Tanks For Nothing? The British Army and the Integrated Review

The Times has revealed that the MOD is considering plans to scrap or mothball the entirety of the British Army’s Challenger 2 force of main battle tanks and possibly its Warrior Infantry Fighting Vehicles as well. These cuts form part of options under consideration for the current Defence Review, and if accepted would be arguably one of the most fundamental changes to the British Army in the last 100 years.

It is always worth sounding a note of gentle caution when Options papers get leaked. Defence Reviews and force structure arguments are built on the bedrock of a foundation of Options. These are intended to consider how different ideas could play out in order to save money, change force structures or do things differently in the armed forces.

For example, an options paper may look at different ways to save money by consolidating military training estate, or another may consider what would happen if more money were to be spent on enhancing weapons fits to ships.

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

The general feel of an options paper is that it considers what would happen if various different things were to be done – for example what would happen if the British Army decided to delete its Main Battle Tank force – how much would be saved in terms of headcount, financial savings both in year and over the next 10 years and longer term. Where would these savings be accrued, and what would the knock on effects be – for instance, what would scrapping armoured capability mean for the defence estate, for training pipeline, for long term support contracts and so on.

The fact that this is under consideration does not mean it will be done, or that it will be taken even remotely seriously. Many options are written precisely because the work needs to be done to show the impact if they were done, if only to build support for decisions to be taken elsewhere (this could be called the ‘Delete SAS Option’ manoeuvre).

Other options will be looked at in order to help build an understanding of what would happen if things were done differently. So for example it may be the case that the MOD looks at an (entirely hypothetical) force package built around spending a lot more money on fast jets but significantly stepping back from armoured operations – in those circumstances this work would help feed into the development of the costing for what this proposed force structure would both cost and save.

It is only as the process continues that some options get filed away, and others are given further refinement and development work, usually going to form some part of the overall outcome. What we do not publicly know from the Times report is the current stage of these options in the Review itself – is this very early work intended to inform thinking, or is it something that will form the basis of the likely outcomes and force structures?

It is hard to tell what is going on from this article alone, for these options will have been leaked to the Times for good reasons. Its hard to work out from the article the motivation of the leaker(s), but historically defence review leaks have occurred for one of several reasons:

a)      Inspired Leak (aka the ‘Yes Minister, You leak I brief’ leak). Usually from very senior levels, designed to test political and public response to floating of an idea.

b)     The Military Inspired Leak (aka the ‘My goodness, where did I leave my briefcase’ leak) designed to generate opposition to proposals by hinting gently at disapproval at wider departmental plans.

c)      The Fight them on the Beaches leak (aka the ‘Top Brass are going to delete the Paras / Red Arrows / Royal Yacht leak) usually at working level designed to fight a desperate rear guard action when all seems lost. Usually rather effective.

What is so interesting about this particular set of options is the scale of the changes under consideration though. Heavy Armour and mechanised infantry sits at the very heart of the Army psyche, and has done for decades. The challenge is that the force is getting a lot older, and the Army, bluntly, doesn’t seem particularly good at buying replacements for it in a timely manner.

This has led to the perfect storm where delayed upgrades, descoped life extension programmes and a sense that ‘we can fix this in the next planning round’ has come home to roost in a big way. Suddenly the Army finds itself looking pretty exposed in defence review terms, as it pushes for the continued existence of the deployable division capability, but with a fairly challenging shopping list needed to properly deliver it.

This comes at a point when the Review seems to be addressing some pretty deep rooted questions about the UK’s role in the world and how emerging technology sits at the heart of this. If the slightly flippant answer to the question of how can the MOD put science and technological innovation at the heart of the armed forces is ‘we’ve spent years trying and failing to put a better gun on our tanks’, then it’s a sign that difficult questions need to be answered.

The biggest question has got to be, what is it that heavy armour offers the UK in a world of coalition operations and is it the right thing to offer? By this, what are the benefits accrued by the UK of maintaining an armoured force and could it be done differently?

We are an island nation, and by definition our armoured capability needs to be sent abroad to fight. This immediately means we must assume that any operation involving our armour is going to require allies prepared to host and support us, and give permission for military equipment to be used as a launch pad on their soil, or in defence of it.

Is the UK realistically and credibly going to be in a position to want to take part in an invasion of a foreign nation in the near future? If the answer is yes, do we need heavy armour for this? Alternatively, if we are doing policing actions, could we look to get support from allies to contribute to our forces by providing the armour instead?

One of the intriguing comments in the article was around how UK staff are sounding out NATO partners about the impact of options like this on their perspective about the UK’s commitment to the Alliance.

Trying to get countries to commit to alliances and bring mutually complementary kit and capabilities is always a challenge. Everyone wants to have and send Special Forces or Gucci stuff, but trying to persuade nations to support with logs, infra, signals and cyber and so on is more difficult – the less glamour involved, the harder it is to get interest.

If the UK took an intentional policy decision that in future it would step back from providing the teeth of a deployable division, but instead focused on funding the enabling assets (e.g. the Divisional HQ, comms, ISTAR, logs and so on) then it would arguably be in a credible position with NATO partners to offer itself as a valuable player – essentially asking those nations with armoured capability to deploy in return for the enabling services offered by UK forces.

This is what coalition operations are all about – bringing mutually complementary skills to the table and ensuring success. In this case the UK could operate a hugely effective core structure of units, augmented as required by multi-national elements that ‘plug in’ as required.

Such a move would be an honest reflection that land wars are now multi-national in nature, and that working as allies in a truly integrated manner is the only way forward that makes sense for land operations.

If this were to happen there would be a lot of challenges to overcome – for instance, how do you retain institutional knowledge and experience of operating with armour if you no longer keep it regularly in your order of battle? There are clearly huge savings to be made (for instance closing BATUS in Canada could potentially save significant sums of money), but would the other costs and political capital burned be worth it?

It seems highly unlikely that the British Army will abandon armoured operations in their entirety – there is always a need for training and experience, and also the need to help provide peer training – maintaining a small cadre of armoured vehicles would be helpful to keep basic familiarity going, and also provide the core of a unit to add to any deployable force.

There may be real challenges though if mothballed in terms of restoring capabilities – although it is possible, as has been seen with the Maritime Patrol Aircraft force, which had a capability gap for 10 years. But, any move to mothball without keeping support contracts and upgrades in place would provide little reassurance – after a few years the vehicles would likely be obsolete, unsupported and little more than a Potemkin capability.

But uncomfortable as it may be to many, this is precisely the sort of debate that needs to be had around the role of the British Army in the 2020s and how it helps defend the UK. What are the skills needed, what equipment is needed and what can the UK as a medium power credibly do and what should it step back from doing?

The challenge is that not everything is affordable – as many UK allies have found, over time maintaining the golf club bag of capabilities is a fantastic aspiration, but also extremely expensive to do. The only way to save money and remain credible is to step back and stop doing some of this and let others do it instead.

Stepping away from fighting at the highest levels of land armoured warfare may be deemed a politically acceptable outcome. There is seemingly little appetite across Westminster to go and engage in lengthy ground wars in the Middle East, and any operations in the Asia Pacific region do not seem to lend themselves naturally to heavy armour.

This leaves the NATO eastern frontier as the main area of risk, and the question is perhaps whether the British Army should resume the BAOR mantle, but further east, providing a strong deterrence capability to deter Russian aggression, or if instead this can be provided via other means (e.g. enhanced infantry, more artillery, and better close air support to name but a few).

Are Challenger 2 tanks and Warrior IFV’s going to deter Russia from attacking the Baltic? Probably not by themselves, but step away from that commitment and NATO as a whole is weakened. Perhaps what is needed is something like the old Berlin Brigade – a force expected to exist in order to be wiped out, and in the process prove a point of allied unity. A small force with limited but useful capabilities and intended to hold until wiped out.

The longer term question, even if armour is retained, is what is the future for armoured units in the UK industrial perspective? We’ve lost the ability as a nation to build tanks, so any future buy will have to come from abroad, and likely cost a lot of money. Is this money that is worth spending to subsidise foreign jobs and industrial capability, or is it better to cut our losses and spend this money instead on developing highly skilled next generation UK capabilities?

For instance cyber warfare is increasingly the environment where NATO is fighting a murky war with a variety of actors. As has been seen over the summer, Russian efforts to steal vaccine data shows that the espionage risk is considerable, while the risk to all manner of critical national infrastructure, communications and sub sea cables is also great.

Are UK national security interests better served by choosing to invest money that could be spent on armour and instead sinking it into more cyber defence? Stepping away from physical security and into digital security will not be popular – it is hard to show on an ORBAT table the cumulative effect of good cyber security measures in the way that an armoured division can denote industrial and offensive capability. Much easier to rank nations on what they possess in terms of hardware, not their PCs and software.

Striking this balance is going to be essential – the spectre of high intensity armoured operations may be at the more unlikely end of conflicts that the UK will be involved in. But if we are, then the absence of armour will be sorely noted, particularly if this is a move to save money and not enhance spending in other areas.

But equally if we don’t spend money on all the enabling issues like updated artillery (as Jack Watling of the RUSI pointed out last year), or we don’t invest in sealift, logistics, comms and so on, then having the best heavy armour in the world is no good if it is open to destruction or cannot reach and be supported in its operational theatre.

This is the challenge of the Integrated Security Review – it needs to decide where the most likely threats lie, and the most effective way of countering them. It was always advertised as being a bold review, and this news seems to indicate that the review is just that – thinking very boldly about defence in a bigger way and trying to take decisions that could have incredibly long term consequences for both our security, and our ability as a nation to operate militarily – both positive and negative.

A final thought is that whenever articles like this come out, there is usually a crop of comments about ‘how we as a nation won’t count’ or ‘we won’t be seen as credible if we don’t have X anymore’. These generally come from people either invested in the capability, or convinced that our credibility in Military HQ’s and political capitals around the world is judged purely by that metric.

To be honest the decision on whether to pull a capability or not has very little impact on how nations regard each other. There may be some regret and sorrow, but unless the capability is seen as being so essential to alliance security, it really doesn’t change the equation.

In the last 20 years a lot of NATO member states have cut their defence capabilities, scrapping submarine arms, tank capabilities or fighter jet forces. Each time NATO accepts it and moves on and finds new ways to handle the capability gap, or it does things differently.

In Humphrey’s personal experience, having worked in national security roles involving lobbying for coalition operations, in international talks, the measure of credibility is not reached via comparative rankings in the IISS Military Balance (fine publication that it is though).

Rather the relative value and worth of a nations contribution to operations is judged far more by what its willingness to contribute to an operation in terms of people is, its willingness to deploy on the ground and its willingness to deploy with a credible and valuable set of rules of engagement that make it a relevant partner to have on operations and not a flag on the wall.

There are plenty of nations out there, regularly cited in lists of ‘Top 10 Biggest Tank Forces’ or other such tedium, who on paper have large holdings of armour, artillery and equipment. Yet they were not seen as credible partner nations – not because they didn’t have lots of nice equipment, it was because they were not prepared to deploy, or they were only prepared to deploy with so many stipulations, restrictions and reasons to avoid going where they may get into difficulty that their presence in operational theatres was seen as being close to fundamentally worthless. Having a flag on the wall of participants and lots of tanks back at home only buys you so much credibility, the rest comes from doing the job at hand and being prepared to take the toughest of all calls.

Whatever happens in the Integrated Review, it seems likely that the UK will continue to hold to its reputation as a willing partner, prepared to operate at the highest levels, and able to support and control difficult and complex military operations with a wide range of ‘in demand’ assets and capabilities. It will do so underpinned by a desire to remain committed, to be engaged and if needs be to go where it will be engaged. That is the mark of credibility, not how many tanks we do, or do not have.