MOD
The Times
Britain’s Ministry of Defence is no longer fit for purpose.
This is not primarily the fault of the present Government. It is chiefly the fault of the last one, which, for year after year, failed to address the department’s deep and growing dysfunctionalities. As the Commons’ Public Accounts Committee reports today, this led to a position where the MoD was running a recurring annual deficit of £10 billion a year, on a budget of £36 billion, without Ministers lifting a finger to put it right.
But here’s the rub. The present parlous state of our nation’s defence may not be down to this Government. But it is down to them to put right this monstrous mess. And they are not making enough progress.
The dust is now settling on the Strategic Defence and Security Review, published last October. And what it reveals is that the deeply painful cuts already announced are not going to be enough to balance the books. There will have to be more — there maybe even have to be, what is in effect, a second Review (though they will call it something else).
Of the £36 billion of cuts the MoD agreed to make over the next four years , it seems to have found less than half. If this is true, then the scale of the black hole which remains means that even if the MoD cuts everything, except what is needed to fight the war in Afghanistan (which the Prime Minster has ring fenced as forbidden territory for cuts), it would still not be enough to bring the department back within budget. Watch this space: we are about to see either a Treasury bail-out or more defence cuts down to a level which could even include our precious amphibious capability.
Today’s PAC report cites delays and alterations to project specifications as the key cause of previous cost over-runs. That is bad enough, but worse still, we are still making the same mistakes. The recent decision to fit ‘cats and traps’ to the new aircraft carriers in order to take cheaper planes has, the committee reports, been made on the basis of an “inadequate understanding of costs”.
The Strategic Defence and Security Review almost ended in disaster. This is not because it was done too quickly, as Labour claim. Any government having to slash welfare, housing, council spending, schools and hospitals in order to reduce the deficit, could not allow defence to wait until later. No Government (and certainly no Labour one ) could have got away with that.
No. The problem with the SDSR was not speed, but lack of political direction. That’s why it ended up, not in a sensible re-arrangement of our defence resources to better meet the national need, but in an unseemly squabble between the service chiefs to hang on to their favourite pieces of capital equipment. One result was that Sir David Richards, then head of the Army and now Chief of Defence Staff had to bypass the whole process (and his Secretary of State) to appeal to the Prime Minister, in order to avert catastrophe in the Army.
The decisions made in the SDSR, with some notable exceptions, like the decision to scrap the Harriers, were broadly right — but only thanks to the last-minute intervention of the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister.
The review should have marked the beginning of a new era. Instead, the MoD is still haemorrhaging money at a colossal rate. Some of the blame for this lies in the MoD’s initial misjudgement that, when the chips were down in the bargaining over cuts, the Prime Minister would back them and not the Chancellor. He didn’t and was never likely to. By the time this realisation dawned, it was too late in the process for rational decisions and hasty, ill-thought out ones had to be made instead to meet the deadline.
The Secretary of State found himself in charge of a department facing tremendously difficult financial choices. And I accept that these will take time to resolve. But not only do these problems remain — the MoD has also made some new blunders.
There were the civil servant emails sent to sack long serving soldiers who should have been told in person (preferably by their Commanding Officers) that they would have to leave. There was the leaking to the press of the termination of the careers of young pilots still under training.
These are bureaucratic mistakes which can be made even in the best run organisations. But they can also be symptoms of a much deeper malaise — and, in this case, they are.
The underlying problem is that because the last government was reluctant to set up a war cabinet to give political direction to the Afghan campaign. the MoD was left to do it instead and its civil servants subsequently strayed well beyond their proper remit. The MoD’s job should be to service the services, not to run them.
Yet today, it is civil servants, not generals, who move around individual units, right down to platoon level, in Afghanistan. Indeed, it is now often the case that those in command sometimes do not even know their units have been moved (or their men sacked) until after it has happened.
With the creation of the National Security Council we are beginning at last to create the architecture for a genuine, joined-up approach to the nation’s security. (Though not yet I fear the strategic thinking or, perhaps, the political will to drive it.) Our armed services themselves are more than capable of playing their part in this. But our Ministry Defence, which has been encouraged to think of itself as a war fighting organisation, rather than one which prepares for war. This needs to be put right soon.
And that can only be done if the politicians who direct this broken instrument focus energetically and exclusively on mending it.
In these turbulent times it is hard to tell where the next security challenge will come from . But I fear that if Britain were to face such a challenge in the next two or three years, our current inadequacies at the heart of defence would be cruelly exposed. That would be very dangerous for our country — and could prove disastrous for a Conservative-led government.