Troubling Times & Difficult Decisions - The 2023 CDS RUSI Speech

News broke this week that off the coast of Ireland the RoyalNavy reportedly had to track and monitor the presence of a Russian submarine just outside of Irish territorial waters. The combination of a (presumably) Type 23 frigate and Merlin was used to politely suggest to the Russians to go and play in someone elses backyard. The Irish Navy was unable to send vessels to police the incident themselves due to a decision taken years ago to pay off vessels equipped with sonar and remove the capability from service. A risk that seemed sensible and pragmatic at the time has proven to have long term consequences.

For Ireland the decision to not invest in sonar made perfect sense, the submarine threat was negligible and the skills and cost needed to maintain a truly effective ASW capability would have cost far in excess of anything the Irish Republic either needed or could afford without making swingeing cuts elsewhere. Maintaining a semblance of a capability would do little good either as to go up against Russian nuclear submarines without a genuinely top tier ASW force would  be pointless – like firing a water pistol at a shooting range. The decision to scrap sonar is a genuinely good example of bold risk taking -  accept that it makes more sense to stop doing something and move on, than maintain a figment of a capability that would in reality not achieve much. Perhaps there is a lesson for the UK here?

In the same week the Chief of the Defence Staff (Admiral Sir Tony Radakin) delivered his annual lecture to the RUSI on the state of the world and how he saw global developments. Notable as one of the increasingly rare occasions when British military personnel are allowed to make public ‘on the record’ speeches, it is a good insight into where he sees the direction of global travel. Throughout he portrayed a world in which statecraft is once again coming to the fore and where alliances, engagement and presence are as important to deterrence as possessing physical military force.  The speech is positive in many ways – for example the emphasis on growing NATO defence budgets, the way that the international community is using a variety of levers of statecraft to tackle Russia and also in which wider challenges from conflict in the Middle East to the tensions in the Indo-Pacific clash together to create a world of increasingly unsettled violence.

Reading a senior officers speech is a fascinating business, usually to see how the speechwriter has structured it to get both ‘killer facts’ and insight into thinking in a coherent way that will be interesting enough to not send the audience to slumber, but bland enough to not wind up a SPAD. This speech contains several interesting snippets worthy of further thought.

The first is that in terms of prioritisation the emphasis is very clearly on the recapitalisation of the British Army and throwing resource at that as an issue. The lessons of Ukraine have been heard, in that we are seeing a clear mission to refit the Army to be able to deliver meaningful deterrence effect within NATO. This is a positive view on where resource should land.

The second is the relative absence of emphasis on conventional sea or airpower as an instrument of the state. Reference is made to a 6^th generation fighter jet (e.g. the joint British, Japanese and Italian project), and to the idea of integrated air/missile defence, but little else. No mention is made of conventional seapower in terms of presence and capability as a priority – while reference is made to the carriers and commandos, the more conventional presence like ASW frigates or air defence gets little attention. Instead focus is on partnership in AUKUS and the long term renewal of the deterrent well into the 2030s.

It also contains one claim that one must hope the speechwriter has firmly checked and verified is in claiming that with the arrival of A400M, the RAF has ‘greater lift capacity than at any time since the 2^nd World War’. Given that the C130J fleet has been scrapped as a defence cut, reducing airframes only this year, it is hard to see how this claim stands up to scrutiny, given the relative reduction in RAF air transport, particularly compared to its arguable heyday of the 1960s and 70s. It would be very helpful to understand how this metric was calculated as, to put it politely, given that it is physically impossible for 100% of these airframes to all be airborne at once, suggesting a theoretical lift capability as opposed to an actual one given the swingeing cuts imposed on RAF strategic airlift over the last decade or more, is perhaps stretching plausibility a little. It we took the actual lift capability on a normal day, with normal availability rates, it would be useful to know if this claim still adds up.

The speech also focused on the fact that the Service Chiefs face difficult investment decisions ahead with further reviews looming. This seems to indicate that all is not well in Whitehall and that the MOD budget faces significant in year pressure and short term pressures. The recent NAO audit report into the equipment plan found that it was £17bn short, due mainly to inflationary pressure. There is no injection of cash on the horizon that will fix this and unless inflation falls quickly, this pressure will remain in the system to be solved. Reading the evidence (LINK) to the House of Commons Defence Committee from Tue 12 Dec, it was fascinating to see senior officials and officers confirm how challenging the problem is right now. For example, it was confirmed that the MOD had planned last year on inflation assumptions of around 2.5%, whereas it is now at around 6.2%, injecting billions of extra costs for the same projects into the Equipment Programme. Likewise, the collapse of the GBP-USD exchange rate last year at the time of the Truss premiership has increased costing significantly too, a particular issue for a Department which spends heavily in dollars.

Listening to the evidence the depressing phrase “defer / delete” was deployed in terms of re-equipping the British Army. In other words the Army has got to work with the wider MOD to significantly change its procurement plans, deleting wholesale capabilities or slipping other projects to help afford its newly found priorities arising from Ukraine. This is a grim state of affairs, to hear that at a time of unprecedented global turmoil, the MOD faces making substantial defence cuts due to the lack of sufficient funding to meet its requirements. The UK is practically alone in NATO in being in this position, but it is hard to see what else can be done. The defence budget has grown significantly in real terms and there is plenty of delegated authority in Defence to find money or pockets of unspent money to do things differently. The MOD is not alone in facing inflationary pressures and every pound committed to Defence is a pound less for more voter friendly policy areas. Simply put, the MOD is going to have to find ways to cut its aspirations to match its cloth.

The challenge is trying to do this when the policy headmark remains that the UK should be a globally focused power interested in NATO and the wider world and which is keen to do lots of good security work with lots of nations. There is no doubt that there is a huge amount of optimism and aspiration in the various national security strategies published in recent years – the problem is delivering this. Perhaps the time has come to have a very serious analysis not of procurement but of policy and aspirational vision.

For example, during the HCDC session, it was confirmed that the MOD is in negotiations to buy 14 CH47 Special Forces Chinooks at significant cost to meet a policy need to operate at the very hardest end of the spectrum. The phrasing was subtle but essentially it was implied that the MOD is buying these because Special Forces have a policy requirement to do very complicated stuff – it was then admitted that if the policy need changed, the MOD wouldn’t need to buy these helicopters after all. In other words, part of the pressure on the defence budget comes from very high-end policy requirements that could, if the will existed, be amended downwards to remove the need to buy stuff. Such a move would upset the team in MOD A Block, and doubtless lead to some choice inspired briefings to friendly media but would help make it easier to find money for the ‘green Army’. This is a good example of where the UK faces some binary decisions – so much of what Defence does is built around a desire to operate at the highest end of the spectrum, and to be the ‘Day 1, Night 1’ partner of the US, operating at the outset of conflict in the highest threat environments against peer rivals and overpowering them. This in turn drives extremely expensive requirements for very capable equipment, be it SF Chinooks, advanced fighter jets or high-end warships – the UK is driven by a need to work at the very highest level of threat and be seen as credible.

Could one solution be to scale back the aspiration and do less complex activity in some environments. For example, focus the high-end capability in NATO while accepting that wider tasks rely on the 2^nd tier of forces – for example cutting back RN deployments outside of the NATO area to a minimum except for OPVs or the occasional carrier task group? This would mark a return to the UK military of the 70s and 80s, focused primarily on deterring the Russians with only a very limited interest beyond this region. How such a move would sit though with the aspiration to work with partners globally (for example the ‘Indo-Pacific tilt’) is less clear – having invested time and effort in a globally focused military, particularly betting the RN ‘farm’ on Carrier Strike, rowing back from that would be painful to put it mildly.

If the UK is serious about deterring Russia and strengthening NATO, perhaps its time to ask if the QUEEN ELIZABETH class have a long-term future in the Royal Navy, or if the Carrier Strike Group concept is laudable but has been overtaken by events and is now no longer the priority. At its hardest, has the time come to pay off both carriers into reserve or even sell them, and reprioritise the people and resources into higher priority tasks like properly crewing ASW and AAW platforms in NATO?  This may sound like heresy, but it feels that the UK is on the verge of a genuine strategic pivot, faced with the difficult reality that the global vision of the 1990s – 2010s has been replaced by the grim future of a world where Russia will dominate our security thinking. It will call for investment in areas we’ve neglected for too long (infrastructure, logistics, supply chains) and allow far less time for the ‘fun stuff’ like global carrier deployments. Is it this sense that we need to change and be truly bold, ditching the old goals and instead focusing on being truly lethal in certain niche areas that matters more now?

The key message we need to take from the CDS speech and the evidence more widely to the HCDC is that really difficult choices lie ahead in terms of spending and prioritisation and they can’t be easily solved. Much will need to be cut and perhaps it is time to look at our policy aspirations and dial back to a more pragmatic approach. The post Cold War era lasted roughly 30 years, enough time for a generation of officers to enjoy a career that helped them look globally at being problem solvers while dismantling the legacy of a force intended to deter, and if needs be fight, in a global nuclear conflict. Today we need to focus on the ‘post-post cold war’ and create a new generation able to focus once again on deterring Russia and having policy dreams that are less grandiose in design but which keep the UK safe and secure for the long haul.

It is likely that in this world we will need to accept that direct military influence will play less of importance outside the NATO area and instead the means by which we influence as a nation will come from intelligence, trade, diplomats and low key presence over the ability to be able to ‘fight tonight’ beyond certain areas. Instead planners need to take a strategic view, planning for potentially many decades of facing off against a state threat, investing in capabilities that bolster the NATO alliance and do so while trying to make the Equipment Programme balance – a task akin to tightrope walking blindfolded across a chasm, while people shake the rope and the other side gets ever further away. Difficult times lie ahead, and even more difficult decisions will need to be made in the next Defence Review.