Strategic Thinking on Trident Part I - Why?

 

(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's words, "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)

Post SDSR - Implementation through PR11

 

(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 Capabilities Pit 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...

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

UK's nuclear future: Beyond Trident

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.