How much defence can we afford?

Max Hastings says that the stakes are high for Liam Fox’s strategic defence review: but we must maintain our current troop numbers and cut in other areas to pay for them

Britain’s armed forces are entering a dangerous period of upheaval. The new government’s strategic defence review (SDR) will impose swingeing cuts, and the only uncertainty concerns where the axe will fall. Defence Secretary Liam Fox has announced — in the Sunday Times, rather than to parliament, that the Chief of Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, will step down in the autumn.

Stirrup will therefore remain as a lame duck while the SDR is carried out. This is deliberate. Fox wants to emphasise that the SDR’s outcome will represent the intentions of government, which a new CDS will then be required to carry out. He thus hopes to avoid the tribal warfare he believes inescapable if a soldier — almost inevitably a lobbyist for the interests of his own service — takes over immediately.

The next CDS will be either the head of the army, Gen. Sir David Richards, or the Vice-Chief of Defence Staff, Gen. Sir Nick Houghton. Houghton is a clever and personable Yorkshireman, who has performed very well in his present role, but the army would prefer Richards. He has been tested in important operational commands, and has shown himself clear-thinking, forceful and outspoken.

The latter qualities are by no means always welcome to politicians. Fox was no more enthusiastic about the perceived politicisation of former head of the army Gen. Sir Richard Dannatt than was the last Labour government.

Striking a balance between obedience to government decisions and independence of view is hard for every CDS — Charles Guthrie was the last worthy incumbent. When David Cameron makes his choice, he may want to remember that some notable recent strategic blunders — including the 2006 under-strength Helmand deployment — took place because successive chiefs of defence staff were too eager to fall in with government wishes.

It has been a mistake to have an RAF chief in the top job when Britain is fighting a war. The doctrine of tri-service interchangeability has been absurdly overdone. Jock Stirrup provoked deep military dismay by choosing an RAF navigator to become chief of joint operations, with a sailor as his deputy. Fliers and sailors cannot be expected convincingly to handle soldiers’ tactical problems, and there has anyway been too much interference with the battlefield from the MoD and joint-service HQ at Northwood.

Stirrup has borne unjust blame for some things that have gone wrong on his watch, but few of his colleagues doubt that he was overpromoted. Under his leadership, or lack of it, relations between the chiefs have been sulphurous.

Liam Fox has strong ideas about defence, and a good opinion of his own abilities. There are some doubts in the MoD, however, about whether he has yet grasped the stark nature of the choices the Exchequer will force upon him. Paul Cornish and Andrew Dorman wrote in a 2009 Chatham House paper about future strategy: ‘A defence review that makes grand statements from the centre of government without being too concerned about what can or cannot be achieved, or which insists that defence is not about ideas but about saving money, will almost certainly repeat the errors of the past.’

Both these assertions are true, and the authors’ assault on service tribalism in the same paper was well-merited. But the inescapable issue is how much defence Britain can afford within a declared upper budgetary limit which is already breached. Much depends on whether the government wants to retain a capability to commit ground forces overseas.

Liam Fox is convinced the navy must have its planned aircraft-carriers, although the purchase of US F-35 aircraft to fly off them will almost certainly be cut back. This means paying a bill for platforms and planes probably close to £15 billion. Given the budgetary black hole and the government’s determination to replace the Trident nuclear deterrent, the carriers can only be funded by cutting ground forces and other equipment programmes.

Yet the army is already struggling to maintain a mere 10,500 men in Afghanistan, one third of peak numbers in Ulster at the height of the Troubles. Most units are under-strength. Every battalion, company and platoon fights with fewer riflemen than it needs as a result of sickness, leave absences and casualties. There is a serious drain of trained personnel who quit after one or two Afghan tours, because these come round with such relentless frequency.

There are key questions, of course, about how far the current conflict should be allowed to dictate the future shape of the armed forces, and how they can be reconfigured to do their jobs better. Not everything that has gone wrong in Afghanistan can be blamed on lack of resources. A few months ago, for instance, Captain John Bethell of the Welsh Guards produced a formidably sceptical report, after serving as an intelligence officer in Helmand.

‘As an army,’ he wrote, ‘and as armed forces more generally, we have come to place increasing confidence in technological solutions — sensors and platforms — yet we have only begun to grapple with the task of engaging with the civilian population...

‘British forces, without an effective doctrine, rotate rapidly through six-month tours, with limited continuity, and pay lip-service to Northern Ireland experience without examining it in depth... Our forces today are “accidental counter-insurgents” — neither purpose-made for, nor ideologically committed to, the operations in which we find ourselves embroiled.’

Bethell’s strictures, whether justified or not, reflect a belief within the army that there is plenty of scope for doing things better. It was generals, not politicians, who in 2006 decreed the rash emphasis on holding fixed positions in Afghanistan such as Sangin at high cost.

The Americans have now committed large forces to Helmand, and a US general commands there. Gen. Stan McChrystal, the American commander-in-chief in Kabul, was keen for the British to shift themselves lock, stock and barrel to Kandahar province. British officers were happy to do this, partly to retain an operational area under their own national control.

Liam Fox has vetoed the move, however. He was appalled at the notion of writing off the huge infrastructure investment at Camp Bastion, though the Americans were willing to pay most of the bills. He perceived a high political cost in abandoning territory which almost 300 British soldiers have died to defend. But the debate about deployments has unsettled those on the ground.

The SDR must consider whether Helmand represents for Britain a hangover from ‘Blair’s wars’, or a likely pattern for the future. Liam Fox echoes the views of most sensible strategists when he asserts that this country must be prepared to meet a range of threats, of which counter-insurgency is only one. David Richards has also spoken imaginatively about this.

Both agree that the armed forces must reorganise themselves for the post-Cold War world. The army can certainly afford to lose some tanks and artillery. The RAF has far too many fast jets. All three services have an excess of senior officers and headquarters. We need to invest heavily in drones and precision-guided munitions. The navy needs more ships, but of a cheap and cheerful kind.

Some of us remain deeply sceptical about the carriers. Long-range power projection is a very good thing — if it is affordable. We are broke. It would be ironic if the carriers are built to support overseas deployments, but in consequence we cannot dispatch credible ground forces.

Almost any likely British commitment abroad, for war-fighting or peacekeeping, will require boots on the ground. If the Defence Review pretends otherwise, it is unlikely to command respect. Liam Fox’s problem is that manpower costs absorb one third of defence spending. People are expensive. This makes it immensely tempting to cut troop numbers, the fastest route to improving the MoD’s cash bottom line.

But for all the army’s difficulties and disappointments in Iraq and Afghanistan, it remains an important national asset. It already has less than 100,000 men. Further cuts would bring it close to losing critical mass. I believe Britain should focus on maintaining ground forces of about their present size with appropriate air and helicopter support, and cut other things to pay for them.

Liam Fox is bidding to make himself the most high profile Defence Secretary since Michael Heseltine. He may have aspirations as radical as those of Denis Healey more than 40 years ago. He has already shown himself notably outspoken. He intends the strategic defence review to bear his own distinctive mark.

But it will be a misfortune if he looks for acquiescence in his chiefs of staff. The leaders of the armed forces are not senior civil servants, whose business is to execute their political masters’ wishes. They also have institutional responsibilities to those who serve under them at risk of their lives.

We should reserve judgment on the SDR and the CDS succession until they happen. Fox has roused a terrific flutter in the dovecot, which is in itself no bad thing. The Ministry of Defence has been a mess for far too long. But the stakes are high — the future of Britain’s already shrunken armed forces — and the price of getting this wrong will be correspondingly great.