One of the macabre pleasures that certain government ministers enjoy is listing which of their colleagues has the worst job. Watching Liam Fox this week scrambling to defend the imminent sacking of 11,000 Armed Forces personnel – some of them now in Afghanistan – it is easy to see why the Defence Secretary is always near the top of that bleak list.
Sacking Servicemen and women is tough enough at the best of times, and these are far from the best of times. Barely hours after David Cameron said he was considering imposing a no-fly zone over Libya, the Ministry of Defence began its redundancy programme with 1,000 Royal Air Force personnel, including 170 trainee pilots.
It gets worse. Next Friday, as Mr Cameron arrives in Brussels to discuss the European Union’s response to the Libyan crisis, HMS Ark Royal, Britain’s flagship and last remaining aircraft carrier, will be formally decommissioned, two years ahead of schedule.
That sad ceremony, like the redundancy programme, is the bitter fruit of last year’s Strategic Defence and Security Review. To call the SDSR controversial would be a grotesque understatement. Field Marshal Lord Bramall; Major General Julian Thompson; Admiral Sir Jeremy Black; Lord Ashdown – the roll call of those who have criticised the SDSR is heavy with military honours.
Yesterday, Sir Laurence Martin, a former head of the Chatham House think tank, said the review amounted to “panicked asset-stripping”. Jim Murphy, the Labour shadow defence secretary, joined the chorus, calling for a “wider reassessment of the assumptions on which defence policy has been based”.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. The SDSR was supposed to prepare Britain and its Armed Forces for an unpredictable world, anticipating crises and equipping us to respond.
The bedrock on which British defence stands is British foreign policy. Soldiers, ships and planes all exist to promote and defend our interests around the globe. So what is our foreign policy?
If we’d had a working aircraft carrier, would it really be steaming towards the North African coast, ready to project British power and values into sovereign Libyan territory? Are we still that sort of country?
Some of the public reaction to the Libyan crisis suggests that many people believe the answer should be yes. Mr Cameron’s vacillations suggest his answer is: not sure yet.
The SDSR was also supposed to make the big decisions about the Services, their structure, size and mission. In fact, it deferred many major questions, launching a small armada of reviews, commissions and studies. One was a study of “force generation” ratios, the way the Services produce deployable units. Today, an Army of 100,000 can sustain a frontline force of around 10,000 in Afghanistan. Improve the force generation ratio and you need a smaller standing Army, an outcome as financially attractive as it is politically toxic. Likewise the deferred decisions about which military bases around Britain will close: announcements are due later this year.
A further review is considering the allowances paid to members of the Armed Forces, for everything from children’s school fees to living overseas. Yet another is working on thinning out the top-heavy upper ranks of the three services, sacking the brigadiers, commodores and air commodores whose numbers have grown even as the Armed Forces have shrunk...
[cf. LGEN Leslie and transformation:
http://forums.milnet.ca/forums/threads/99602.0.html ]
like almost every one of his predecessors, Dr Fox is learning that the Armed Forces are at least as good at Whitehall warfare as the real thing. Each of the three Services has fought ferociously to defend its interests, often at the expense of the others: the venom of inter-Service feuds and vendettas can make civilian politicking seem tame.
One of the last decisions the review made was on the Navy’s Harriers. Dr Fox said the aircraft were deleted instead of the RAF’s Tornadoes because the Tornado offered “greater capability” in Afghanistan. It was “a very difficult decision”, he conceded.
Yet some insiders are convinced the Harriers were sacrificed simply to keep the RAF happy and ensure that pain was evenly distributed across the Services. One of those involved in the review said: “It was depressingly simple really: because the Navy got their new aircraft carriers, they had to lose something else.”
That is precisely the sort of salami-slicing that Dr Fox promised to avoid, yet it kept a fragile peace between the Services. Formally reopening the SDSR, or even quietly revisiting some of its decisions, could inflame inter-service tensions.
Friends say Dr Fox must tread carefully because, politically, the chiefs are nuclear-armed. The top brass make little secret of their continuing unease; criticism from retired officers is often sanctioned by serving chiefs. The political impact of public criticism from a serving chief would be immense; a resignation would be catastrophic. The Armed Forces and their leaders have immense public sympathy [emphasis added]. No matter what private exasperations ministers may have about the chiefs, none would risk his own position in a public confrontation.
Mr Cameron knows that rows with the top brass destroyed Labour on defence. Under fire, would he back his Defence Secretary against the military? The question must haunt Dr Fox.
Yet elsewhere in Whitehall, there is less sympathy...
