N-A-B wrote:
You either bring something worthwhile and get some sort of leverage from it, or you pitch up with tokenism, in which case, pay the absolute minimum you can get away with.
and earlier,
Truly, the treasury goons (informed by the likes of Dannatt and that braniac Soames) are writing this review.
The first it right. On the second, I beg to differ - and no, I'm not one of said HMT goons. I think that the real issues here are at least three-fold:
(i) SDR 98 was a political compromise between No 10, HMT, MoD, Foreign Office and Cabinet Office; everyone knew it was affordable only with some highly optimistic assumptions, and virtually all of them have been exposed - but it was in everyone's interests to pretend otherwise. The real cost of an SDR 98 sized force is probably in the £60 - £70bn p.a or in the order of 5% of GDP - about the norm for the late Cold War - and it was never funded.
(ii) The MoD never got a reality check about the underfunding, and therefore pruned capability and slipped projects rightwards - and we know from the NAO reports ad nauseum how effective this is in achieving value for money. Hence, the current lot inherited a budget overspent by at least £35bn over the next decade (and probably more). In other words, more than 50% of the annual procurement budget for the next decade. Gordon Brown and Comrade Bob have a great deal to answer for in not taking the tough decisions their policies required.
(iii) The current lot haven't been very Strategic in their thinking:
- Who are we as a Nation?
- What role do we aspire to internationally?
- How much are we prepared to spend?
are questions that appear to have been neglected. And exempting Trident and carriers from the purview of the review is risible, because they're so expensive and so alter the remaining choices to encompass the unpalatable, very unpalatable and extremely unpalatable.
Not very clever - and the likely (bonkers) result is the one Sir Malcolm Rifkind foreshadowed at RUSI before the election: the Tories are so wedded to Trident that they are prepared to slash (useful) conventional forces to keep it. Which in my view, is nuts.
So I have a great deal of time for the Treasury's position - "there's no cash and you lot have been incapable of managing your way out of a paper bag for the last decade or more, and sadly there's a time when the music stops."
It stops on 20 Oct 10, if not before.
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