The defence secretary Liam Fox announced plans this week to cut back the army to pre-1900 levels and spend a bit more on kit. Has Britain got the balance right on defence spending? Simon Wilson reports.
What’s happened?
Steep cuts to the army have been announced, which will see the number of regular troops reduced by 17,000 to 84,000 by 2020 – the smallest total since Victorian times. But the defence secretary also announced a deal with George Osborne to increase spending on defence equipment every year from 2015 to 2020. The claimed overall result is a 0.4% real increase in the overall MoD budget. The money will be used to fund the two planned new aircraft carriers, Joint Strike Fighters, 14 Chinook helicopters, a Global Combat Ship and drones. The settlement is unusual, in that the Treasury rarely guarantees spending commitments so far ahead.
Has the deal been welcomed?
In effect, the deal offers the armed forces modest spending increases in the future in exchange for big cuts now to plug a £43bn gap in existing commitments (just less than the MoD’s current annual budget of £45bn). But the spending pledge still falls some way short of the 2% real terms increase, which army chiefs believe is needed to fund the government’s future defence strategy as laid out in last autumn’s Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR). “This settlement is not to be sneezed at,” says Malcolm Chalmers of the Royal United Services Institute. It will help with the budgetary overhang (of £43bn the government says it inherited from Labour). “But if they want to stick to their current plans for 2020, more (cuts) will be needed.”
What are those plans?
The review envisages a real-terms 8% reduction in defence spending over the next four years and projects a reduction in personnel of 42,000 (25,000 of them civilian MoD posts). Its core assumptions are that Britain will be able to launch a one-off intervention in another country with no more than 30,000 troops (45,000 were sent to Iraq in 2003); and that it will be able to deploy up to 6,500 troops with sea and air support in a long-term stabilisation force (10,000 are currently on just such a mission in Afghanistan). In other words, Britain has conceded it will not be involved in any Iraq-style wars unless and until its finances improve. The SDSR also cuts the navy’s destroyer and frigate fleet from 23 to 19, scraps 80 Harrier jump-jets and leaves Britain without an aircraft carrier for ten years after decommissioning the Ark Royal.
Is that a wise move?
Admiral Sir Mark Stanhope, the First Sea Lord, has said that Britain’s effort in Libya has been compromised by its inability to place an aircraft carrier off the coast and the withdrawal from service of the last remaining Nimrods. As such, Dr Paul Cornish, head of the International Security Programme at the Chatham House think tank, says that last year’s review has been exposed as “one of the fastest failures in modern British strategic history” – bolstering those who argue that defence spending must not be cut and that spending is being focused on the wrong areas.
Is Britain in tune with America on this?
Critics argue that huge amounts of money are being thrown at kit for a war (in Afghanistan) from which Britain is about to retreat. Meanwhile, its naval and air capabilities are being cut to dangerously low levels. Britain’s defence strategy is rooted in its Atlantic alliance, and yet it does not appear to have taken on board that America’s withdrawal from Iraq and now Afghanistan signals a new defence era (focused on the Pacific and China) in which sea and air power will be critical. As outgoing US defence secretary Robert Gates put it earlier this year, any future holder of that job who advises a president to send a big land army into Asia, Africa or the Middle East should “have his head examined” and “the most plausible scenarios for the US military are primarily naval and air engagements”. Britain, meanwhile notwithstanding this week’s reductions), has spared its army the worst of the cuts while decimating its maritime air power. At some point that mismatch will need to be revisited, whatever the fiscal constraints.
Should the defence budget be cut?
Yes
1. Britain’s borders and its people have not faced a serious military threat since the end of the cold war. The need to stabilise the public finances make defence cuts a necessity.
2. Even after the cuts, Britain will have the fourth-highest level of defence spending in the world – comfortably above the 2% of GDP target that Nato members sign up to.
3. Cheaper reservists currently make up just 20% of the British Army – in similar European counties, Canada or America, the split is 50/50. Britain should make more use of them.
No
1. The twin pillars of Britain’s security strategy since World War II have been the close relationship with America and the Nato alliance. Both are at risk if defence spending continues to fall.
2. Britain has been involved in seven conflicts over the past three decades, from the Falklands to Libya, all of them unforeseen. These cuts will leave us underprepared for another.
3. The unpredicted ‘Arab Spring’ and the uncertainty surrounding China’s rise suggest this is no time to skimp on defence, but to invest in a military equipped for future threats.