The Ship of State - Leaks on Defence Spending Plans

Its that time again, a period theoretically seen every five years or so, but occasionally more recently than that. A group of people who it seems cordially loathe each other spend months leaking, shouting, briefing and making grandiose pledges that don’t always get fulfilled. This whole, and at times, unedifying, process is, of course, the latest iteration in a Strategic Defence Review.

The Sunday Times leads with a story today that the Army is facing cuts to its manpower, and that in return they want the Navy to be forced to lease or mothball one of the two QUEEN ELIZABETH class carriers. The article talks about a range of debates going on, and the latest news about what may or may not be scrapped or cut in any future budget settlement. Is this something to worry about, or is it merely the opening salvos in what is likely to be a long and painful campaign of attrition?

Defence reviews are driven from the very centre of Government – they occur usually with the Prime Minister of the days blessing, and they are now run centrally – usually via the Cabinet Office, and not by the MOD. This reflects the fact that modern national security requirements means the need to bring all departments together in a consensus and not isolated pockets doing their own thing.

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

The pattern of the two previous SDSR’s has been to form up a team, usually announced to Parliament, and then conduct a series of studies – framing the areas of interest and questions to answer (e.g. what role should Britain play in the Far East, where is the main strategic threat in Europe, should we assume Eastasia will always be at war with Oceania etc). This then shapes a lengthy period of study as ideas emerge and policy thinkers try to develop a broad set of goals and strategy for the 5-10 year period ahead.

At some point in this process, departments then begin to look at what they individually need to do to meet these goals. For instance, the FCO may look at how many embassies and High Commissions it requires, or DFID may think about how much it needs to deliver the programmes to have the effects it wants.

For the MOD this period usually heralds a period of deep soul searching and at times outright warfare as the three services co-operate/compete with each other to define what force structures would be needed to meet all these goals, and identify how to deliver the desired effects (e.g. what do you need across Defence to deploy one armoured division and sustain it in the Middle East as part of a coalition operation).

These ambitions are costed up and series of packages developed which provide options to decision makers – for instance, you could run a series of options about investing very heavily in the Army, but cutting the RAF to pay for it if you felt that land based operations was where the future would be. 

This would then turn into a series of deeper debates about the impact on both savings (short, medium and long term) as you shut RAF bases, reduced the training pipeline and cancelled maintenance contracts, and then what you could do to reinvest the money saved in the Army as an enhancement (e.g more tanks, guns and attack helicopters).

Over a period of months many different packages are developed, some are scrapped quickly while others are taken further for more scrutiny (the RN ‘delete UPHOLDER SSK’ case from 1993 is a classic example of how not to offer something you expect to be saved, only to see it taken as a savings measure). The end result is a package of options that is put to senior military figures and then Ministers (and usually the Prime Minister and Cabinet) for approval. The findings will then be announced in the House of Commons in due course.

So, given all this, what should we make of some of the content of todays Sunday Times article? The first thing to note is that there is not a defence review currently underway in any formal basis. With an election campaign underway, it would simply not be feasible to be running a defence review until such point as the next Government is formed.

We can therefore immediately discount the idea that these decisions are imminent or that they will definitely happen. They do not reflect formed thinking put in front of Ministers for a decision, or even thinking in front of an SDSR meeting – given that there is no SDSR underway.

What instead appears to be happening is we are seeing the initial jockeying for position by the services to try and think at a low level about how they could meet an SDSR and what their SDSR bids would look like if budget cuts fell disproportionately on their service. In other words, if there needed to be cuts to the budget, what would a 2/5/10/20% cut look like?

Secondly, there is likely to be discussion about how to meet all the current commitments and plans in Defence and ensure that it meets with funding plans and goals. It is no secret, in fact it is in the open source literature that as currently constructed, Defence has a significant fiscal challenge at its heart – depending on how you interpret it, the NAO thinks it could be as high as a £15bn black hole on current spending plans. In other words, the NAO has stated that based on the current budgets and based on the current commitments made, there appears to be a significant shortfall in funding.

The previous Government had committed to holding a Comprehensive Spending Review (which is a normal part of all Government activity). It is likely that this will occur whoever wins the election – this is the point at which Defence will have a much clearer idea of how much it has to fund its ambitions and projects over the next 5-10 years.

As such what may be happening is that there is some low-level staff work going on, not yet crystallised into formal thinking, about how to solve some of the potential financial scenarios that could emerge, and what happens if this falls on one Service.

This is incredibly routine thinking and should not be seen as anything other than normal business. Trying to understand how to adapt your plans if budgets change makes a lot of sense, and if you are so minded, makes for some wonderfully scary reading if you wanted to leak it.

The actual substance of the reports feels very strange – the idea that the Army would somehow mount a single service campaign to mothball a carrier doesn’t inherently fit well with how these decisions are taken. It could well be that somewhere a paper exists saying ‘if you mothball/lease HMS QUEEN ELIZABETH you’d save X’ but that sort of decision is one taken at the very highest levels of Government, and not on the behest of a junior Army officer.

Similarly the decision making process is not built around one service demanding another do something – this utterly misrepresents how these decisions happen. The Army can no more demand the RN mothball a carrier than the RAF can demand the Army scrap the Household Division.

This is not to say that this idea would not be considered – frankly, if you are running work on how to save money then you have to put everything on the table otherwise it’s a pointless exercise. But, there is a very very significant difference between low level staff work to do the basic sums, and the finalisation of a package of cuts to present to Ministers.

To get there requires a lot of work, a lot of agreement and arguably given how central the carriers are to UK policy objectives, a fundamental reappraisal of how the UK see’s its place and goals in the world.

The other note of interest is the proposal that the Navy wants the Army cut to about 62 - 65000 people.  The discussion around cutting the Army to this level is neither new, nor Navy driven. If you look back to the 2015 SDSR the clear drive from the Army then was to cut to this level – there is plenty of open source discussion around it.

The figure of 65000 is one that was looked at as both being affordable in that it opened up room in the equipment programme to properly fund a deployable division, but also that this bought a headcount gap of some 17000 posts that could be used to fund an increase to RN/RAF manpower totals. Both services reportedly wanted large headcount increases in the last review and this could have been made possible by essentially reassigning the manpower totals around (e.g. RN could have gained a notional 3000 posts from the Army, so could the RAF and there would still be significant savings to be made by reducing headcount by about 10000).

It is inevitable that this subject will be up for discussion in the next Defence Review, as understanding whether you want mass or reach is a key debate. Does the UK want a force that can deploy and fight with the US as a deployable division or sustainable Brigade, or does it want to have lots more troops but a more limited range of places to deploy and operate them? These are big difficult questions to answer, coming back to the point that these are dealt with as part of a full blown Defence Review and not as a random staff paper proposal to leak to the media.

There are other odd comments too about the Royal Navy being told by the SofS for Defence to look to deploy the carrier with US planes and NATO warships to save money. This may come as news to the Royal Navy, which has spent the last two decades designing, building and delivering a pair of aircraft carriers designed to do exactly that from the outset.

The US will be central to the deployment and employment of the F35 at sea, and USMC aircraft have already embarked in, and will continue to embark in the QE. Whether the balance shifts and over time more USMC embark vice UK airframes is an interesting question, but fundamentally the RN has always planned to make the USMC a central part of the carrier air group.

Similarly, the Carrier Strike Group concept has always been international by design. The UK philosophy of operating as a coalition partner leads inevitably to this. The UK will provide the heavy carriers and some escorts, enabling other countries to participate by sending escorts too. Already the WESTLANT19 CSG has worked up with US Navy vessels, and it is likely other NATO partners will join in too as time progresses. The suggestion that this is direction to the Navy is a bit odd to say the least, given the Navy is championing it.

There are interesting comments about the direction given to all three services to increase recruitment, ships availability and pilot numbers, but this feels more like general guidance issued in terms of where to focus efforts in the short term, and not the headmark guidance for the SDSR and views on where cuts should fall.

Finally, the article talks about the possible change of CDS impacting on where these cuts may happen. Frankly this substantially overestimates the role of the CDS in presenting these cuts, or his ability to determine where they fall. Decisions on force packages and structures are not taken in isolation by one man alone, and CDS cannot just say ‘scrap the carrier’ and expect it done.

Rather such a move would need to be taken by Ministers, who would be presented with advice and options on what to do, which may include recommendations on mothballing a carrier. It is incredibly important to realise that the choice of CDS will not have a material outcome on this work – the idea that somehow people put their single service blinkers back on at this level is just untrue.

What is depressing about this article though is the fact that once again we seem to have an outbreak of intra-service insecurity and willy waving ahead of a review – it is utterly pathetic. If you are a serving officer and you genuinely think that ‘the Army hates carriers’ or ‘the RAF are out to abolish the Fleet Air Arm’ then this not a healthy place to be. Frankly, if you feel the need to go a journalist and whinge about how the big bad nasty Army wants to do nasty things to your Service then, frankly, you should bloody well grow up and quit the Service.

Staffwork means looking at difficult and at times unpalatable choices to come up with options and advice to Ministers. It is a process that when done well considers things in the round, that looks at all the different angles and outcomes and provides balanced nuanced advice that allows Ministers to take a decision.

Sometimes that means looking at things that seem unpalatable, or make uncomfortable reading, but it doesn’t mean that they will happen or come true. But it is vital that decision makers and their advisers have the space to consider everything objectively, and not be bounced into rash decisions because a junior officer, not privy to the whole picture, threw their toys out of the pram over one theoretical piece of advice or costings option.

What is clear is that the new season of ‘Game of Planning Rounds’ has begun. We can expect plenty more leaks like this to a variety of sources and papers which will be intended to achieve effect. If past performance is anything to go by, you can expect to see a ‘greatest hits’ collection of some variants of the following options leaked in the next 12-18 months:

a.       Parachute regiment to merge with Royal Marines

b.      White elephant carriers are all to blame

c.       The nasty MOD civil service did it…

d.      SAS to merge with SBS

e.       RAF to take control of all F35 and scrap FAA

f.        Army has more horses than tanks

g.       Army to no longer have enough troops to deploy a Division

h.      Cranwell, Sandhurst and Dartmouth to close / merge in one location

i.        RN to scrap X number of frigates or other ships

j.        Naval Infantry Division to return…

k.      Army to scrap Y number of tanks

l.        RAF to dispose of Z aircraft fleets

All of these have appeared in the past, but how many of them actually happened or were true? The above links are just a snapshot in time (based on a quick google) but demonstrate that in the build up to a review, we’ll see a lot more articles like this one (which predicted cuts, many of which never happened) and a lot of rumours, angst and predictions.

Humphreys honest advice is simple – DON’T PANIC! Until the review is finalised, and has gone to the Prime Minister of the day for approval, nothing is set in stone. There will be leaks aplenty, rumours aplenty and very little in the way of actionable outcomes. Until the final package of measures is approved, everything is to play for, and anything can happen. It is just not worth getting worked up about because unless you are on the inside track as part of the Review team, you don’t know what is going on.

Other advice is to assume that every SDSR or cuts story, unless it has come from an ‘on the record’ source is designed to influence your way of thinking and influence others too. Ask yourself ‘why is this leaking now and in whose best interests is it to leak it’? In the case of the Sunday Times story, it feels instinctively like some overly worried Naval Officers are trying to make the case for the Carrier – which begs the question, ‘why now?’

Whatever the outcome of the election, some form of spending review and likely defence review will probably occur. The trick now is to sit back, relax and not believe everything you read until such point as it is announced officially by the Minister in one form or another. In the interim, its probably worth remembering this helpful Yes Minister quotes and reminding yourself that all of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again…

Bernard: That's another of those irregular verbs, isn't it? I give confidential press briefings; you leak; he's being charged under section 2A of the Official Secrets Act.