Times has gone in hard today
Editorial & article
Britain wastes money on weapons that are too costly, too late, too few or rarely work
The Times Leading Articles
Monday January 23 2023, 12.01am, The Times
Legend has it that, when the Royal Navy was trying to ensure the survival of its cherished aircraft carrier programme from cost-cutting politicians, it named the ships Queen Elizabeth and Prince of Wales to make them harder to cancel. No prime minister, it was reasoned, would want to break the bad news to the monarch or her heir that the ships bearing their names had been canned. But in choosing Prince of Wales the admirals were dicing with history. The previous Prince of Wales, a Second World War battleship, was plagued by misfortune. Mechanically unreliable when launched, it was sunk in a Japanese air attack after only 11 months. And some of that bad luck has now rubbed off on its new £3.4 billion descendant, which has suffered a major propulsion fault, putting it out of service for months. None of this comes as a surprise.
Wherever one looks, there is some procurement disaster or other. Over the years, billions have been wasted on cancelled projects, while equipment that does eventually work arrives years late and in smaller numbers than needed. Despite a defence budget of £46 billion, the second-highest in Nato, Britain is now unable to field a carrier battle group with sufficient combat aircraft, early warning radar aircraft to protect our airspace, or even a single battle-ready army division.
Yet political leaders insist on talking Britain up as a global power. Until, that is, reality intervenes to calm their hubris. Rishi Sunak recently promised Ukraine a large batch of artillery shells only to discover the army didn’t have them. The truth is, £46 billion does not buy much if you want to be a pocket superpower. Two per cent of GDP is wholly inadequate to satisfy this country’s strategic pretensions. The defence budget is constantly whittled away by defence inflation, always higher than its civilian counterpart, and a weak pound, making dollar purchases from America more expensive.
Lack of money is not the sole problem. Successive politicians and service chiefs have insisted on expensive new weapons instead of simpler off-the-shelf kit, partly because they want to protect Britain’s defence industry but also due to a chronic weakness for “gold plating”. In order to be useful partners to the United States, the argument goes, our fighters require the best gear. But Britain’s defence budget is barely a tenth of America’s, meaning that top-line equipment can be bought only in embarrassingly small quantities, making it too valuable to lose in an actual war.
The navy is supposed to have one carrier available with about 24 F35 stealth fighters on board. But there are simply not enough in service yet because of cost. The RAF’s planned purchase of new airborne early-warning planes has been cut from five to three due to cost, and the previous type retired early to save money, leaving a gap in defences. The army, meanwhile, is in a parlous state, its armoured vehicles old, and its new Ajax vehicle way overdue because of vibration problems that cause drivers to get headaches. And distorting all defence procurement is the gorilla in the room: the replacement of the submarine-based nuclear deterrent, costing up to £50 billion.
Britain needs to get real about defence. It must downgrade its Indo-Pacific aspirations and focus on Europe where, as Ukraine shows, the most serious threat lies. And it means sensible weapons buying, emphasising quantity as well as quality. Perfect should not be the enemy of good enough.
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Ben Wallace has condemned the “hollowing out” of the military after decades of underfunding in a stark warning to the Treasury before the budget. The defence secretary said the army was unable to field a war fighting division of just 10,000 troops. The Ministry of Defence had only been able to start fixing longstanding issues after it was given more money by Boris Johnson, he said.
Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, is holding talks with the MoD over a settlement after concerns were raised about wasteful spending in the department."