Times:
The Winners and Losers from the MoD's £2bn Black Hole, or Do I Mean the Losers and the Losers?
The past six months has seen internecine fighting between the three services on a scale not seen for many years as the Royal Navy, the Army, and the RAF bickered over which programmes should be scrapped to save the cash needed to fill the £2bn black hole in the MoD’s budget over the next three years.
Yes you're right, the whole point about black holes is you can't fill them and so it has proved. The service chiefs have agreed, if that is the right word, on a series of delays and salami-slicing, most of which simply postpone payments and move the black hole back a few years when it will re-emerge even larger than it is now.
Don't expect a list of cuts out of the MoD, Gordon doesn't want the bad publicity over not properly funding the armed forces so that mantra about telling parliament everything has gone out of the window. But here for TimesOnline readers only, is a list of the winners and losers, or more accurately the losers and the losers:
The Army is the big loser with a number of programmes cut or delayed:
FRES [Future Rapid Effect System] family of armoured vehicles, the army’s most important procurement project. There has been nothing rapid about this much delayed project at all. The more than 3,000 new vehicles were supposed to be introduced next year. Threats of further delays led last year to the resignation of Lord Drayson, procurement minister, who had vowed to bring it in on time. The MoD announced this month that the "provisional" choice is the General Dynamics Piranha V, which will be built in the UK. But the project will now be pushed back three years, taking it out of the current Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) period and saving around £800m. Gen Sir Richard Dannatt, the army chief of general staff, appears confident he will get the vehicles, but a revamp of the old FV430 series, now known as Bulldog, raises doubts as to whether it will ever go ahead.
Bowman Communications System. This is the army’s only other major programme, although strictly speaking it is tri-service, and has seen the sort of delays that would be impossible to believe were they happening in any other area than defence procurement. It is now 19 years old and is still not fully implemented. A key part of the system, a software upgrade designed to give it true battlefield internet capability helping to avoid friendly fire air strikes has been delayed indefinitely, effectively salami-sliced, pushing more than £300 million out of the three-year CSR period and again raising doubts as to whether it will ever happen.
Future Integrated Soldier Technology (FIST) - futuristic attempt to have every soldier linked in to command HQs with a range of new technology - eg live video feeds from a soldier’s helmet back to commanders, his rifle linked into the video to improve accuracy and increased protection through reduced infrared and radar signatures. This has been pushed back three years out of the CSR period, saving £100m. Will it ever happen? If you ever thought frontline soldiers would get this sort of treatment you were living in a parallel universe where chocolate bars grew on trees and every woman looked like Michelle Pfeiffer.
Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS) - The truck-mounted light version of this system known as the Lightweight Mobile Artillery Weapon System (Rocket) which is designed to provide an air portable version of the multiple launch rocket system has been salami-sliced saving an immediate £100m.
The army had also been expected to lose the Future Lynx helicopters it is buying in conjunction with the navy but the idea of cancelling this programme with the prospect of AgustaWestland closing its Yeovil base, losing hundreds of jobs in an area where Labour needs the votes, not to mention the loss of a British helicopter industry, has ensured the helicopters will be built. AgustaWestland has been forced to take a two-year payment holiday. This has pushed £200m out of the three year period, but how much it will add to the eventual cost of the £1bn project is far from clear.
The RAF has got off relatively lightly. It has already seen a two-year delay in the introduction of its new Typhoon (the aircraft formerly known as Eurofighter). Given the watertight contractual obligation to buy, and pay for, the aircraft on time, this was only engineered by the sale of 72 of the British aircraft direct to Saudi Arabia. This of course has already had a great deal of political fall-out in terms of the row over the associated decision not to allow a prosecution over the alleged payment of bribes to Saudi princes by BAE Systems.
Which idiot agreed to sign that watertight contractual obligation? It was of course us, not only did we agree to it, we designed it, in a misguided attempt to keep Germany on board. Now that's karma. The deal saves £1.3bn but that was already factored into the defence budget so has no effect whatsoever on the £2bn black hole. Yes, it really was that bad!
The RAF will also lose Project Listener, an upgrade for its AWACs early warning that would improve interoperability wtith US aircraft when detecting and attacking targets. This will save £50m.
The RAF will also not get any replacements for the three C130 Hercules transport aircraft lost in Iraq and Afghanistan or the nine scrapped over the past year due to fatigue, saving some £600m.
But the furore over the safety of the Nimrod MR2 in the wake of the September 2006 deaths of 14 men when their aircraft exploded over Afghanistan, not to mention the importance of the aircraft’s spy in the sky capability, has ensured the survival of the Nimrod MRA4 programme.
The Navy appears at first sight to have got off Scot-free. Not only is it getting its much cherished carriers at a cost of £2bn each, it is also keeping its part of the Future Lynx project. Its only concession has been the acceptance that it will only get six Astute submarines instead of the original seven and six Type-45 destroyers instead of eight. (It had already gone down from the 12 first announced in 1999, ouch!) It will lose five frigates, all four Type-22s and one Type-23. So actually not totally Scot-free. But in fact all these cuts had long since been written in stone in exchange for the carriers.
With so many payments being pushed back into the next three-year CSR period, few people expect things to get any better, particularly if the defence-hating Brown survives as prime minister. The service chiefs are said to be in “survival mode”, picking over the bones of every story that suggests Labour might ditch Brown as leader and hoping against hope that it just might be true.