DEFENCE: Two cheers for Tony Blair
And a sorry commentary on Bae
And there’s more to come
How good it is to see something actually being announced in the House of Commons. For there it was that Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, informed MPs that the Government was committing itself to spending upwards of ten billion pounds — and in truth, something (and we can only but be vague in these matters) somewhere between twenty and thirty billion pounds. As the cause for this extravagance is to be the two new large aircraft carriers promised by the Strategic Defence Review, there was, of course, little in the way of opposition. This was not a moment when our house of supply opted to query profligacy, what with, patriotism, and, skilled labouring jobs being at stake. There wasn’t even much in the way of recidivist Peace-Pledging in evidence. And we have no cause for objection either, save for our desire that at least one more should be built. It is, however, worth commenting on how the Government has brought us to the extraordinary point where a French arms company, still part-state owned has come to play such a large part in this contract.
There is much scope for carping on the matter of British naval aviation. The joint Anglo-American successor to the Harrier can be queried as an airframe (a much stronger case was there to be made for a naval variant of the Eurofighter Typhoon — which, ironically, would have been much better suited to this function than the one it’s been landed with), as indeed can the politics of that particular piece of procurement. Then there is the matter, predicated on saving money, of the Government using the ‘gap’ between ordering and delivery of the Joint Strike Fighter, to denude the three small (20,000 tonne) Invincible class carriers of their fighters, reducing them, until the first 60,000 tonne carrier is commissioned, to the status of mere helicopter carriers. This is a reversible decision. If there is any merit to there being a Tory government again, the fact that it would, we trust, reverse this, and keep the Harriers in service until the new carriers (and their fighters) come into service, is high amongst the reasons. That said, we do have to applaud the Government for having the courage to order two near-thousand foot platforms, and to then, logically enough, equip them with fixed-wing airframes. The implications of this for foreign policy are not remote, but are a matter for another time, perhaps closer to their arrival in the fleet (2012).
Captain Simon Williams, assistant director of strategy at the naval staff, excitedly spoke of, and in rather too involved a fashion for a serving officer, the new carriers thus:
If you put one of these carriers in international waters off another country it becomes a very flexible tool and it focuses the mind of the people we are trying to influence . . . If we had one of those carriers now and put it in the Gulf, all the countries in the region would take notice - but we have to leave that to the Americans at the moment.
All very true, but as true is the point, technical as it may seem, that such vessels would, in every regard other than cost, be better off being nuclear powered. All of the large American carriers are reactor-driven for the very sensible reason that this fits in well with their doctrinal purpose, their likely patterns of usage, and tours of duty a carrier is liable to face. As Britain is proposing just to have two carriers (with one inevitably being in permanent ‘refit’, therefore only one being ‘at sea’), the demands upon it will be total. Every crisis of defence and foreign policy that requires a British carrier will inevitably fall upon the solitary carrier in service at any one moment. This is only one of the reasons why we should of course build three. By far the most important lies in the fact — and surely the necessary probability modelling has been done, given the vast amount of public funds being expended? — that these vessels are projected to be in service for fifty years. The one thing we can say with some certainty about what will happens to British warships between 2012 and 2062 is that at least one of them will be sunk. Inescapably, it could well be one of the carriers.
This insight may not be dramatically apparent at the moment, but believe us when we promise you that the moment a Cabinet finds itself obliged to commit the solitary British carrier-at-sea to a war-fighting situation, the implications will hit home hard enough. A much more credible deployment will be assured if instead of having two, we have three, which is to say, if we have two at sea at any one moment, we can be that bit more sanguine about one being sunk. There is no realistic point in deliberating matters of defence policy if this reality is not taken into account. Much as ERO — alone— predicted that the SDR’s ‘two carrier’ commitment, repeatedly renewed by the Government, would actually be effected by vessels twice the size of the 30,000 tonne figure cited by everyone else, we can safely make another astonishing vision public. At some point between now and 2015 (the delivery date of the second carrier), the Government of the day, taking advantage of the cost-savings available whilst carriers are being built, will build that third carrier. Just as the foreign policy embodied in the SDR required carriers more capable than the Invincibles, and that capacity required twice what was initially predicted of their successors, the very fact of building an exposed pair will lead to that necessary protective third.
Part of the reason why realisation that this will be the case is dawning extremely slow is that it’s not, so they judge, in the navy’s interest to make this easy to apprehend logic widely apparent. In the SDR the Navy, and the wider MoD, scored a great victory in making the case that Britain should not merely retain the capacity for global power-projection, but that she should enhance it. This meant carriers, and as we have said, it meant carriers twice as big as the navy was happy to let ministers think they had let themselves in for. And so too now the Navy keeps quiet about the vulnerability of this construction programme, knowing full well that once keels have been laid, modular purchasing programmes set in train, yards extended to cope with the ships, fighters ordered, and all the rest of it, once there is absolutely no going back on this one, that’s when the senior service is going to very painfully bring home to the Government of the day there is no sensible option but to order a third carrier.
Other unseen consequences
In a disastrous development begun under John Major’s government (and naturally at its worst during the abysmal Defence Secretaryship of Michael Portillo), the state has foolishly disposed of substantial quantities of, in effect, irrecoverable defence assets. These are the land banks built up over the course of many centuries, and with the sale of every Georgian Barracks and military hospital and airfield, rather than their sensible re-use within the confines of the state, it becomes ever more expense to adjust defence policy in the future. This, however, is most serious when it comes to naval dockyards. To build the new carriers will require extending each one of the commercial yards involved, but to harbour them will require extremely complex solutions. Made still more difficult by the asinine habit of destroying facilities centuries’ old in order that we gain some more maritime themed museums, or luxury sea-front housing developments. In the wake of a World War, the case for returning to civil occupation of as much of the country as possible was sanity itself, destroying our traditional defences is, conversely, the kind of anti-Tory behaviour that could only have been performed most gratuitously by Mr Portillo.
Then there is the matter of the escort ships (though they too will come as an unwelcome surprise to ministers when the Admiralty makes clear their tactical necessity) that will have to be built to accompany the carriers, as they sail the world, righting wrong, stamping out teenage smoking, balancing genders, and doing whatever else it our foreign policy of the day will require of them. If you’re inclined to property speculation, now that the MoD had disposed of all the prime sites in the UK even it would be delinquent enough to forgo, watch out for our certain withdrawal from the banks of the Rhine. The Navy rightly needed for Britain’s strategic circumstances will, as it inexorably grinds into life with these orders, soon but assuredly put paid to this relic of a commitment.
Of U-turns and clever tactics
We should all though stop and admire the way the Government has finessed this one: no other regime would have been able to get away, still less end up being praised in many quarters, with giving a substantial part of the order to the French firm Thales. Their principal aid has been the astounding inefficiency of Bae, and consequently, the sheer reasonableness of all black propagandising carried out against them (how long off now seems the world where the UK would end up with two world class defence groups, one Anglo-European [Bae-led], and the other Anglo-American [GEC-led]!).
What this meant the Government was able to do was plausibly suggest in the press that Bae was virtually certain not to get the contract. This was never true for a moment, and it is greatly to the discredit of all the papers that swallowed this line (which is to say, all of them) that they repeated it. No British government, whatever the incompetence of Bae, was ever going to get away with not both building the carriers here, and having them delivered to itself all bound up in official Bae wrapping paper. But, by the hugely impressive campaign of spin that the Government waged, it has brought itself to the stage where, everyone being so grateful for what the Government was never going to have any choice but to do anyway, they have been able to give a gross and unfortunate proportion of the work in question to Thales.
The case against Thales is simple: whatever failings Bae has historically brought to the management of naval contracts, the record of the French is worse. It is incontestable that France has not yet designed a successful aircraft carrier, and despite all the clever people Thales employ here in Bath, this is not going to be the occasion on which they start, albeit overseas. Much, much more important is the brute truth that Thales is a creature of the French state, jealously protected by that self-same brood-mother in its home market. We would not have enjoyed the freedom to penetrate the French ‘market’ in the way they have been allowed to enter ours — and this contract will have done nothing to change that situation. For if anyone believes that Thales have emerged with anything other than the icing on this cake, they are very foolish indeed. What makes our own Government most foolish of all is, as we say, the sure knowledge poor Bae must have that they will never be allowed to perform this trick in reverse.
All of which enables us to make another, but much less happy prediction: this set-up won’t last. The fudge that this order represents goes against all the decent ‘best practice’ that the MoD has been building up over the last decade and a half: two competitors have been obliged to team up (thus effacing the benefits of competition now and in the future); and, the Government has felt it unavoidable that it should share much of the financial risk, in the event of cost over-runs. It has had to do this because if this imperfect set-up goes as wrong as it's presently liable so to do, then Bae will be wiped out as a viable economic proposition. Paradoxically, it would have been the granting of the contract exclusively to Bae that would have forestalled this: there would have been more money in the pot, and less difficulty in delivering the vessel ordered. Our next prediction then is that this unhappy scenario of Bae being the workhorse, and Thales being the rider will end up in the ditch. Thales will be dismounted, and within little more than a year, possibly under the polite aegis of a nominal buy-out of the work (maybe with the Bath designers thrown in for good measure), this will become solely a Bae project. It’s what should have happened from the start, but like everything else the silent service has a hand in, it’s what will ineluctably happen in due course.
ERO’s editorial comment
ERO, January 30, 2003 06:33 PM