How much worse could it get?
Cuts reduce RAF to The Few
By Michael Smith, Defence Correspondent, and Neil Tweedie
(Filed: 22/07/2004)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.../22/ndef22.xml
Nearly a quarter of the RAF is to be axed, with the loss of more than 100 front-line aircraft, Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, said yesterday.
Overall, the Armed Forces will be reduced by a tenth in what the Tories described as "a political and moral betrayal". Many ships and tanks will be scrapped.
The RAF is to be cut from 53,800 personnel to 41,000 and will lose all 108 Jaguar ground attack aircraft. A fifth of its Tornado F3 fighter aircraft are to go, plus its base at Coltishall, Norfolk.
It will also lose nine of its Nimrod maritime patrol aircraft and the RAF Regiment's air defence capability.
The Royal Navy will lose 5,000 men and 15 vessels, including the Type 42 destroyers Cardiff, Newcastle and Glasgow, the Type 23 frigates Norfolk, Grafton and Marlborough and the hunter-killer submarines Spartan, Superb and Trafalgar.
The Army is to lose 5,500 men and more than 80 Challenger II tanks as part of a major restructuring in which all 19 single-battalion "famous names" will be subsumed into large regionally-based regiments, with the loss of four named regiments.
Much of the detail of the cuts will not be given until later in the year when military bases and many helicopters will be axed.
The only expansion is in special forces, with a second regular SAS regiment expected to be created to cope with the amount of work the SAS and SBS have been carrying out in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Mr Hoon told MPs that 10,000 Ministry of Defence civil servants would lose their jobs as part of "improvements to military capabilities".
He said the "rebalancing" was designed to ensure that the Armed Forces were "equipped and trained to continue to perform with success in the future those tasks which they have so admirably undertaken in recent years". The forces had "enthusiastically embraced this process of transformation" which would "see a shift away from an emphasis on numbers of platforms and of people".
But last night there was a deep sense of shock in the RAF and the Royal Navy, the two services hardest hit. A recently retired senior officer said both felt "the top brass have sold them out".
Nicholas Soames, the shadow defence secretary, said the forces would feel "betrayed politically and morally" and the public would be "dismayed" by the "underhand" treatment meted out to those who had fought for their country.
All three services are below their established strengths and the Army and the Royal Navy will need to lose only about 1,500 personnel. But many RAF and MoD civil servants will be made redundant.
Defence sources said the calculations had been very difficult, with the Treasury refusing to pay for the redundancies that were an inevitable result of its failure to fund defence properly.
It is still refusing to pay more than £500 million of the money spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Ministry of Defence is in the grip of a major financial crisis, caused in part by its failure to realise the full effect of the Treasury's introduction of resource account budgeting, which penalises it heavily because of the large amount of land it owns. It also over-estimated the amount it could save by making small cuts to large procurement projects such as the Eurofighter and the Royal Navy's two new aircraft carriers. Both projects will continue but the number of the Navy's new Type 45 destroyers will be cut from 12 to eight.
The angry debate that preceded the announcements had led Mr Hoon to warn the defence chiefs that any sign of dissent "would lead to them being shown the door", defence sources said.
In a personal message to the fleet, Adml Sir Alan West, the First Sea Lord, emphasised the difficulties the Navy now faced.
He said that "clearly a ship can only be in one place at a time" and added: "I do not instinctively welcome the early disposal of good ships."
Gen Sir Michael Walker, the Chief of the Defence Staff, told service personnel in a letter that "tough choices" had been made and that the numbers of personnel being axed were "stark".
Defence sources said he had gone to see Tony Blair three times to curtail the cuts to levels that he and the other defence chiefs believed the forces would accept.
So contentious were some of the cuts that changes were being made up to the last minute. The decision to axe only one of the Scottish famous name infantry regiments was taken this week for purely political reasons to try to contain the angry reaction in Scotland.
The names of the one Scottish and three English regiments to be axed will not be announced until later in the year. The six Scottish infantry line regiments have been told to decide among themselves which regiment is to go, with the Highlanders the most likely.
