The Economist's take. My bold :
The first casualty
The intervention in Libya has cast fresh doubt on the wisdom of last year’s cost-cutting defence review
May 19th 2011 | from the print edition
War on the cheap
“NO BATTLE plan ever survives first contact with the enemy,” Helmuth von Moltke, a 19th-century head of the Prussian army, famously observed. That is amply true of the Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) published by the government last October. Paul Cornish of Chatham House, a think-tank, thinks it might prove “one of the fastest failures in modern British strategic history”.
David Cameron’s resolve to take a leading role in Libya immediately called into question one of the main, if unspoken, assumptions underlying the SDSR: that no more “wars of choice” would be fought until the exchequer was flusher. So far, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) is just about coping with the demands of the Libyan intervention; the Treasury has not yet balked at meeting the costs from its reserve, even as they spiral. But it would have been a different story if the Libyan crisis had blown up only a few months later—because the campaign has relied on precisely the sort of air and maritime assets that the SDSR, preoccupied as it was with the land war in Afghanistan, blithely calculated that Britain could do without.
For example, HMS Cumberland, one of four Type-22 frigates identified for retirement, was on its way home to be decommissioned before it was sent into action, first ferrying British nationals to safety and then helping to enforce the maritime exclusion zone off the coast of Libya. Similarly, the Nimrod R1 reconnaissance aircraft, due to be scrapped in March, has won a stay of execution because it was needed in Libya. The brunt of Britain’s contribution to striking at the Libyan regime’s military infrastructure has been borne by Tornado GR4s. The number of Tornado squadrons is scheduled to be reduced from seven to five next month.
And had the SDSR not decided that Britain could take the risk of going a decade without an aircraft-carrier, the already decommissioned HMS Ark Royal and its Harrier jets would have joined carriers from France, Italy and America off the Libyan coast. Able to respond more quickly than the Tornados that are flying from Italy, the Harriers would have been especially handy for attacking Muammar Qaddafi’s tanks and mobile rocket-launchers. It turns out that much of the “legacy equipment for which there is no requirement”—to quote the SDSR—is still pretty useful.
The Libyan mission has also highlighted the weakness in Britain’s broader strategic thinking. Hew Strachan of Oxford University says the SDSR is “strategy-light”, and fails to convince on either China or the Middle East—the “two areas where big and really difficult conflicts could occur”. Afghanistan aside, he fears that British thinking attempts “to map a world 30 years away” and is not focused enough on the “immediate and unexpected”. Michael Clarke, the director of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), another think-tank, struggles to find evidence of strategic thinking that goes much beyond being America’s “most loyal ally”—and says there has been little reflection on what that notion actually means nowadays. Observers also wonder where responsibility for military strategy ultimately lies in the British system: in the MOD, the new National Security Council or with the overstretched prime minister?
The last hurrah
Liam Fox, the defence secretary, gamely argues that the Libyan operation is a one-off that could not have been predicted. But his private dissatisfaction with the defence settlement is palpable. This week a letter from Dr Fox to Mr Cameron, in which the former took issue with the government’s plan to enshrine in law its aim of raising international-aid spending to 0.7% of GDP, was leaked, as was another letter from Dr Fox to the prime minister about defence cuts last year.
His discomfort is likely to worsen. Dr Fox maintains that revising the SDSR would make sense only if the government suddenly decided to give defence more cash—which would mean either backsliding on cutting the country’s fiscal deficit or taking money from health, education or something else closer to the hearts of most voters than bombing Tripoli. In fact, the only changes under serious discussion involve even deeper and faster cuts in capability than those announced last year—which might not be anything like enough to bring spending into line with the actual defence budget.
Andrew Dorman, who lectures at the Joint Services Command and Staff College, reckons that the defence budget is set to shrink by between 20% and 30% in real terms, rather than the publicised figure of 8%. That is because the Treasury has left it to the MoD to sort out the £38 billion ($61 billion) black hole in spending commitments left by the previous government, plus the unbudgeted costs of replacing Britain’s ballistic-missile submarine fleet.
Mr Dorman expects new cuts to be announced soon that will include (among other things) speeding up plans to reduce the number of army units, and cancelling the remaining order for Chinook heavy-lift helicopters in anticipation of British combat forces leaving Afghanistan by 2015. However, he and others believe that Dr Fox needs to be still more radical, and that the pace of administrative reforms should be accelerated, culling not only the top-heavy civilian side of the MoD but also the bloated ranks of senior officers: proportional to its size, the British Army has four times as many generals as the US Army.
The crude ring-fencing by the SDSR of capabilities supposedly required for Afghanistan has created another pressing problem: a worsening imbalance between the various parts of the armed forces. Malcolm Chalmers of RUSI calculates that, by 2015, land forces will account for around 65% of total service personnel, compared with current levels of around 55% in America and France, 53% in Canada and 50% in Australia. One partial solution, advocated in a recent paper by Sir Graeme Lamb, a former director of special forces, and Colonel Richard Williams, a former commander of the SAS, would be to move to an army of 75,000, rather than the intended 95,000 (itself down from 102,000), with a larger and more integrated reserve component.
The basic question for British strategy is whether the ways and means implied by the SDSR can support the government’s still-ambitious military goals. Or, to put it another way, whether the government’s eyes for embarking on high-minded adventures of the Libyan kind are bigger than its stomach for resourcing them.