Melchett01
15th Oct 2009, 12:59
Well if Liabour MP Nick Palmer were to be believed, it would be to get rid of the RAF and RN and invest everything in an Army of UN beret wearing troops.
WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF THE DEFENCE BUDGET?
NICK PALMER
Pressure on public finances is concentrating minds over defence spending. The idea of cancelling the Trident project is no longer seen as a hideous betrayal of New Labour, but as a possibly necessary adjustment to financial reality. Equipment problems in Afghanistan are seen, rightly or wrongly, as a reflection of tight budgets. The public is primed for a serious defence review. It’s vital, though, that this is not primarily driven by current economic problems. A major change in defence strategy would still be affecting Britain in the distant future, when the banking crisis will be a fading memory.
Britain’s role in the world
The question of our defence stance is related to the much larger issue of what sort of role Britain should play in today’s world. A curious feature of the parliamentary calendar is an occasional adjournment debate entitled ‘Defence in the World’. This does not refer to concerns about dangers from outer space, an issue which MPs generally leave to Lembit Opik, but to Britain’s military activity around the globe. The debate is generally poorly attended, and traditionally proceeds without a proposal or a vote.
To set the scene for a proper debate, this short piece looks at a basic question: what is the defence budget for? The obvious answer is ‘to defend the United Kingdom’, but in the absence of any plausible threat of invasion for the foreseeable future, that would seem to imply that we barely need armed forces at all.
What about ‘to defend British interests around the world’? Here, the Falklands springs to mind, but it’s such an unusual case that it is difficult to base the entire strategy upon it. How many other British possessions overseas do we still have that somebody might want to invade? And our wider interests, such as protecting British investments, are not really protected by the armed forces. If Morocco were to seize all British companies’ assets, we would deplore their actions, but would we invade Morocco? Hardly.
The actual answer, as implied by the policies of successive governments, seems to be ‘influence world events positively’. The assumption is that what we see as positive for the world (defeat of aggression, support for democracy, and so on) is likely to be good for Britain. This includes efforts to combat terrorism: a major argument advanced for our presence in Afghanistan is that we cannot afford to have a state taken over by the allies of al-Qaeda, since they would soon be offering diplomatic and training cover for terrorist activities in Britain and elsewhere.
If this is the objective, then it follows that it’s a good thing if we ‘punch above our weight’. Although we are only a medium-sized power, we have highly trained armed forces and can intervene effectively around the world.
There is a tendency to decide what we think of this on the basis of the recent examples: Sierra Leone (an unqualified success); Kosovo (an arguable success); Iraq (controversial, to say the least); and Afghanistan (likewise). One can throw in examples of cases where we didn’t intervene and feel that perhaps we should have done: the Congo, where a million died while the world looked on; Darfur, where atrocities against civilians were so common as to drop out of the news.
Setting out criteria
However, the question of whether we should in principle be ready to intervene to help the perceived good guys around the planet is actually separate from the question of whether we’ve recently got it right. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that all future British governments have unerring good judgment on who should be helped. How much military might should we be prepared to put in?
The answer, I think, is threefold:
· We should focus on the types of intervention where we have particular skills. There is likely to be a continuing demand for expert, highly disciplined, highly trained ground troops: we should concentrate on equipping them to the highest standard and for a range of possible roles.
· We should limit ourselves to the budgetary norms of Europe – typically under 2 per cent of GDP compared with our current 2.4 per cent (see, for example, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2034rank.html ). There is now no particular reason why we should be uniquely suited to sorting out problems around the globe. We should scale our ambitions to reflect our size.
· We should principally seek to make our expertise available to multinational forces, preferably with a UN mandate. A British brigade able to back up a UN decision will be a very significant asset for the UN for the foreseeable future. But a British brigade that operates without broad international support will get us into difficulty – even if we think it is actually doing a good job.
Avoiding overstretch
We are currently able to deploy one brigade in full-scale conflict on a long-term basis and a second brigade for shorter periods. Anything more leads to manpower overstretch (as recently when the Afghan campaign was ratcheted up before we pulled out of Iraq). This seems a reasonable force to make available, and public opinion would clearly favour investing more rather than less in strengthening its equipment for all eventualities.
If so, though, can one say the same about the Navy and the Air Force? Probably not. It goes against the grain of British tradition to say so, but we have neither plausible reasons for major naval operations (the Falklands excepted), nor likely scenarios where we would want to act alone without the necessary seapower available from allies. The Air Force is in a similar position: it is easy to see it in a ground support role, but the strategic and air superiority roles for which much of the RAF is trained are not likely to be called upon for as far into the future as we can see.
What of Trident? The same applies. It is difficult to think of scenarios where it would be useful, except as an immensely expensive ticket to the top negotiating table. We would contribute more to world peace if we threw it into the Obama basket of Western concessions available if Russia is willing to scale down its forces as well.
A long-term shift
All of this means a long-term shift of spending to the Army (and ground support) from strategic nuclear defence and the Navy and Air Force (even though it may be that the immediate carrier project is now too far advanced to produce useful savings if cancelled). Such a shift would need to be a political decision, and a difficult one. The Chiefs of Staff traditionally resolve rivalries by compromise, and any decision to change the balance of spending radically would meet with resignations and high-profile opposition.
Deciding the overall interest, however, is what politicians are for, and arguably the biggest failure in defence policy in recent years is the absence of a clear sense of overall purpose. We should be able to deploy up to 2 extremely well-equipped brigades in internationally-accepted causes with sufficient naval and air backup, and that should be the limit of our ambitions. To do less is to abdicate any influence on world affairs, which would be the wrong lesson to learn from Iraq (the right lesson is to be sure we are in fact making a positive difference). To do more is to stretch ourselves beyond what we can afford and beyond what the public will, in the long term, support.
WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF THE DEFENCE BUDGET?
NICK PALMER
Pressure on public finances is concentrating minds over defence spending. The idea of cancelling the Trident project is no longer seen as a hideous betrayal of New Labour, but as a possibly necessary adjustment to financial reality. Equipment problems in Afghanistan are seen, rightly or wrongly, as a reflection of tight budgets. The public is primed for a serious defence review. It’s vital, though, that this is not primarily driven by current economic problems. A major change in defence strategy would still be affecting Britain in the distant future, when the banking crisis will be a fading memory.
Britain’s role in the world
The question of our defence stance is related to the much larger issue of what sort of role Britain should play in today’s world. A curious feature of the parliamentary calendar is an occasional adjournment debate entitled ‘Defence in the World’. This does not refer to concerns about dangers from outer space, an issue which MPs generally leave to Lembit Opik, but to Britain’s military activity around the globe. The debate is generally poorly attended, and traditionally proceeds without a proposal or a vote.
To set the scene for a proper debate, this short piece looks at a basic question: what is the defence budget for? The obvious answer is ‘to defend the United Kingdom’, but in the absence of any plausible threat of invasion for the foreseeable future, that would seem to imply that we barely need armed forces at all.
What about ‘to defend British interests around the world’? Here, the Falklands springs to mind, but it’s such an unusual case that it is difficult to base the entire strategy upon it. How many other British possessions overseas do we still have that somebody might want to invade? And our wider interests, such as protecting British investments, are not really protected by the armed forces. If Morocco were to seize all British companies’ assets, we would deplore their actions, but would we invade Morocco? Hardly.
The actual answer, as implied by the policies of successive governments, seems to be ‘influence world events positively’. The assumption is that what we see as positive for the world (defeat of aggression, support for democracy, and so on) is likely to be good for Britain. This includes efforts to combat terrorism: a major argument advanced for our presence in Afghanistan is that we cannot afford to have a state taken over by the allies of al-Qaeda, since they would soon be offering diplomatic and training cover for terrorist activities in Britain and elsewhere.
If this is the objective, then it follows that it’s a good thing if we ‘punch above our weight’. Although we are only a medium-sized power, we have highly trained armed forces and can intervene effectively around the world.
There is a tendency to decide what we think of this on the basis of the recent examples: Sierra Leone (an unqualified success); Kosovo (an arguable success); Iraq (controversial, to say the least); and Afghanistan (likewise). One can throw in examples of cases where we didn’t intervene and feel that perhaps we should have done: the Congo, where a million died while the world looked on; Darfur, where atrocities against civilians were so common as to drop out of the news.
Setting out criteria
However, the question of whether we should in principle be ready to intervene to help the perceived good guys around the planet is actually separate from the question of whether we’ve recently got it right. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that all future British governments have unerring good judgment on who should be helped. How much military might should we be prepared to put in?
The answer, I think, is threefold:
· We should focus on the types of intervention where we have particular skills. There is likely to be a continuing demand for expert, highly disciplined, highly trained ground troops: we should concentrate on equipping them to the highest standard and for a range of possible roles.
· We should limit ourselves to the budgetary norms of Europe – typically under 2 per cent of GDP compared with our current 2.4 per cent (see, for example, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2034rank.html ). There is now no particular reason why we should be uniquely suited to sorting out problems around the globe. We should scale our ambitions to reflect our size.
· We should principally seek to make our expertise available to multinational forces, preferably with a UN mandate. A British brigade able to back up a UN decision will be a very significant asset for the UN for the foreseeable future. But a British brigade that operates without broad international support will get us into difficulty – even if we think it is actually doing a good job.
Avoiding overstretch
We are currently able to deploy one brigade in full-scale conflict on a long-term basis and a second brigade for shorter periods. Anything more leads to manpower overstretch (as recently when the Afghan campaign was ratcheted up before we pulled out of Iraq). This seems a reasonable force to make available, and public opinion would clearly favour investing more rather than less in strengthening its equipment for all eventualities.
If so, though, can one say the same about the Navy and the Air Force? Probably not. It goes against the grain of British tradition to say so, but we have neither plausible reasons for major naval operations (the Falklands excepted), nor likely scenarios where we would want to act alone without the necessary seapower available from allies. The Air Force is in a similar position: it is easy to see it in a ground support role, but the strategic and air superiority roles for which much of the RAF is trained are not likely to be called upon for as far into the future as we can see.
What of Trident? The same applies. It is difficult to think of scenarios where it would be useful, except as an immensely expensive ticket to the top negotiating table. We would contribute more to world peace if we threw it into the Obama basket of Western concessions available if Russia is willing to scale down its forces as well.
A long-term shift
All of this means a long-term shift of spending to the Army (and ground support) from strategic nuclear defence and the Navy and Air Force (even though it may be that the immediate carrier project is now too far advanced to produce useful savings if cancelled). Such a shift would need to be a political decision, and a difficult one. The Chiefs of Staff traditionally resolve rivalries by compromise, and any decision to change the balance of spending radically would meet with resignations and high-profile opposition.
Deciding the overall interest, however, is what politicians are for, and arguably the biggest failure in defence policy in recent years is the absence of a clear sense of overall purpose. We should be able to deploy up to 2 extremely well-equipped brigades in internationally-accepted causes with sufficient naval and air backup, and that should be the limit of our ambitions. To do less is to abdicate any influence on world affairs, which would be the wrong lesson to learn from Iraq (the right lesson is to be sure we are in fact making a positive difference). To do more is to stretch ourselves beyond what we can afford and beyond what the public will, in the long term, support.