What does the MDP Review outcome mean for the MOD?

After almost 18 months of work, updates, repeated statements and leaks, the final announcement about the ‘Modernising Defence Programme’ was made on Tue December 18^th. “Is that it?” seemed to be the response in many quarters. Is this a fair judgement, or is there more here than meets the initial eye?

For context, since 2010 the UK has adopted a policy of conducting some form of cross Government ‘national security strategy’ style review. In 2010 this was known as the Strategic Defence and Security Review, followed in 2015 by the National Security Strategy and Strategic Defence Review.

The aim of these documents was to lay out the challenges and threats facing the UK, the strategy that Government intended to adopt to counter them, and put forward the range of assets, capabilities and programmes across the whole of Government (not just the MOD) that would counter them and ensure our ongoing strategic success.

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

As part of this work, the MOD used it to set out the military capability it would need to deliver on its commitments, and what force structures would need to be as a result. This led to the concept of Future Force 2020/2025, which was the vision of the type of armed forces the UK would possess, and the sort of headline capabilities that could be deployed to meet these goals.

The NSS & SDSR documents represented the top-level direction to the MOD on the role it was to play in supporting national security, the forces it needed to maintain and the jobs it had to do in order to deliver this. Underpinning these headline documents were a considerable array of papers, strategies and goals that would provide direction to the armed forces about the missions they had to do and what equipment they needed to purchase, support and the real estate needed to maintain this.

Simply put, the SDSR was supposed to provide 5 years of clarity on what the MOD needed to do, where it needed to prioritise funding and what it had to generate to meet operational success as part of wider National Security Strategy goals. The problem is that the money available to do this didn’t tally with the requirements the MOD had. In other words, there was too little money available to meet the challenges and requirements placed on it. Work was urgently needed to be done to either find more money, or find ways to save lots of money to keep Defence financially solvent.

On 20 July 2017 on the day that Parliament rose for the summer recess, it was announced that there was to be a wholesale review of National Security capabilities across 89 different commitments to ensure that the plans continued to be appropriate and effective. There then followed a series of months of leaks, including suggestions that large amounts of RN warships were to be scrapped, as the MOD was reportedly in deep financial straits.

In January 2018 in recognition of the fact that it had proven impossible to get a package of cuts for the MOD agreed to reconcile the budget, it was confirmed that the MOD would conduct its own review of defence capabilities separate to the wider National Security Capability Review, which reported in March 2018.

In July 2018 the Secretary of State updated the House of Commons on the first tranche of findings. He noted the first tranche of MDP work made three core assumptions about the role of the armed forces. Namely that they should:

·         Contribute to strengthening global security through our leading role in NATO, and provide the structures and capabilities to defend the UK;

·         Meet the challenges of the wider threats to international security and stability, including through operations and activities alongside our global allies and partners. Defence must be engaged and outward looking, meeting the challenges of our age, from state-based competition and confrontation, violent extremism and terrorism, instability and crises in Africa and Asia, illegal and irregular migration, serious and organised crime, to climate change and environmental disasters.

·         Act independently, when appropriate, to protect UK interests and citizens overseas, leading multi-national operations and developing strong defence relationships with partners around the world.

The Secretary of State then confirmed that there were three primary themes or conclusions to the work drawn:

·         Our armed forces need to be ready and able to match the pace at which our adversaries now move.

·          A fighting force fit for the challenges of the 21st century

·          Transforming the business of defence to deliver a robust, credible, modern and affordable force

This work then led to a follow-on phase of the Review to consider these findings in more detail, and this is the document that was published during his speech to the House of Commons.

What does it all mean?

On first glance the initial sensation is one of genuine bemusement that such a short (28 pages cover to cover) document is the outcome of such a long gestation period. Arguably the 2018 MDP journey has taken longer to do than the 1998, 2010 and 2015 Defence Reviews, for far less tangible outcomes. The document focuses on the roles and tasks of the armed forces, the type of changes being made to Defence and considers the wider business and other issues linked to it. 

The headline announcement for many is the judgement that the MOD will continue to aim to deploy a global force of up to 50,000 personnel built around three core outputs – a maritime task group centred on a Carrier; a deployable Division of three brigades, an air group of combat, transport and surveillance aircraft and a special forces task group.

At first glance it appears that the headline findings of the 2015 SDSR have been preserved and that Force 2025 remains on track. But nowhere in the document is there any discussion on force structures or levels.

For example, while the ambition may be to deploy a Maritime Task Group, it is not clear what this will consist of, or how it will be formed. There is no sense of how many ships will be in it, which in turn asks questions about the future size of the Royal Navy.  Similarly, there is no information on how many aircraft will be at the centre of the Air Group – is it a multiple squadron sized force, or is it a couple of jets of each type? There is absolutely no indication about the level of deployable capability that will be maintained by the RN or RAF.

The first question must be, ‘how many ships will the Royal Navy have as a result of MDP?’. It is simply not clear what size the Royal Navy is going to be – given the reports of significant cuts to the force, one must ask what the future planning assumptions are for the size of the Future Force 2025. Is the RN still committed to a force of 19 escorts and 7 attack submarines? Right now, it is not clear from reading the MDP whether it is or not.

While one must hope that force levels are being maintained as planned, the fact that there is not a single glossy table anywhere in the document, or any suggestion as to the future size and structure of the armed forces is a little odd. Every high-level MOD document that Humphrey can recall reading usually covers at length the force levels required to meet the outputs expected of it. Here there is no information at all beyond saying the very vague headline goals - this is somewhat unusual.

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Global Reach

There is an intriguing discussion on the global role of the British Armed Forces. It is helpful to see the three ‘National Security Objectives’ (the top level goals for the MOD in the last SDSR) expanded to show the roles and missions associated with them – there are now 25 specific tasks for the Armed Forces to deliver against in order to ‘Protect Our People’, ‘Project Our Influence’ and ‘Promote Our Prosperity’.

A cynic may argue that there is nothing particularly new in any of these roles, and that in one form or another most of them have been in defence reviews for many years. But, within this there are some interesting specific tasks – for instance the clear statement that the role of the armed forces is in part to conduct overseas strike operations unilaterally or with allies – while there will doubtless be many papers written on what a strike operation is, and the scale at which the UK will conduct it, it is reassuring to see the continued intent to operate globally.

There are encouraging words about global operations, and the intent to increase presence in locations like Asia Pacific and Africa, although the paper is short on specifics and what form this presence may look like. Matching this aspiration for a global presence against the challenges of supporting NATO commitments to match a highly assertive and aggressive Russia may prove a challenge.

The move towards recognising Cyber and Space as environmental domains is also notable, and perhaps indicates a move towards some kind of increased space and cyber force capability. The clear language used about deterrence of activity towards threats towards UK interests including in Space highlights the manner that this has gone from the realm of science fiction to everyday operations.

While we may not see a ‘Royal Space Force’ established soon, it does feel that there is a real effort being made to get people to think in more than the traditional set of three environmental domains, which over time could have a significant impact. This may be particularly notable given the manner that Cyber and Space are as much about civilian operations as they are military operations, compared to the more traditional military environments, posing challenging questions about the primacy of the military in these areas (e.g. do you need a uniformed person to deter aggression in space?). Similarly the addition of two extra domains will put further pressure on stretched procurement budgets to continue to invest in the full range of capabilities.

Mention is made of increased investment in some areas, for example the use of innovation funds and prioritising the additional resources made available in the Budget on things like better availability of resources like ships, and more enhancements to capability in the ASW space to protect the deterrent.

Given the RN already works its ships extremely hard, it will be interesting to see what the explicitly referenced discussion on ship availability means – does it suggest that the RN may be trying something new, for instance paying off some ships to create a bigger pool of people to man existing ones (e.g. adopting OPV manning principles for the surface fleet), or does it mean changes to refit and repair practises?

There are unanswered questions about what these improvements look like in practise, and while increased availability of ships at sea will be welcomed in order to meet our commitments, it must not be done at the cost of breaking the people in the force. There is no point having a theoretical ability to send ships to sea for 320 days per year (for example) if the specialist crew are leaving because they have had enough. Ensuring that increasing platform availability does not break personnel goodwill and remains broadly retention positive will prove to be a challenge.

The discussion about spending extra resources on innovative technology sounds impressive - £140m is for most people an enormous sum of money. In the context of Defence though, this funding is relatively small. In an era of £100m aircraft and £1bn escort ships, this is not going to bring in large scale capability changes, more incremental enhancements in some areas.

One of the benefits of such an approach will be the fact that this sort of cash could be used to encourage the UKs vibrant defence and technology industry, helping provide financial support to encourage them to continue producing world leading capability. One of the reasons the UK is in a strong position is, in part, due to the strength of its domestic industry. Investment here will go a way to helping secure the future of many smaller companies that can produce exceptional capability.

Reference is made to reprioritising funding to increase ammunition stockpiles. ‘Reprioritising’ is an interesting word – for not only does it mean more money for some areas, but it also implies less money is available for others. The document gives the impression that the decision has been taken to reduce funding elsewhere in order to increase munitions.

The logical follow on question is ‘what has changed to warrant buying more munitions’? While it is highly unlikely that any public comment would be made, the assumption must be that either the MOD feels that parts of its current stockpile requires enhancing in order to be certain of combating the envisaged threats, or that they envisage new and more challenging scenarios involving higher than previously anticipated use of munitions in some environments. Either way something significant appears to have changed in the underlying analysis to warrant prioritising investment in this area over other parts of the system.

More widely there is discussion on what Defence can offer the rest of Government in terms of providing capability to support the efforts to improve and defend National Security. It is fascinating to observe the higher priority accorded to the conduct of support to the Civil Power, including cyber defence and defence of non-MOD critical national infrastructure points to an increased awareness of the vital role played by Defence in a range of discrete tasks, such as the Salisbury poisonings. There is a sense that the MOD is returning its thinking to classic Cold War issues like defence of the Home Base and ‘Critical Points’ as it grapples with the challenges posed – for the first time in a generation it seems to be considering what Defence can do to keep the UK Homebase safe on land. This marks a significant change from the drift towards purely global and expeditionary capability seen in the 1990s and 00s back towards a more balanced approach.

The human dimension -Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

All about the People

There are welcome remarks on career structures indicating that the planned cuts to the MOD Civil Service from 2015 (which was planned to see it reduce from 55,000 to 40,000 in 5 years) appear to have been scrapped. While it is absolutely right that the Civil Service should always be lean, and posts exist because they need to be there, not because they’ve always been there, there will doubtless be relief that putting people and skills before headcount appears to have won out.

The MOD Civil Service is the unsung hero of Defence, doing an enormous amount of work, much of it routine, mundane and extremely unglamorous to ensure the Armed Forces can deploy on operations. It is good to see recognition that their work is sufficiently vital so as to warrant changing previous plans.

There are warm words on needing to increase the skills available to Defence, particularly via the Reserves on areas like cyber and other key areas. This is fine in principle, but given the utterly inflexible, and at times nonsensical medical standards applied to joiners (as Humphrey has discovered to his cost, you can be prescribed some medications in service without issue that if you take before (re)joining immediately makes you classed Permanently Medically Unfit to serve), one has to wonder whether there is a genuine willingness to utterly change how recruiting is done to bring people in. The recruiting system remains a slow and unwieldy beast, and until this is significantly improved, people will give up and lose interest.

The wider problem that doesn’t seem to have been addressed about bringing in niche skills to the Reserves is trying to persuade people to sign up in their spare time to do their day job, probably for a lot less money and a lot more hassle. People join the Reserves to do something new or different – not spend the weekend doing their weekday role. The ‘offer’ needs to be compelling to bring these skills in, and perhaps focus on a structure whereby people agree to do general military training and wider work, but in return will provide their professional skills in a crisis if required. Failing to recognise that people don’t usually join the Reserves to bring niche skills to the Army, but come to the Army to learn nice skills will hold back recruitment.

One other area of interest is the move to establish both ‘Net Assessment’ and units to bring in outsiders to provide ‘challenge’ to Defence policy assumptions. This is an intriguing idea (although it could be asked what the Net Assessment is going to do that isn’t already done by a multitude of Whitehall assessment organisations, including Defence Intelligence), but Humphrey has one reservation.

For all the talk of ‘challenge culture’ and bringing in external people to critique and put views and challenge across, the issue is less ‘the challenge’ but more whether the challenge is accepted and acted on. Perhaps what is needed here is cultural change to move the armed forces into a point where external challenge is sought and acted on, rather than being seen with some scepticism by individuals who feel outsiders do not understand the ways of the Whitehall warrior…

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Where is the Money?

Reading the document, one could be forgiven for forgetting why this review was launched in the first place. Namely a significant disparity between the money the MOD has, and the money that it wanted/needed to spend to meet the requirements placed on it.

It is not being disloyal to suggest that reading the document, one is not left with a sense of understanding what the plan is to put the MOD onto a financially stable pathway to the future. Instead the document feels like a short affirmation of all the really good stuff that has been done (and there is a huge amount of excellent work being done) and marrying this up with aspiration to do more really good stuff and spend a bit of extra cash too.

Reading the MDP one struggles to get a sense of whether it has met the goal it set out to do. It is not clear what the scale of the financial challenge was when the process began – there do not appear to be public statements showing how much of a deficit the MOD was expecting to be in, nor how bad the in-year or medium-term position was that warranted starting this process off in the first place. Also strikingly absent from the public document is any sense of how to fix the multi-billion pound ‘black hole’ at the heart of the equipment programme, which the NAO predicts is currently over £7bn out of alignment. This is not to say that the MOD doesn’t have a plan to fix this challenge. Its just that nowhere in the document does it set out how this will be done.

Since the public have not been told the scale of the challenge, it is impossible to understand how much money has been saved through delays, deferrals or ‘descoping’ – how many deployments or visits were cancelled, or how many small measures designed to save £50k here or £1m there, but overall there is no simple statement talking about how the books have been balanced.

It is perhaps not unreasonable to ask what measures were taken, how much equipment has been cut, what additional sites will be sold or where will things be done differently? It is not being critical of the MOD to perhaps expect more granularity about how things have been done, in part to seek reassurance that this problem will not occur again in the next few years. The big worry must be that MDP has not fixed these problems, and that the CSR will be the next MDP, which in turn will see further cuts made to balance the books.  

This calendar year some £1.8bn has been found for the MOD by the Treasury in addition to the planned Defence budget. This money has been used to buy out in year challenges, solve challenges with the DREADNOUGHT project and find some additional cash to support specific projects. But, what remains unclear is how much more is needed to ensure the Department is financially viable in the medium term.

The impression given is that this document is not the final stage in the process, but rather an ‘amuse bouche’ to whet the appetite ahead of the real battle, which will be the Comprehensive Spending Review. This major piece of work held across Government next spring will determine the size of the Defence budget for the next five years.

The MDP reads as if it is designed to set out what the MOD wants to do, with the expectation and understanding that the Treasury will find the money to do this. While there is oblique references to reprioritisation and buying headroom in the report, what is not clear is the scale to which the MOD thinks it will need to be given additional funding to meet the demands placed on it.

Overall though there is a sense of cautious optimism here. The Secretary of State was clear in his speech to the House of Commons that further work is required as the MOD moves towards the Spending Review to understand how to take long term decisions to improve the ‘lethality, reach and mass of our armed forces’.

The aspiration to increase the mass and effectiveness of the military is to be applauded. Coupled with an emphasis on robust language that reminds the world that the military exists primarily to inflict violence on those who would harm us, it leaves us with a sense that the desire to increase the size of the military and its effectiveness is there. Whether this welcome ambition will be sustained through the CSR, or if the numbers simply don’t add up and further cuts are required remains to be seen.