Does It Pass The Daily Mail Test? Should The UK Have Scrapped Rapier?

 Every piece of military equipment will, eventually, be disposed of. Be it preserved in a museum, lost in combat or simply sold for scrap and recycling; an end is coming for everything that serves. The timing of such departures is not always ideal – the loss of HMS ARK ROYAL in 1978 was felt keenly in 1982. Arguably an even greater loss was that of the scrapping of the fleet repair ship HMS TRIUMPH, after nearly a decade in reserve in Chatham, barely a year before she would have been welcomed in the Falklands War. It is against this backdrop that a curious report has been published in the Mail,suggesting that the MOD is at fault for scrapping the Rapier missile system in 2021, when it could have been used by Ukraine instead. Apparently the MOD lack of psychic powers to predict the future (damn those pesky planning round options deleting this as a feature for staff officers) is a bad thing.

This is a really curious article which consists of a group of think tank types, none of whom seem to have credibility when it comes to platform maintenance, bemoaning the MOD decision to dispose of the last of rapier in late 2021 rather than keep it on for ‘reasons’. Is this fair, or this unwarranted and baseless criticism?

From the day it enters service there is always a planned ‘out of service date’ – the stage at which the military expect to no longer use it, and while it may be pushed ever further back (current planning for instance reportedly envisages the FV432 OSD to be at the end of the 41^st Millenium), it will leave service. The plan for doing this is carefully drawn up some years in advance – it is almost as complex a task to remove a capability from service as it is to introduce it in the first place.

In the case of rapier, an anti-aircraft missile system which entered service in the 1970s and went through a series of incremental upgrades, planners had to balance off three key objectives. Firstly, ensuring that there was sufficient system availability until the end of its time in service to meet MOD requirements – e.g. be able to provide the vehicles, missiles, spare parts and people to deliver an agreed number of rapier batteries to support specific tasks.

Secondly they had to do this while planning to draw down the equipment in service, reducing its numbers and availability as the replacement systems entered service. This meant tracking holdings of spare parts, working out the right level of parts to order as drawdown occurred, and ensuring that deeper maintenance and other support contracts were properly reduced too. In other words it involved the laborious process of ensuring that the Army wasn’t left with an overstock of spares it wasn’t going to use and wasn’t paying for a maintenance contract it didn’t need, but at the same time ensuring that Rapier batteries weren’t out of action for want of spare parts. This sort of work is one of the many invaluable tasks carried out by MOD Civil Servants who help track and support this sort of activity.

The final challenge is to balance off the drawdown while the new system is ramping up, putting people and resources in the right combination to be able to operate two systems at once, ensuring that everything works as planned, and that as the old system leaves service, the new one is able to effortlessly take up the role instead. Once this is done its possible to begin the disposal process.

The last Rapier units left service about a year ago, which means that no work will have been done on maintaining those systems since this point. You will have essentially got a stockpile of dead SAM launchers that have had no maintenance, training or other work done on them in a long time, and which are fit for little other than being scrapped. Some will argue that the MOD should have kept them in some kind of operational reserve state, able to be ready to be brought back into service in a hurry or donated to Ukraine if required. Indeed the Mail article essentially suggests that the UK is at fault for not doing this. There are though a lot of very good reasons why this makes no sense at all.

For starters the drawdown in service means that there will be very few stockholdings and spare parts left out there to use (in the UK at least). Support contracts will have ceased over time and the production lines and supply chains will no longer be in place to provide the material necessary to use the system. After all, why would industry retain a capability to make parts for a weapon that isn’t being used in the UK? This means that there is very little in the way of spare parts to keep the system usable.

The second challenge is that to keep a missile operational it requires people that know how to use it. You cannot just turn up and fire a rapier missile – it requires training and experience to know how to use it safely and properly and bring together the missiles, radars and other parts of the system as part of an air defence network. There will have been no training courses run for Rapier operators for some time (possibly years in some cases) which means there is no current pool of experience, and a rapidly decreasing level of familiarity and awareness with the system.

The final big problem is that of whether there are any missiles left that are actually safe to use. It isn’t appreciated that one of the most complex parts of operating a modern military is safe stockpile management of explosives, which can deteriorate over time. Missiles will have a lifespan in which it is reasonable to assume that, if fired properly, the missile would work as intended. Over time as the warhead ages and condition deteriorates, this becomes less certain – consequently it is common for firing exercises to take ammunition approaching its ‘use by date’ and fire them off, rather than newer stock that could be good for some years to come.

In the case of the Rapier, it is likely that the supply of warshot missiles and the state of its warheads governed the decision on when to take the missile out of service. If you know that the stockpile would, by 2021 no longer be safe for use, then this drives wider decisions on when to remove it from service and when to get the successor into use.  It is probably safe to assume that by the time the missile left service there were very few missiles left that could be used due to the managed drawdown of the stockpile.

This means you’ve got the difficult problem of having missile launchers without a supply chain, that haven’t been maintained for over a year and no pool of personnel currently qualified and up to date in how to operate them. Oh and by the way, you probably don’t actually have any missiles left to fire from them, and if there were any left, they’d be so unstable to so as to pose more of a threat to their own side than the enemy. This isn’t a great combination to put it mildly.

It is lovely to think that the MOD could have kept Rapier going, but to do so would have meant them throwing a lot of money at a capability that was decades old, approaching near obsolescence and had been replaced already. It would have meant keeping the launchers maintained, contracts in place to keep spare parts flowing and an active programme of stockpile management on the missiles to ensure they were safe for use – all of this would have taken up soldiers that had already gotten new jobs and spare money, which is in very short supply, to keep a small number of launchers capable ‘just in case’.

The question posed here would be ‘does keeping Rapier available just in case pass the Daily Mail test’? Arguably it would be a firm no – it would be a waste of public money at a time of financial challenge and would rightly have been condemned as wasteful MOD spending by many.

It is perhaps then ironic that the MOD is now being attacked for not wasting money and instead not having this equipment to send. There is no certainty that Rapier is the right answer for the Ukraines current challenges – while on paper, in the endless game of ‘fantasy ORBATS’ it may look good to say ‘oh lets just send this kit to Country X because it solves this capability gap’, such superficial analysis doesn’t take into account the reality of operating modern equipment.

Articles like this are frustrating as they purport to show simple answers to complex problems. It is easy to loftily pronounce and go ‘oh but of course we should have kept these missile systems’ without actually doing analysis on whether it is possible. For example, would Rapier be the right missile to send – could it be used in a properly integrated way with Ukrainian air defence systems, able to respond effectively to a complex and confusing air picture and provide timely air defence? Would its systems be supportable in Ukraine, or would the lack of spare parts slow it down? Is its mobility enough in a very fast moving war where artillery is dominating the battlespace, or would a Rapier battery quickly be destroyed by Russian artillery? Does the radar used by Rapier work effectively with existing Ukrainian systems or don’t they talk to each other – how much integration work is needed to make them effectively talk to each other, and is it even possible? Finally do the Ukrainians actually want or need Rapier?

The UK has committed an exceptional amount of support to the Ukraine in their valiant fight against the Russian fascist invaders. There is no doubt that the provision of missiles, equipment, training and wider support has made a massive difference to the ability of Ukraine to defend their homeland and take the offensive to the enemy. But to blame the MOD for not keeping an obsolete missile without a meaningful stockpile of ammunition and spare parts in some kind of weird half life reserve capability on the off chance of donating it when required is scraping the barrel of attempts to cause outrage.