Why The UK Should Not 'Buy Off The Shelf'.

 

Should the UK ‘buy off the shelf’ and simply purchase American defence equipment? Apparently they are cheaper, better, more reliable and would be the solution to all the UK’s many defence woes, particularly compared to collaboration with European partners. Why not just buy American? This view, set out in an article in the Daily Telegraph is doubtless music to the ears of the US defence industry, but is also one that would, if implemented, do untold damage to the UK and its national interests and significantly undermine British sovereignty.

The arguments for buying American are on the face of it reasonable. The US produces good quality equipment able to meet many UK defence needs. There is a strong supply chain in place, ensuring that there are plenty of spare parts in the system to draw on when needed, and at cheaper cost due to bulk buying. The equipment is usually designed to be interoperable with NATO partners, so it can be integrated to work alongside allies and with existing equipment. It can be delivered quickly, it works and lots of other people use it, so why shouldn’t’ the UK? There are in fact many good reasons why the UK should not exclusively buy American.

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright 2023.

To start with, US kit is designed by US companies to meet US requirements, not British ones. This may sound obvious but there is a dangerous view some put forward that ‘off the shelf’ means the UK could just buy something and use it. There is no such thing as ‘off the shelf’ unless you want it as it comes in its US version, with no modifications, changes or installation of British equipment. The moment you do this, you’ve created a UK variant with its own bespoke requirements and supply needs, for which you are dependent on the US defence industry to support – and there is no guarantee that this can or will happen. From the outset you have lost operational sovereignty and control over your military equipment.

Buying from the US means the UK would need to request a Foreign Military Sale (FMS) case through the US government, seeking legislative approval to purchase the equipment. If, for example, the UK wanted to buy a new tank, it would be reliant on US government approval to do so, not just for the initial purchase, but for all spares buy thereafter. The way that FMS works is that it sets out approval not just for purchase, but sets a schedule for spare parts purchases, services, and upgrades, all of which are done at the time and schedule set by US government and industry, and not the British government. This means that the UK would lose control over when to purchase spares or upgrades and would be forced to buy to a foreign governments timetable. This is why FMS is so successful for the US – it offers cheap entry prices but makes a killing in the long-term spares and support market. To buy from the US means to accept that you are handing over control of your spares and logistics chain to a foreign power who determines the timing of when and what you buy. This is fine in small doses but if you buy exclusively from the US, suddenly means you’ve got no control over how you want to support your armed forces.

The next challenge is the integration work needed to make things work for the UK. One of the risks of buying a foreign design is that you lack operational sovereignty over the design and its internal contents. Equipment supplied by the US will often come with a variety of sealed, tamper proof boxes containing US government-controlled technology that cannot be accessed by the purchasing nation. As the operator, you do not have full control over your military equipment, you don’t know what is necessarily in the boxes, and you are reliant on the US to fix issues with them. By contrast any equipment designed and built in the UK means that the MOD has full control and sovereignty over it to open it up, modify, adapt or change it to meet British needs. To buy US means accepting we cannot change a design without a foreign nations’ approval, which in turn means exposing our own sensitive military technology and equipment to the US, to conduct trials to ensure it can work with the US provided equipment. This represents an astounding loss of sovereign control on advanced weapon systems and means potentially giving the US defence industry insight into UK capabilities that manufacturers may want to keep commercially sensitive.

The industrial base is a key reason why going solely to the US is such a dangerous move. At the moment the UK has one of the worlds most comprehensive and advanced defence, aerospace and security industries, able to design and deliver world leading equipment and capabilities that not only get installed on MOD platforms, but export versions can also be sold to other nations. This industry underpins hundreds of thousands of highly skilled jobs across the supply chain. If the UK were to move to purchasing equipment from the US then the vast majority of these jobs would be lost due to the lack of MOD orders. This is because the wider follow-on sales are unlikely to occur from a foreign country unless the UK is using it, and because developing world leading equipment in isolation is much harder without government support. While the UK could make the case for offsets to the US industry for final assembly plants to invest in the UK, the reality is that such a move would replace original R&D work with less skilled partial assembly of premanufactured products. The UK would lose the ability to design and manufacture its own indigenous defence products, a skill that once lost is almost impossible to regain.

While this may sound an acceptable price to pay in the short term to get ‘more kit’, what it would do is make the UK into essentially a US client state for defence equipment supply. Without the ability to make modifications or update missiles, radars and other technology, the UK industrial and scientific base would soon whither away, meaning that in the longer term it wouldn’t be possible to put a sovereign solution into the field. The attraction of the UK too as a ‘tier one partner’ would vanish for industry – for example it would be inconceivable that the UK would be asked to partner on projects like future fast jets or advanced missiles as there would be no industry capable of supporting it. Reduced to client state status, the UK would also struggle to be able to integrate other missiles or capabilities onto platforms, reducing our ability to field equipment that meets our national needs. The result would be a force essentially operating whatever variant the US produced, maintained, and supported to a standard set by the US. This is not an ideal outcome.

A wider issue is that while the benefit of buying American provides access to cheaper spare parts and a more plentiful supply chain, it also means you are in the queue with everyone else for parts. If a crisis happens and the US decides another nation takes priority, you’ll have to wait alongside others for your delivery, whether you like it or not. In a major crisis the US military will always come first, meaning your own national needs will not be met as parts are instead directed to the US armed forces. This is fine if only a small part of your military is US derived, but if everything is, then you become completely reliant on a single nation to provide your defence, which may not be a good thing. By contrast, having a stake in the supply chain and an ability to prioritise UK interests over other nations gives you significantly more control at a time of national crisis.

It is also worth understanding the reality of what operating an entirely US advanced force would look like. The UK would need to fundamentally change its training, equipment and means of operation to take on equipment that may, or may not, meet its national needs. We would not be able to easily adapt or modify this equipment without vast payments to US government and industry, which would support their technological base, not our own. We would not have full operational control or sovereignty over the equipment we operated, meaning that in wartime, we’d be unable to know how to use it to its full potential, or tweak it to meet our own needs. We would be a wholly dependent client state, reliant on US goodwill to help us – and if the UK undertook a foreign policy adventure that the US disagreed with, there is no certainty that the support would be forthcoming. Such a move would emasculate the military, who would find themselves wholly reliant on US largesse and support to conduct operations.

In the article, the author cites some examples of where buying American has been a success in the past, and how in contrast buying European has been a ‘disaster’. Some of these are fair – for example the C17, C130 and Chinook fleets are good examples of how buying simple designs to meet airlift needs has worked well. He incorrectly suggests the Phantom was an ‘off the shelf’ purchase and suggests buying designs and building them in our factories to modified designs was a disaster. In fact, the key UK design was heavily modified to meet UK operational needs (landing gear, engines and so on). It was not an ‘off the shelf’ purchase, but in fact one that reduced chunks of the UK aerospace industry to a component manufacture function, with the UK airframes assembled in the US. Phantom was a successful aircraft, but it was not an ‘off the shelf’ purchase by any stretch of the imagination.

Meanwhile the author suggests that Merlin, A400M, Type 45 and Typhoon have been a ‘disaster’. This is an ‘unusual’ take. There is no doubt that building collaboratively with European partners is not easy, fusing together multiple national requirements, workshare arrangements and so on is a challenge. But in each case the UK has had significantly more clout and input in this than if it was in partnership with the US due to relative scales. In Typhoon, the UK is one of four partners who have similar needs and requirements, making it easier to influence outcomes. As a Tier 1 partner on JSF with the US, the UK is buying a fraction of the aircraft that the US is, and while influential, has a relatively smaller voice than compared to European collaboration.

It is inevitable that advanced defence projects overrun, get more costly and become the subject of concern to auditors and national parliaments. Building an aircraft or ship design over a period of decades, subject to the vagaries of technology change, financial and budgetary challenges, political policy changes means that what emerges at the end can often be very different to what the original requirement was. But that does not make it a disaster – in the case of Merlin, the UK has acquired some of the most impressive ASW helicopters in the world, capable of prosecuting hostile submarines at significant distance from their mothership, while also conducting wider missions. It is an astoundingly capable aircraft capable of meeting UK national needs in the demanding north Atlantic environment. It is difficult to understand why anyone would see this as a disaster.

Similarly, Typhoon has had a long gestation, in part due to the unexpected ending of the Cold War and defence budget cuts, but it has now been in service in various tranches for many years and remains an absolutely cutting edge fighter jet. That the design is manufactured in the UK helps sustain tens of thousands of jobs and a world leading aerospace industry is a wider benefit, as too are the sales to a wide number of nations who now operate the jet. Used operationally globally, the Typhoon is an extremely successful jet, capable of far more now than was originally envisaged in the mid-1980s.

The Type 45 continues to be unfairly maligned as a ‘disaster’. There is no doubt that the programme has had challenges, particularly getting the propulsion system to operate as intended – but these owe more to spending cuts than to a failure of the design. But it has produced an astoundingly capable radar and air defence system, one that has proven itself operationally around the world and remains one of the very few ships permitted to integrate into US carrier battle groups and provide area air defence. Right now, 50% of the Type 45 force is operationally deployed in the Baltic, Med and West Indies, helping showcase this class as a world beating piece of equipment. It is a little tiresome to see inaccurate coverage suggesting that it isn’t up to the mark.

The proposed solutions by the author seem, to put it kindly, hilarious. To start with the suggestion that the UK should abandon the Tempest programme in favour of buying more F18s and in turn more F35s. To start with, the F18 is at its heart a surprisingly elderly airframe – the first F18 flew in 1978 and entered squadron service in 1983, with the original variant being retired by the USN in 2021. The F18EF Super Hornet first flew in 1995 and has been in service since 1999. Buying an aircraft now that represents the very best of 1970s – 1990s technology is an interesting decision, as no matter how capable it is, it is at the end of its life. The jet will cease to be manufactured in 2025, so there is no future in this route as it is too late to place further orders.

Even ignoring this impediment, the idea that the UK should effectively pause advanced development of the next generation of fighter aircraft, spending billions of pounds on a jet that is 25 years old, is not integrated to carry UK weapon systems and for which there is no UK support or training pipeline is a very easy way to waste money. To do this would require setting up an entire logistics supply chain from scratch, conducting a lengthy programme of trials to make sure that the jet could operate to meet UK needs (and that’s with no modifications to include minor things like UK comms or crypto – if you want that, then add in many more years of effort) and then get sufficient pilots and ground crew trained to operate and maintain it. This is a programme that would take many years to deliver, costing billions to carry out and relying on people who don’t exist or have other roles in the services already. It would result in the UK replacing the F35B (in the short term) with the F18, a curious case of the UK replacing the jet that was designed to replace the F18 with the F18…

The author also touches on the idea that it would be a simple matter to just install catapults on the QUEEN ELIZABETH class and operate the F18 and then later the F35C. This is an idea that was first looked at in the 2010 defence review and later rightly abandoned as being not cost effective (a decision supported by the National Audit Office). To suggest now that we should backtrack again, fund a major refit of the carriers to carry the F18 (necessitating huge redesign internally to fixtures, fittings, IT systems and all manner of other problems), as well as buying new jets, trainer jets and abandoning years of work on the F35 programme to instead operate a less capable jet at sea is, to put it mildly, a bit odd. It would cost billions to deliver and provide less capability than we have now for more money and take the carriers out of commission for years while they are refitted, and trials are carried out. It’s taken 5 years to get the F35 cleared for its full potential on the QE class due to the sheer number and range of trials needed to properly operate the aircraft from the ships.

To make this proposal even more crazy, apparently, we should later add F35C to the mix and then deploy that from the carriers instead. Now we’re in a position where we’re talking about adding billions of pounds of spending for an orphan fleet of F18s, to then refit the ships again to operate the F35C. This would only make the plan even more eye-wateringly expensive for very little gain. We’d be committing to a course of action that would set carrier strike back by roughly a decade. Why on earth would this make sense?

As for the Tempest, its worth understanding why the Tempest is a programme that makes sense to support. Firstly, its an international collaborative project for which the UK will gain a significant amount of work, particularly if further partners or export orders are received. This will safeguard the long-term future of the UK aerospace sector and produce a significant amount of research and development that will drive advances across aviation, military equipment, munitions and so on. If Tempest becomes widely exported, there is an opportunity for the UK to benefit from reduced costs and efficiencies of scale too, making it more affordable. But most importantly, if we fail to innovate and research the next generation of stealth aircraft, we will be left without one. There is no point saying that we’ll buy the F35C and that’s the end of the matter. At some point those aircraft will leave service or become progressively obsolete. Without a replacement on the cards, we’ll be left with an aircraft fleet unable to meet our operational needs.

The US is highly unlikely to go into alliance with any nation for its most advanced fighter replacements, look for instance at the F22 and B2 as examples of where ‘national red lines’ exist. If the UK is serious about ensuring it has advanced fighter capability, it needs to commit to developing it, ensuring that it has full sovereign control over it and that it gets a solution that meets operational requirements. Reliance on the US for a solution leaves us dependent on US technology, standards, and willingness to share fully with the UK – something that we cannot take for granted. Stating an optimism for the future bilateral relationship is not the basis of a good defence policy.

The author also suggests that the UK should progressively replace existing naval capabilities with the US equivalents like Aegis or Standard missiles. This is fine as a long term aspiration but is impossible in the short term. The idea that we could refit a ship like Type 45, designed from the keel up around a radar, combat management and missile system and replace it with Aegis is the sort of concept that consultants and industry love, due to the profit they can book from it. It would be lengthy, expensive and a huge waste of money, fitting an entirely new system that the UK has no operational sovereignty over, and no existing missile stockpiles to draw on, and writing off billions in expenditure on the Aster / PAAMS combination. Such ideas sound good on paper but would be ruinously expensive to deliver.

Perhaps part of the issue is that we have fallen into the trap of assuming that everything British /European is ‘bad’, while every defence project the US does is somehow a beacon of efficiency and ‘good’. Its common to see stories attacking UK projects, but we forget that plenty of US projects too were expensive, over budget, didn’t work as planned. We are not unique in discovering that defence procurement is expensive, complex, and rarely goes entirely to plan. This is not surprising when you consider the scope of what we want to do, inventing new technology and ways to use it and then managing the delivery over many years. But there is a danger of assuming that the US is a master of getting it right while we uniquely get it wrong – a quick look at the history of the M247 AA gun (a textbook example of how using ‘cheap’ off the shelf technology doesn’t make things better) tells us that the US isn’t perfect. At the same time, programmes like the Bradley came under attack for many years as being a good example of ‘broken procurement’ despite the vehicle now being seen as one of the most effective vehicles of its type. Its easy to forget that new kit is complex, can break easily and takes some years to iron out all the bugs.

Ultimately Governments must make difficult choices when it comes to defence procurement. The more they choose to build at home, the more expensive it can be, particularly if initial orders are small. But possession of national manufacturing for ships or aircraft can be priceless in terms of sovereignty and control over how to build and use the equipment. It also means a country can compete for export orders, sustaining the industry and making equipment cheaper. Not supporting a defence / aerospace industry does undoubtedly make things cheaper and perhaps enables more equipment to be purchased, but at the cost of no real sovereignty over the design and use of the technology and reduced economic prospects. There is no right answer, but the UK balance of trying to buy globally when it makes sense, coupled with the maintenance of a national industrial base for key equipment seems right. It enables flexibility and sovereign control as required. It also ensures the UK is seen as a credible partner for future collaboration, not just a client state who will buy whatever design the US wishes to sell that day.

It is a particularly curious irony to see the Telegraph of all papers publishing a column advocating this approach. Throughout the debacle that was Brexit, the Telegraph played a key part in arguing that ‘taking back control’ was essential, and that national sovereignty mattered, not being a ‘rules taker’ from a foreign organisation. Having played their part in delivering the biggest geostrategic policy disaster in recent British history, it seems ironic that the paper is advocating a policy that would destroy our national industrial capability, ruin our high-tech manufacturing industries, and leave the UK at the behest of a foreign power which would dictate how and when equipment was bought, used and maintained. We’d be a rules taker, not a rules maker. Clearly sovereignty isn’t that important after all when it comes to defence…