BRITAIN

Intro: At over £50bn a year, Britain is the sixth biggest defence spender in the world. But something has gone terribly wrong. Our Armed Forces are badly equipped and humiliatingly hollowed out. Incompetence and reckless squandering at the Ministry of Defence is largely to blame

THIS year alone, Britain will spend more than £50 billion on its military. This makes us the sixth-largest defence spender on the planet, and the biggest in Europe. That’s still not enough in these increasingly dangerous and perilous times, with wars, hostile dictatorships, and security threats on all fronts. For once, there is now a welcome consensus on the mainstream Right and Left in British politics that we need to spend more.

Yet, even those most enthusiastic about bigger defence budgets, are troubled by a vexing and nagging question: where do the billions we currently spend on defence actually go?

On the face of it, we don’t seem to be getting much for the billions spent.

After all, despite being a big spender on defence, Britain somehow has a navy – which once laid claim to rule the waves – with fewer frigates and destroyers than its French, Japanese, or South Korean counterparts.

The British Army, which is now the smallest it’s been since Napoleonic times, is about to get smaller still. It is apparent that it would currently struggle to deploy one fully equipped armoured division.

The RAF, meanwhile, which thirty years ago could proudly boast of 31 fast-jet squadrons, can now muster only seven.

Underpinning our weakness is that all three services are crippled by serious shortages of skilled manpower.

The United States, our most important ally, regards Britain as a declining military power with limited resources that are spread too thin. That’s a view that is shared by many of our other NATO allies. They fear our forces are now so small that they would lack “critical mass” in any major military confrontation.

A recent report by the House of Commons defence select committee concluded that our military is “hollowed out”, and seriously “overstretched”. Not a healthy state of affairs for £50 billion a year.

So, what are we actually getting for that money? Quite clearly, the answer is not nearly enough.

Any competent auditor would quickly point to the waste, incompetence, mismanagement, stupidity, and reckless squandering of our money by those at the Ministry of Defence (MoD) responsible for the procurement and servicing of the military equipment and weapons systems our forces need to defend us and project British power.

On just about every major defence project, the MoD’s default operating stance is to deliver late (sometimes very late) and over budget (often way over budget).

There’s nothing new about this. This is how defence in Britain has been conducted for decades: Never on time, always above budget. Despite bromides that “lessons have been learned”, nothing ever seems to change. The Department is populated by congenitally slow learners – if they ever do indeed learn about anything.

The culprits never face any penalties for their staggering incompetence or extravagance. Nobody is ever demoted, disciplined, humiliated, much less fired. It’s just on to the next disaster or through the revolving door to a lucrative job in the private sector with a defence contractor who’s no doubt been complicit in some botched programme. The whole farrago is a public-private sector cosy club funded by the taxpayer.

TWO

THREE YEARS AGO, the National Audit Office reviewed 20 defence projects costing a combined total of £120billion. In nine of them, costs rose substantially between the moment the initial case was made for them and the decision was taken to proceed – in other words, before they even got off the ground.

Thirteen of them showed cumulative delays of 254 months between contract signing and entering service. The longest delay was for the A400M transport aircraft – 79 months late.

A litany of recent disasters stretches as far as the horizon and beyond. Where do we start?

Let’s begin with something very visible, the Royal Navy’s pride and joy, its two massive new aircraft carriers, HMS Queen Elizabeth II and HMS Prince of Wales. Pride and joy? They’ve become a national embarrassment.

Costing £3.5 billion each (excluding the expensive aircraft to be deployed on their decks), naturally they were delivered late and over budget. Both ships have been bedevilled by problems, mostly to do with their propulsion systems. The Prince of Wales has spent more time during its short-commissioned life in repair docks than it has on the high seas.

The Queen Elizabeth did make it out into the North Atlantic and the seas off Norway last autumn as part of a NATO Carrier Strike Group. Though it has capacity for 36 F-35B fighter jump jets, it was only able to carry eight, minimising the lethal force it was designed for. But it was better than the year before, when more often than not it went to sea with no fighter jets at all.

Going to sea, with or without jets, is currently not an option. The Queen Elizabeth was earmarked to lead the maritime arm of Steadfast Defender, one of NATO’s biggest ever exercises involving 40 allies. The aircraft carrier has been unable to leave Portsmouth because of propeller shaft issues, the same issues which took the Prince of Wales out of service 18 months ago.

The autumn of 2023 was not the Royal Navy’s finest hour. All five of its nuclear-powered Astute class attack submarines were docked awaiting essential repairs, as was its Trafalgar class submarine.

With all six out of action the Kremlin was basically given the freedom of the North Atlantic. Two new Astute class submarines are on their way. But not before 2026, late of course.

Sometimes matters descend into farce. Two Royal Navy minesweepers managed to bump into each other while in port in Bahrain, making them inoperable to continue doing the vital work of keeping the sea lanes in the Gulf, through which much of the world’s oil moves, open and safe.

You’ll see now why many of our allies sometimes despair.

Yet, perhaps most significant of all in terms of naval waste and inefficiency, was the recent experience of Vanguard, one of our four nuclear-armed submarines, the very core of our independent nuclear deterrent. It was taken out of service for a major refit. It took 89 months, longer than the 83 months it took to build her, at a cost of £500 million.

All four of our nuclear-armed submarines will eventually be replaced by a new class of Dreadnought. These are already subject to delay and huge cost overruns – up by an incredible 62 per cent in just one year. A third of the MoD’s £306 billion budget for its Equipment Plan over the next 10 years will go on the future nuclear deterrent. That starves our conventional forces of much needed investment.

It is probably right Britain remains a nuclear power, but it cannot do so at the cost of undermining our non-nuclear capabilities. We boast politically of spending over 2 per cent of GDP on defence, among the highest in NATO. But exclude nuclear spending and it equates to about 1.75 per cent.

When it comes to delays, cost overruns, and squandering of scarce resources, the British Army takes Olympic gold. The forlorn and sorry story of Ajax, its troubled armoured vehicle project, is emblematic of all that is wrong with British defence – and indicative of why it goes wrong.

Ajax was meant to be an off-the-shelf replacement for the ageing Warrior armoured vehicle, based on an existing Austrian-Spanish model, and to be in service by 2018.

But defence chiefs and the MoD added 1,200 additional requirements, including a unique 40mm gun placement, during its development. It has become a bespoke project.

As a result, after 12 years and more than £3 billion spent of a £5.5 billion project, led by the UK arm of General Dynamics, a US defence conglomerate, not a single Ajax is yet fit to be deployed. And none is likely to be ready for at least a couple of years yet.

True, some have been handed over for training. But the noise and vibration inside these vehicles was so bad that crews manning them suffered various ailments, including hearing impairment. None have been declared fit for the battlefield.

The grim saga and debacle of Ajax is revealed in all its gory detail in a devastating and damning 172-page investigation entitled “Lessons Learned”, which is optimistic since lessons are never learned when it comes to defence procurement.

THREE

With China and Russia currently developing hypersonic missiles which can travel at speeds of 6,500 mph, we need to work with our allies to develop the technology to stop them. But it hardly builds confidence in our ability to do so when we can’t even get an armoured vehicle right.

The lessons are transparently clear. It is the propensity of the British top brass, with the MoD’s complicity, to want everything gold-plated, customised precisely to their needs. That is the root of the problem.

In its constant fiddling with the specifications, or by insisting that because “the Americans have it, so must we”, costs are pushed up and delays are inevitable. All kit has to be high-end – and then they complain when we can’t afford enough of it.

Our friends in Poland are in the midst of a massive rearmament programme following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It is buying hundreds of tanks and fighter jets “off-the-shelf”, mainly from South Korea.

Poland will soon have the most formidable land forces in Europe, having acquired over a thousand new tanks and 600 artillery pieces. Britain is upgrading its Challenger tank but at such expense we can only afford 148 of them and they will be delivered from 2027. The numbers were cut because the cost rose by 60 per cent. A familiar story of British defence procurement.

In similar fashion, Poland will soon have 1,000 new fighter jets. Britain have ordered only 48 F-35Bs. They are hugely sophisticated, state-of-the-art jets. But they are also very expensive and 48 isn’t even enough to give our two aircraft carriers a full complement of fighters.

More will no doubt be ordered, slowly, in the years ahead. But it is these sort of measly numbers which make US generals wonder if, even as a small military, we are any longer a top fighting force.

For the foreseeable future, our carriers will depend on F-35s provided by the US Marine Corps.

In the past two decades there have been five attempts to reform defence procurement. On each attempt, it has been nothing more than a rearranging of the deck chairs, and none made a demonstratable difference. Radical action is needed.

FOUR

THE largely useless Defence Equipment and Support Unit within the MoD should be scrapped and replaced with a new powerful Procurement Agency, one which operates at arms’ length from the MoD (which should lose power over procurement) and run by people – professional project managers – whose careers, positions, and level of remuneration, would depend entirely on overseeing projects that are delivered on time and on budget.

There really isn’t any time to waste. In 2021, the UK Government decided to reduce some of our military capabilities, including the early retirement of Typhoon fighter jets (so they could be cannibalised for spare parts), phasing out the C-130 heavy lift aircraft, and inexplicably cutting the number of new early warning aircraft from five to three – even though they are an integral and vital part of any deployment in a war zone. That’s difficult to understand given Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the growing threats across the globe.

Britain needs to do better than this. It needs to rapidly increase defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP. But only if that is accompanied by the radical reform of our pitifully poor procurements processes.

Political parties need to have a clear plan about how to do this in these perilous and dangerous times. It is a serious matter.