Technology | 2010.01.26
Naval nostalgia and edgy kit are no basis for sane defence | Simon Jenkins
The head of the army is right: war today means boots on the ground, not bombs in the air or manoeuvres at sea
The general is right and the admiral wrong. The head of the army, Sir David Richards, has at last locked horns with the head of the navy, Sir Mark Stanhope, in what should be a savage, no-quarter-given Ministry of Defence turf war. Only good can come from it.
Today Stanhope reacted angrily to a speech by Richards , who implicitly dismissed the navy and air force as strategically obsolete. He said they were obsessed with "exotic capability that is rendered irrelevant by advances in technology". To Richards, "we get more bang for our buck from soldiers who can fight one moment and help others the next". Hi-tech weapons platforms were "not a good way to help tottering states" – the chief objective, however warped, of current foreign policy.
The admiral banged his fist on the bridge like John Mills on convoy duty. He then made the cardinal error of sailors in Whitehall and cited the Falklands, a sea war fought only because the navy (and the colonies) existed, and at ridiculous cost. Seeing the Treasury bearing down on his beloved carriers and submarines, Stanhope demanded that Britain maintain a full-blown navy, capable of "high-intensity warfare".
Stanhope wants to wind the clock back to before John Nott\'s 1981 defence review, the last sane survey of British defence to be free of bombast, prestige and industrial lobbying. It was accepted by Margaret Thatcher but blown out of the water by the Falklands. Stanhope dreams of pre-Falklands glory days, Atlantic convoys, hunter-killer submarines and amphibious invasions anywhere on earth. But while these may be mere dreams, their costs are all too real.
In 1997 Stanhope\'s navy won its greatest battle since Trafalgar. It browbeat Labour\'s defence ministers into promising a new fleet, with carriers, destroyers, submarines and nuclear missiles, on pain of being thought leftwing. Also conceded were the air force\'s demand for more planes to dogfight with Russian MiGs, and the MoD\'s demented staff roll of 87,000 civilians (to service 175,000 in uniform). The army\'s General Charles Guthrie had to look on appalled. The price of those decisions is being paid in the killing fields of Helmand.
Real war beats turf war in defining priorities. It makes the virtual real and turns two dimensions into three. Since Tony Blair made Labour the war party in Kosovo in 1999, the army has been on continuous battle duty, undermanned, ill-equipped and subject to the cynical abuse recalled in Geoff Hoon\'s evidence to Chilcot today of being refused permission to prepare properly for Iraq lest it upset the Labour party.
The army has had enough. Worsted in Iraq and about to be worsted in Afghanistan, last year\'s boss, Sir Richard Dannatt, broke protocol in protesting at the cabinet\'s neglect of his troops. He then jumped tank and joined the Tories in a bizarre show of partisanship. His successor, Richards, has broken a different omerta in openly criticising the extravagance of his fellow service chiefs.
He could have cited the navy\'s carrier programme, now rising through £5bn and with the first keel already laid. There are the £20bn Trident replacements, the £20bn Eurofighters and the £10bn F-35s for the carriers. These programmes are so over-budget as to leave some £15bn hovering over the MoD in unfunded debt. Not a penny of these projects is going on the real war.
Every external student of the MoD, from Bernard Gray and Paul Robinson to Lewis Page and Richard North , describes a department whose spending is out of control and devoid of reason. As Robinson (author of Doing Less With Less: Making Britain More Secure) remarked, the MoD has accepted that there is "no conventional military threat to Europe". The huge spending by EU countries is "primarily to defend us against assymetrical threats such as terrorists". Four million soldiers and $200bn a year are required "to protect us from a few thousand men armed with nothing more sophisticated than Soviet-era RPGs. The excess capacity is staggering."
Whenever I write disagreeably about the Royal Navy, it deploys press officers in battle fleet strength. I accept that the RN is a noble creation steeped in history and romance, the Church of England at sea: conservative, obsessed with ritual, and a little gay. But the game is up. Trident lacks deterrence plausibility. There is no money to give the carriers frigate escorts, and deploying them tempts politicians to unwise intervention.
The same is true of the air force. Jet fighters are toys for boys, a hangover from the Battle of Britain. They scream over Welsh mountains burning more carbon in a minute than the wind turbines below could make up for in a decade. As bombers, their inaccuracy makes them counter-productive rather than counter-insurgent, and they are swiftly being replaced by cheaper drones.
Stanhope\'s language shows how far his reach exceeds his budgetary grasp. He speaks of a navy "intimately tied to Britain\'s wider position of influence in the world". He wants to "contribute significantly to the overall business of defence across the globe", to respond "at short notice to the unexpected but not unforeseen". It might be Churchill talking, Churchill with billions to burn.
The prestige case for defence has always been meretricious. China, Russia, Japan and Germany feel no need to invade distant countries to be taken seriously. Richards must be right that present and foreseeable conflicts involve complex relationships, mostly amid civilians. Insofar as this requires force, it means boots on the ground, not bombs in the air or manoeuvres at sea.
Any constructive use for air and sea power can only be as an adjunct to land power. It is wrong for the navy to cruise the world on "goodwill" visits or the air force to practise dog fights when a defence secretary has to write letters to service wives assuring them that soldiers have "the appropriate equipment needed to allow them to complete their mission". The statement is untrue.
This offers a virtuous circle. Sane defence means concentrating on the task in hand: disengaging from Afghanistan in good order, and equipping an army capable of making a better fist of things should politicians again be tempted to overseas adventure. Defence does not mean thinking up fantasy justifications for costly kit.
Big savings can be made without risk to national security. In his weekly homily to the dead of Helmand, Gordon Brown always cites their "bravery". Defence needs bravery closer to home.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]al-nostalgia-sane-defence-army
