The Ship of State Springs a Leak (again)...

Defence is in the news again today, this time as part of a Sunday Times article suggesting that the budget faces significant cuts, that there are concerns about how the next Defence Review is being driven and that the Royal Navy is considering decommissioning HMS VANGUARD as part of this work.

Given the same paper has recently published a variety of stories recently that were demonstrably false (such as the alleged scrapping of HMS PRINCE OF WALES), it is perhaps reasonable to ask how much of this one is actually true, or how much of it is conjecture and intentional leaking

70 Whitehall - Home of the Cabinet Office - Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

The first issue is the suggestion that the Treasury has refused to ringfence the defence budget and guarantee its size meaning, on paper, the MOD may face £4bn cuts. This is a challenge as the commitment to spending 2% of GDP on defence can arguably cut both ways. The main charge appears to be that despite being pushed to commit, the Treasury has instead insisted that the MOD wait until the main spending review before finalising figures.

While this may be frustrating to the MOD, it also makes good sense. We are in the middle of a significant economic crisis, and every department is likely to face potentially significant spending cuts in the near future as revenue streams reduce. This means a promise to ringfence defence now only makes life harder for other departments which also face equally challenging spending priorities.

The danger is that this leak smacks of ‘Defence special pleading because Defence is special’  and trying to make the case via leaks, the court of public and backbench opinion that things must be done, rather than winning the argument in a cross Whitehall spending round.

This sort of behaviour infuriates the Treasury, who dislike being bounced into ringfencing spending commitments at the best of times, and in this case a hamfisted attempt to make the Treasury look bad is likely to backfire spectacularly. With a massive cross Whitehall spending review due, where every Departments plans are on the table for analysis and cuts, to try and force the issue in this way now ahead of it starting is an interesting, and in Whitehall speak, ‘brave’ approach to the issue.

Alternatively it could be interpreted as the start of the ‘softening up’ campaign as the MOD realises the scale of the cuts it has to make loom, then trying to control the narrative by making clear it is the Treasury to blame for these cuts and not MOD (and by extension their Ministers and top people) may be seen as a useful thing to do.

This sort of debate will rumble on for months as negotiations continue, but it is worth remembering when reading  any article on defence spending right now that there is a very challenging spending review in the offing, and every department will be fighting tooth and nail to protect its position as it goes in to the ring.

The next charge sems to be one that the Cabinet Secretary has used the National Security Secretariat (NSS) to force the upcoming defence review to consider cutting the army without reference to Ministers, and to shape the review as he wants prior to Ministers considering it.

This suggestion seems to mirror the views from some quarters that the NSS is some kind of malign entity existing to carry out the Machiavellian tasks of its master, Mark Sedwill, even if this is not what departments want to happen.

There is a great deal of misunderstanding about the role of the Cabinet Office, and in particular the Secretariats, and what they do. At its heart, the Cabinet Office both acts as a home for a variety of functions and tasks that work across Government, or which do not easily have a home elsewhere, and it also acts as the home to the Secretariats which co-ordinate policy development on behalf of the Prime Minister.

The CO is unusual in that most of its staff, particularly in the Secretariats are not permanent staff. Rather they join on loan from parent departments, and return to them on completion of their tour. Their work is to act as the co-ordinating policy hub for government, taking clearly expressed Prime Ministerial and Cabinet direction, and ensuring the machinery of government delivers this.

The Secretariat focuses on a variety of tasks and has been through, and will continue to go through various iterations and structures. The national security element of it focuses on trying to support the agreed outputs of the National Security Council by bringing departments together, drafting papers that reflect cross government views, and then seeking Ministerial agreement on them, prior to monitoring delivery and working with departments to unblock problems. National Security work is done via a so-called 'fusion doctrine' of bringing together views of all departments and their assets and capabilities, and not just the traditional ones.

In the case of defence reviews, these are conducted by a small team which comprises staff brought in from across the civil service to consider the shape of the review, work out what issues departments want to look at, and set the broad direction of travel. What this means in reality is a combination both of drafting exam questions, asking Departments what their priorities are, what they want to focus on and the areas of concern, and then starting to work out how to pull all these concerns together into one coherent package.

At a very strategic level these reviews are around seeing what all departments with a national security interest think, and not just the MOD. They consider priorities, work out national security goals and identify both where the threat is coming from, and what needs to be done to counter this.

This work then evolves over time into papers, studies and options to build a national security architecture that can respond to those challenges. For example, if it is identified that there is a clear threat from hostile actors using state sponsored hackers to our energy network then different departments such as MOD, FCO, GCHQ and BEIS will work together to identify the strategy  to counter this using a variety of assets and capabilities.

Over time these papers are refined and combined with work in departments, so that the initial top level direction from Cabinet Office working that identifies that the threat may be from (hypothetically) Russian military, Chinese industrial espionage and Iranian hacking is then slowly evolved into a range of options and packages that can counter this, and handle it as necessary.

This in turn leads to the options process where at departmental level the MOD will begin to look at what tanks, ships and aircraft it needs, how it needs to build its armed forces and where does extra investment go, and where do savings need to be made. Additionally if savings do need to be made, can they be done by scrapping wholesale capabilities – for example the 2010 SDR identified that the need to recover and regenerate the military post OP HERRICK, coupled with the need to make savings meant that it was possible to scrap the Harrier force, and make additional savings as the intention was not to use them in an expeditionary manner again until 2020 when the JSF force would be available.

The other thing that is key to note here is that it is utter nonsense to suggest that Ministers are having the wool pulled over their eyes by a civil servant. The idea that the Cabinet Secretary has arbitrarily decided to cut the army, and then worked to use his secretariat to make this happen while shielding ministers from this plan is complete and utter fantasy of the highest order.

For a start all departments involved with the SDSR process will have regular ministerial briefings and catch ups to ensure that Ministers are personally sighted on the work, the issues being discussed and evolving themes and options. They will be given insight into where the work is going, what the thinking is, and they will be asked to confirm that they are content, or if they want to look at other options.

Secondly, the SDSR is of such importance that its progress will routinely be discussed using the NSC process, which will see both Permanent Secretary level, and Cabinet Minister level meetings happen for updates and discussion on the process. They are kept completely in the loop on developments.

It would be completely impossible for the Cabinet Secretary to act in the manner suggested in the article. There are enormous checks and balances in the system, and all the options are openly considered – more pertinently still, the process does not involve a senior mandarin sitting in an opulent stuffed chair with a glass of whiskey to hand going to his assembled minions  ‘I think we’ll cut the Army and hire more spies – Bernard, sort it out would you’ – not only does the system not work like that, it would be impossible to do.

What this article seems to represent instead is the view of whichever (possibly retired) Army officer was taken out for what feels like a lunch on expenses who is feeling raw that the MOD isn’t able to do the Defence Review ‘in house’ and that the likely outcome for the review is that the Army will have to be cut.

The blame game appears to have started already for some in the Army, trying to get their excuses in ahead of time as to why they are going to be cut. It is a fairly depressing state of affairs to be honest. For all the talk of jointery (that’s spelt A-R-M-Y to some), when faced with cross Whitehall jointery, bringing all departments together to create a truly fused approach to national security strategy, which sees this work done together and not in glorious Army isolation to ensure the Reviews outcome is that the Rifles assimilate all capbadges before them, it is depressing how quickly poor behaviours emerge.

Another poor behaviour which seems to have emerged here is that most cliched of activity ‘the leaking of the nasty option’. This is up there with the ‘dog ate my homework’ and ‘ooops, I appear to have left my briefcase on the side of the canal’ as most predictable excuses for poor defence behaviour during a defence review.

In this case the article cites an option by the Royal Navy to potentially decommission HMS VANGUARD, currently in the middle of a major refuelling in Devonport, and instead use her as a source of spares to keep the three remaining hulls going into the 2030s.

On the face of it this seems madness, why decommission a ship deep into refit territory and place yet more pressure on her sisters to maintain the deterrent – what on earth is the Royal Navy thinking? There are several explanations, none of which can be confirmed as the document has been seen in isolation and without wider context.

The first is that this is a ‘worst case scenario’ planning exercise. The sort of work done to scope out how the RN would handle absorbing a huge financial cut to its budget and what extreme measures could be taken to help save money in the budget. This sort of planning work is regularly done – you have to understand both where to save money, but also show the very real risks you run by doing so.

In those circumstances, there is an argument that this paper represents a ‘well we could do this, but here are the significant risks attached’ list that would effectively kill the idea stone dead.

The next thing to consider is the circumstances in which this option was being considered. Was it as a stand alone savings measure? Alternatively was it being taken to look to the challenge of fixing other issues – for example, given some of the personnel challenges in the submarine service and in getting sufficient people in the right ranks/rates at any one time, could it have been looking at measures that would ensure there were enough people to keep the remaining three hulls fully crewed, and potentially with extra ‘fat’ in the system to ease the pressure.

It is all well and good having four SSBNs, but if you only have crews for 3, then you have a real problem in maintaining continuous at sea deterrent (CASD) for the long haul. This pressure will only increase over the next few years as the DREADNOUGHT class come on line, as the Submarine Service, lean manned at the best of times, will have to not only run on the V boats, but also introduce a new class to service as well, while not breaking the CASD task (which has been enduring for over 50 years now).

The paper may also have been looking at the impact of potentially accelerating introduction to service of the DREADNOUGHT and considering ways to achieve this, or of other measures. Finally it may also be the case that as she is now 30 years old and approaching her out of service date, flaws have been identified in the hull that would take too long to repair, potentially impacting on the refit schedule for the remaining three boats, and difficult decisions are needed about whether to bite the bullet and pay her off, or to continue with the refit.

Trying to work out how to maintain CASD over the medium term is like playing 3D chess, and there are multiple moving parts that need to be considered. Seeing an option paper like this in isolation is dangerous because it gives no sense of context, where the options are being considered, the wider package of measures they are also thinking about and what was the way it was written – was it an early draft intended as a thinkpiece or a ministerial submission recommending this is done?

Leaks like this make great news articles, because they sound serious and scary and make it look like the Royal Navy and MOD haven’t got a clue about their job. It is almost inevitable that parts of social media will light up with people going on about ‘but we need 4 SSBN to keep 1 at sea, what are those idiots doing’ while conveniently forgetting that the MOD and Royal Navy has over 50 years of constant SSBN operations under its belt and does tend to know what its doing when it drafts papers like this.

The key thing to takeaway from all of this story though is that its hard to actually spot much of an actual story in it. Boiled down it seems to be ‘Treasury not making promises ahead of defence review, some Army / Defence types a bit grumpy that the Defence Review isn’t being done the way that they want, and the Navy has  done some hypothetical work about a thing it could do but with a wider context that we know nothing about’.

As always with these stories, remember not to take them too seriously – defence reviews are always a time for leakers to emerge with stories intended to shape public opinion, make people worried and force a change. Its worth asking yourself a few key questions when reading articles like this:

1.       What is the actual source of the story-  are they credible?

2.      What is the agenda emerging from the story – does it seem to support or detract from a military service?

3.      Who is the intended audience of the story and what is the key point that the leaker is trying to make?

4.      Is there actually a credible evidence chain here, or is it when analysed more deeply a collection of Whitehall gossip wrapped together in one article?

There will be a lot more articles like this, with a lot of ‘senior defence sources’ talking to try and influence a variety of audiences. Please exercise caution when reading these articles and remember, nothing is final until it is announced publicly – until that point, there is everything to play for!