. 

PR12 - More UK Defence Cuts?

(Philip Hammond: likely to make sure a balance sheet does. Good for him!)

Parliament rises on the 26th of March - it's taking a break until the 16th of April for Easter and constituency business. And before the Recess, it is expected that Secretary of State for Defence Philip Hammond will address the Commons to announce the outputs of the 2012 MoD Planning Round (known as PR12)  and explain how the MoD's budget has been trimmed from Liam Fox's being "broadly in balance" to actually, well, er, actually being in balance. And to do so with no increases in funding, and presumably with no clear source of magic pixie dust that reduces the costs of military equipment. 

In other words, there are going to be more cuts. In fact, I hear that something like between £3bn and £5bn is likely to be cut from the forward programme. We look forward to understanding how this is going to work out - it is most likely that this will not be outright cancellation of existing contracts (gets very expensive) but is much more likely to be those projects that haven't been signed - but which the forces are expecting to get. Ouch.

Let's see what they come up with - but it makes the case for retaining the Trident replacement programme at £25 - £33bn whilst taking more cuts in the conventional forces ever weaker.

UK Defence Futures

(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.

Post SDSR - The SDSR Numbers

 

(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?"

** Chalmers, p. 7
*** Chalmers, p. 7

SDSR - Post Libya, more questions

(6 Sqn RAF Typhoon* from RAF Leuchars: low, fast, agile. MoD budget: low.)

Against a backdrop of the Royal Navy's redundancies last week, there's been some interesting work coming out of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI, MoD's favourite thinktank) this week from the estimable Malcolm Chalmers on defence spending. Prof. Chalmers' paper is here, and I'll comment on it in detail over the next few days.

The real questions remain around whether the budget is under control, and whether the reduced capability of the UK forces has been matched with a reduced level of political intent to use military force. (Oops. More complex, that.)

*Copyright: Andy Sheppard

UK Nuclear Future

(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. 

Thoughts, as always, most welcome.

Poetry

Doggerel, actually. Meant to post this earlier on the failure of the 1998 Strategic Defence Review:

Implementing SDR 1998

Geoffrey had a little Plan, with contradictions that weren’t hidden
And anything that Gordon said, Geoffrey did unbidden;
“The Plan” demanded tanks and tankers, breaking Gordon’s “Golden Rule”
But “The Plan” was very popular in Preston, ’ull and Poole.
So Geoffrey stretched “The Plan” out, with “jam tomorrow” for all
And everyone was satisfied, waiting patiently for The Ball.
But then the budget, it collapsed, imperilling “The Plan”
And all that Comrade Bob could do was blame another man…

Sad but true. Time will tell whether the 2010 version is any better - it doesn't look too hopeful.

Starting out all over again

Well, here we are. I started this blog back in 2008, and never did anything with it - and when I did think about doing something with it, I was constrained by work.

So, in the spirit of fresh starts, here's a new blog.

What do I want to cover? Well, it's going to reflect public policy issues and international law, and we'll start with an analysis of the ICJ Kosovo decision over the weekend, and then move onto an assessment of the UK's options in the on-going Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR).

I don't really have any idea whether anyone will read these musings, but if you've got this far, thank-you, and I hope to turn it into a place for conversation.

Cheers,

Toby