Defence review: a mixed bag

By Pete North - March 23, 2021

Defence Secretary Ben Wallace has outlined a white paper outlining the shape and size of the British military over the years to come. It’s a mixed bag of cuts and promises of jam tomorrow. But then they usually are. You can trust them when they say they’ll cut things but no so much when it comes to filling the capability gaps.

Being charitable, however, it’s not all bad. This to me looks like a major modernisation programme. The RAF is having yet more fat trimmed and that’s probably no bad thing. We’re finally leaving the cold war mentality behind. It’s not about fast jets and big toys any more. But even so we are still downsizing.

It makes total sense to cut the Hawk force being that we’re just not operating a large fast jet fleet and simulator technology kills a lot of the old arguments about real flying time. For the moment it looks like the Red Arrows have won a reprieve but the writing has been on the wall for a while. BAe is no longer making or exporting the Hawk, thus there is no national requirement to showcase them internationally. If they’re still around in 2030 I shall be hugely surprised.

The one cut I have doubts about is the C130. The Army is looking at reconfiguring for high mobility elite operations, for which there is no better suited aircraft. The A400M is unreliable and too big and the C17 is really just a cargo bus even though it notionally has many of the same tactical capabilities.

As to downsizing the Army, I’m not sure that it’s necessarily a bad thing so long as we have a functioning reserve. Dumping the Warrior refit looks questionable, but in any case, every time we undertake such a review the forces have to live with expensive decisions made years ago. We may or may not have made the wrong policy decisions as regards to future vehicles but we have to live with them come what may.

What matter is logistics and training. We need further clarity on the future role of helicopters being that the white paper appears to be technically illiterate. Clearly nobody in the armed forces got to read it in advance.

But then this is more than a question of size and capability. It is also one of direction and the main cause for concern is the division of resources over a diverse array of deployments and having to do more with less – while also breaking into new operational territory and entirely new disciplines.

I’ve been following defence debates for a long time and just about everybody in the game has an opinion on what toys we should have and how many, and nobody is ever satisfied so ministers can’t win either way, especially having to balance political ambition, technical requirements and budgets against competing interests.

But in any case, by the end of the decade we will have a large(ish) armed forces with broad capabilities, able to reconfigure at short notice, and we’ll still be punching above our weight (notwithstanding future cuts). The question is whether our forces can do any of those things effectively, and whether a smaller force, pulled to and fro according to changing strategic and political priorities can still manage to deliver the basics.

We’re already seeing such challenges emerge, having gone all in on having a readily deployable carrier group. It gives us a largely useless capability (in terms of the major threats citied) while seriously eating into the Royal Navy’s ability to conduct business elsewhere. The ambition, or rather delusions, of our political class will likely leave us unable to respond to emergencies.

One suspects, though that defence commentators are just as stuck in the past as our political class. Black propaganda, cyber threats and biological warfare can destroy a country without firing a shot, and a navy fleet as big as it was at the 1977 Fleet Review wouldn’t be of any use. Defence of the realm is multidimensional, multidisciplinary and highly unpredictable. It could be argued that these less glamorous areas are where the major thinking and spending should go.

For the moment, with the nation struggling with an identity crisis and failing to find a new post-EU role in the world, our defence spending policy will mirror that incoherence. As yet we do not have a clear foreign policy and we’re pulling back on aid and development. Until we know what that future role is to be, defence planning can only ever be generalised, perhaps to the point of uselessness. The structural problems within the armed forces will likely remain until our national political malaise is resolved.