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UK Security and Defence: More 'Muddling Through' or Time for a Requirements-Led Strategic Defence Review?

Experts' Comment - 27 May 2008

Dr Paul Cornish, Head, International Security Programme and Carrington Chair in International Security, Chatham House

With Britain's Armed Forces stretched to breaking point in Afghanistan and Iraq, calls for a review of defence strategy and commitments are being heard more often. And if British troops become embroiled in conflict in Kosovo after the new constitution comes into force there on 15 June, the government will come under still more pressure to set out its strategic priorities and to ensure that sufficient resources are allocated to defence.

While UK Armed Forces are over-stretched, the UK defence sector is having precisely the opposite experience - a sense of under-employment while government spending plans are confused and important equipment programmes remain on the drawing board.

Armed Forces stretched to the point of exhaustion, and defence industry panicking about their order book: hardly a strong, balanced relationship between government, industry and Armed Forces. Would a review of UK defence sort things out, or are Britain's defence planners rediscovering the merits of 'muddling through'?

New Labour's 1998 Strategic Defence Review was a convincing attempt to set out a 'foreign policy-led' defence policy. The SDR was probably the most successful UK defence review for decades and was widely respected. The ten year old review has, however, been overtaken by events. The SDR offered as a planning guideline the requirement to be able to mount one major operation on the scale of the 1991 Gulf War, when the UK deployed one armoured division, 26 major warships and over 80 combat aircraft. Alternatively, the SDR called for the ability to mount simultaneously a peace support mission of the sort seen in Bosnia along with a brigade-sized combat operation (with appropriate levels of naval and air force support). Ironically, given the sustained deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq, and the intensity of the operations in both places, the SDR argued, 'We would not expect both deployments to involve warfighting or to maintain them simultaneously for longer than six months'.

Wisely enough, the assumptions underpinning the SDR have been amended several times. After 9/11, a 'New Chapter' to the SDR was published, in which it was acknowledged that, rather than Gulf War-scale combat deployments, or Balkans-style peacekeeping operations, 'frequent, smaller operations are becoming the pattern'. The New Chapter emphasised 'network-centric capability' as the best response to terrorism and asymmetric threats, argued that only 'relatively small quantities' of new specialised equipment would be needed, and promised to 'work closely with industry to translate our requirements into equipment solutions'.

These themes were taken forward in the 2003 Defence White Paper which claimed that 'multiple concurrent Small to Medium Scale operations will be the most significant factor in our force planning', and which required the Armed Forces to be able to support three such operations (including one 'enduring peace support operation') simultaneously. Good ideas, and responsive to change: but even the keenest supporter of defence planning under Labour would have to accept that the intensity and duration of operations in Afghanistan and Iraq have gone far beyond anything envisaged in the SDR or since.

For industry, equipment acquisition programmes have become uncomfortably unpredictable. The Ministry of Defence faces considerable pressure on its budget, with a projected deficit for 2008-2009 in the region of £2bn, or the cost of one new aircraft carrier (some analysts suggest the deficit could be as much as £3bn). Various cost-cutting options present themselves. One approach would be to eliminate one or more major equipment programmes from a list which includes the Astute nuclear submarine, the A-400M transport aircraft, the Type-45 destroyer, the third tranche of Eurofighter, the Future Lynx helicopter and the fleet of armoured vehicles known as the Future Rapid Effects System. With the decision having been made to proceed with the aircraft carrier build, the status of these other major programmes could be less certain still. But Prime Minister Gordon Brown doesn't like this zero-sum approach, and has insisted that cost savings should be achieved without cancelling a major programme. The remaining options are either to postpone one or more programmes, to find cheaper alternatives, or to impose 'salami slice' cuts across the board by reducing numbers and/or capability. The proposed Joint Strike Fighter - the principal weapon system intended for the new aircraft carrier - might be a candidate for trimming of this sort.

Relations between government and industry have been uncertain since the departure of Lord Drayson and the decision to postpone revision of the Defence Industrial Strategy. There are too few signs that the relationship is stabilising. Industry is concerned at the prospect of a return to annual budgeting, with an additional financial planning round being introduced for 2009. Widely regarded as little more than a device with which to postpone equipment expenditure in order to meet mounting operational costs, a return to annual planning is seen by industry as an assault on Drayson's idea of a long-term partnership between government and manufacturers. Baroness Taylor, Minister for Defence Equipment and Support since November 2007, seems on the verge of abandoning planning altogether in favour of an 'incremental approach' to equipment acquisition. The problem with incrementalism (otherwise known as 'muddling through') is that it becomes almost impossible to plan for the long term. The salami of defence spending is not so much sliced as kept out of sight in its wrapper.

UK defence industry would prefer a better planned and more predictable strategic framework. Shipyards, factories and key suppliers cannot be reactivated at a moment's notice, and the excessive use of Urgent Operational Requirements is scarcely the best way to go about things. A strategic outlook would yield other financial and operational benefits, from common platforms and weapon systems and from whole fleet management. But for government, a defence review is always awkward. Unless the cash is made available up front, a defence review raises strategic and political questions which cannot all be answered satisfactorily. The Armed Forces are, as a result, wary of defence reviews, since they usually mean cutbacks of one sort or another (albeit not usually in commitments).

The UK has tried most conceivable types of defence review; threat-oriented, capabilities-driven, effects-based and foreign policy-led. On the assumption that commitments will not be reduced in the near term, perhaps the moment has arrived for a new style of review, one focused on military requirements. The Armed Forces would be provided with what they manifestly need to meet their commitments, from medical treatment and rehabilitation, to housing and salaries, to the best equipment that British defence industry can provide. Everybody would then be happy. Except the Treasury.

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