WWND? (What Would Nelson Do?)

A defence review wouldn’t be a defence review without a little mischief making by all the participants and interested parties. The award for ‘most outrageously ballsy interjection in the 2018 SDSR’ is currently likely to be awarded to the French Government for their offer of amphibious shipping to support the Royal Marines if the RN decides to delete its LPD capability.

This news seemed designed to cause outrage among many supporters of the Navy, and to get MP’s intentionally wound up about the perceived ‘humiliation’ that would be caused by the Royal Marines relying on the French for help. WWND?

A cynic would suggest that this news is intentionally timed to fight the rearguard action for the LPDs by individuals in the Naval Service with vested interests. It is clear that this ‘proposal’ is actually nothing of the sort – no formal offer has been made to the UK by the French Government, and one wonders if it was an inspired leak at a relatively junior level to help shift public opinion.

The UK and French navies enjoy a remarkably close relationship, which has only grown deeper in recent years. Both navies are similar sizes and carry out similar functions, with the mild difference being the French preference to prioritise ‘shop window’ capability at the cost of deeper blue water support, whereas the RN has focused more on logistics and sustainability. There have been a growing number of joint deployments – for example this year a Commando Helicopter Force detachment embarked on a training cruise to the Far East, putting RN merlins onboard a French LPH for a sustained deployment.

One of the challenges MOD planners face is the acceptance that they cannot do everything they want to do under the financial envelope in which they are operating. Defence planning is about judging risks, mitigating them and accepting what risk is so unlikely as to not require treatment. The need to operate a pair of LPD is likely to be one area where planners may reluctantly accept that risk can be taken.

The chances of the UK needing to exercise an amphibious assault in national isolation are vanishingly small these days. Any operation will almost certainly be done in conjunction with the US or French, so being able to draw on these assets is a great way to reduce the burden on the UK taxpayer while retaining operational capability. Even if the LPDs do pay off, the RN will retain a pair of carriers able to embark Royal Marines and the ability to put some limited intra theatre lift into play via the Bay and Point class.

If the RN chooses to pay off ALBION and BULWARK then the actual loss to UK amphibious capability comes from the ability to command and control amphibious operations. Both ships are optimised to act as C2 platforms and while they embark troops, the bulk of the landing force is likely to instead come from the Bays or whichever LPH/CVF is available.  The French offer then to provide access to their platforms would make a lot of sense. It could provide a coalition C2 platform onto which an RN battle staff could embark in order to exercise command and control of an amphibious landing.

Offering up spare capacity for contingency planning is a good way to focus on burden sharing. If the RN requirement is for a command platform, then working with the French is a great way to achieve it – providing the suitable accommodation, IT infrastructure and associated communications challenges can be dealt with (and this is all eminently doable), then embarking on a French ship is a sensible way to provide this capability if required.

The problem though is that pig-headedness and national pride often forces decision takers to reflect public opinion and make the wrong decision. There is no shame in burden sharing with other nations – many navies do it. The French are our closest ‘peer navy’ and have a great deal in common with the UK in term of strategic goals and outlook. The French armed forces are extremely capable and professional and get on very well with their UK peers. Finally the French are perfectly capable of burden sharing from the UK – relying heavily on RAF strategic airlift  support to help deliver their hugely successful operations in Mali a few years ago.

Co-operating with the French would be an extremely sensible way to retain a capability that will be very rarely needed and even then realistically only in international operations. It would free up resources better spent keeping other more badly needed ships at sea, and help bolster the UKs credentials as being genuinely committed to European collaboration at a time when real questions are being asked about what role the UK can play in European defence.

The wider challenge though is that in the increasingly connected world in which we live, news can break quickly and be used to influence and inform others. There was strong suspicion on social media that this story came about as a result of leaks to force the Government to rethink its proposed cuts to the LPD force by trying to reputationally embarrass it – after all, who wants to be reliant on the French?

The issue though is that when you try to force decision making on people through public pressure, you are doing so with only partial visibility of the options on the table. This means that if the Government bows to pressure, and Ministers decide not to sacrifice the LPD capability to appease the backbenches and the Sun, then something else will need to be cut instead.

It is increasingly hard for Governments to conduct genuinely strategic reviews when there is widespread leaking and ‘special pleading’ by vested interests. Ministers now face the difficult decision of whether to take an option that would reduce a rarely used capability in the face of strident backbench opposition, working on the assumption that the political damage has already been done, and or give in to the special pleading, and save the ships, but in the process cause significant pain to other parts of the armed forces.

The reality is that for all the harrumphing about France, international co-operation and burden sharing is the future way of working in a resource constrained world. The RN and wider MOD has got to take a long look at what it wants to do versus what the resources are there to do. Often it is possible to focus on working with allies to achieve the same effect, but differently. This is naturally a blow to national pride, but defence and national security policy making should be about doing what is right for the country in the long term with the resources available, not stubbornly clinging onto assets while scrapping other desperately needed capability just because its less embarrassing than working with the French.