It’s one of those awkward dilemmas on which Debrett’s is just no help. You’ve just given away nearly all your anti-tank missiles to a friend and when you call up to order some more you find that some key parts are not just out of stock but completely out of production. “But I love those missiles!” you tell the factory. “They’re my favourites.” “News to us,” they say. What is a defence secretary to do?
This, more or less, is now the dilemma for large parts of the West’s military industrial complex. There is a global shortage of gunpowder and 5mm shells, for example. And if you want to buy stocks of percussion caps (gun ignition parts) on any scale, there’s a three-year waiting list. When it comes to refitting nuclear submarines such as HMS Vanguard, it turns out one of the parts used to fire its missiles was originally made by adapting an American corn blower that hasn’t been made for decades. The said part had to be made from scratch, contributing to a delay that took the sub’s 2015 maintenance stoppage from three to seven years.
MPs are quite right to take Ben Wallace to task for his department’s abysmal procurement record, as the defence select committee did this week. Backbenchers are right to say out loud what we all know Wallace really thinks: we are not spending enough on defence by a long way. But Wallace is also justified in arguing that Britain’s dwindling ammunition stocks and ill-equipped, shrunken military are not just the problems of shoddy contract lawyers and blundering civil servants. As Britain’s industrial base has shrunk, so has its defence industry. For example, research by Paul Mulvihill, an engineer at the munitions maker Primetake, shows that whereas we had seven pyrotechnics firms in 1990, we now have just two. So it’s a similar story for all sorts of other parts, from gunpowder to shells to detonators.
In short, many of the problems faced by our military are the same as those in our energy sector, our medical supply chains and our tech industry. We have lost the capacity to make what we need affordably. But as the pandemic, the gas crisis and the Ukraine war have revealed, we can no longer trust others to make it all for us.
Take the handheld missiles, or Nlaws, mentioned above, which Wallace successfully argued we must donate to Ukraine at the start of the war and which were critical to stopping Russia’s tanks. As the defence secretary revealed in parliament on Tuesday, the military has been trying to replenish its stock of Nlaws but when it came to place a new order last year, “it turned out that the optics had stopped being made ten years before”. A critic might note that the period “ten years before” today was one in which the Tories were in charge. But, as Wallace was keen to emphasise to the Labour MP challenging him: “The stockpiles of our ammunition started depleting around about 1997.”
The cost of rectifying this, laid out in the defence command paper this week, is now estimated at £2.5 billion. If there is one thing we know for sure, given the MoD’s record, it is that the final bill will be much higher.
There is nothing for it but to build capacity back up again, no doubt at vast cost. The US has made a strong start by declaring it will increase its total ammunition production fivefold in the next two years — at a cost of more than £13 billion. Our government recently placed an order with BAE that will increase production of one type of ammunition eightfold, in addition to ordering thousands more Nlaws. But more broadly across Europe, defence contractors are nervous about expanding capacity on this scale in case our fickle governments stop ordering after a few years, leaving them with no customers.
This is not just about guns and steel. Modern military technology relies more than ever on all sorts of complex civilian technologies, which Britain has been enthusiastically selling off to precisely the wrong people for years. In 2008, for example, UK authorities took little interest in the sale of
Dynex Semiconductor, a chipmaker, to a Chinese rail company. In 2018 it emerged that Dynex’s technology had likely been used to design a new type of ultra-powerful cannon mounted on a Chinese assault ship. In 2012, Huawei bought the Centre for Integrated Photonics from an arm of the British government. British security officials now say this gave them “a head start” in a key technology. This is before we even get to the dubious partnerships between British universities and Chinese military conglomerates.