Dan's Desperate Mission

Jarvis must pick up the pieces from the failed SDR and DIP and inject realism into the MOD. We need him to succeed.

The MOD will be busy this weekend as it briefs a new Secretary of State. That said, Dan Jarvis has already had two years in the MOD and served in the Parachute Regiment from 1997 to 2011, including tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and passing through Staff College. He has combat experience, significant understanding of the military machine and academic qualifications in politics, conflict and security studies. That probably makes him the ideal paper candidate. The last minister of defence to have military service was Ben Wallace, who had been to neither university nor Staff College. Both went pretty much straight from the army to the House of Commons (Wallace has spent two years working for QinetiQ, a defence firm).

That’s the problem. While they understand soldiering and politics, they do not understand commerce, finance or science. The army tends not to like those who question; politics requires adherence to the leader’s line – to the point of sycophancy. Neither, therefore, are inclined to challenge the norm nor to take the drastic actions needed. Wallace’s failures are Jarvis’s poisoned chalice of an inheritance. Wallace was able to perpetuate the myth that British Armed Forces are capable and valuable, in which process the very senior officers colluded – even as capable junior officers left the services. Events have now proved that they’re a hollowed out shell delivering PR stunts rather than projecting power. Solving this is Dan Jarvis’s task.

Whatever the fix is, there is no money – or not much. John Healey, an honourable man, resigned because the Prime Minister failed to fund the additional £28 billion or so that the MOD says it needs. The economy hasn’t improved since Thursday and gilt yields remain high. Reeves hasn’t got welfare spending under control and Miliband’s net zero remains the dominant theme of the Labour Party. Even if Starmer is replaced (temporarily by David Lamy if he resigns after Makerfield), there is no reason to think that the King of the North – a man who has had no career outside politics – would save the economy if he wins the Makerfield by-election and Labour leadership contest he wants to trigger. Dan Jarvis is probably in post until September and quite possibly rather longer. However, there won’t be any more money.

If there isn’t enough money for the Defence Investment Plan (DIP) to deliver on the Strategic Defence Review (SDR), both are now irrelevant. The £13 billion from the DIP will help Jarvis – if the Treasury doesn’t claw it back. The exam question is how to deliver defence capability using the resources one has until the economy recovers, a happy state unlikely until net zero is scrapped and welfare spending brought under control.

Healey’s mistake was to outsource the SDR; Jarvis needs to write a new one based on the finances, and he needs to do that quickly. A fag-packet version is probably enough. The short-term priority is to get the Navy’s ships to work and keep them at sea. In the medium term, order more of the same, to be produced at a higher rate. Stop the RAF’s nuclear ambition in its tracks. Use the cash saved it to meet the next payments due on the (challenging) Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP).

GCAP is an Anglo-Italian-Japanese 6th generation fighter programme. Such a project is at the cutting edge of technology and therefore expensive, which means multinational. Unfortunately that adds management risk to already astronomic technical risk and affordability risks. The Franco-German equivalent of GCAP, known as FCAS, has just collapsed.

GCAP is major part of the possible future of the defence of The Realm, currently directly controlled by the Treasury on the basis that it needs better project management than the MOD can deliver. The last is unarguable, but given the (Treasury-run) HS2 debacle, it’s hard to see that Ms Reeves’ department is any better at big projects than Dan Jarvis’s. The Treasury knows even less about combat aviation than it does about trains.

Jarvis needs to establish whether GCAP is indeed vital. If it is, he must wrest control from the Treasury, recruit and retain project managers and then back it to the hilt, ensuring that the UK taxpayer receives paybacks if international sales succeed. If it isn’t, he should simply delete the requirement and spend the savings on the Typhoons and building war stocks of air-launched missiles.

The Army, supported by many sections of the press, has gone totally drone crazy. They base their argument on lessons from Ukraine and conclude that armoured vehicles are obsolete. As an ex-paratrooper, Jarvis probably believes this. Before he cancels the Army’s “heavy metal”, he should answer the question of how an infantryman can survive on a battlefield without protected mobility – that is, an armoured vehicle. The Israelis (who have never lost a war) use armour all the time. The Ukrainians (who have yet to win one) were invaded by an armoured force, and, lacking armour themselves, they have struggled to recapture the land they lost. Drones have a role, and quite a large one, but they are not a complete solution. (An article for another day).

Jarvis’s biggest problem is the ministry itself and the career structure of the civil servants and officers that fill it. Put simply, they change roles too often, meaning that decisions are delayed or changed or badly made. At the same time, nobody is held accountable. He should demand that any procurement project has one person in charge, from inception to delivery. That person takes the rap or receives the kudos. It worked for the F-16 (the world’s most successful fighter aircraft) and it worked for the Merkava (the tank the Israelis built at short notice when a Labour government declined to sell them Chieftain – plus ça change). He should instil a spirit of mission command, telling his team what outcomes he expects, in what time frames and with what resources and then leaving them to get on with it.

His fag-packet SDR should compare what the government have pledged (and the taxpayer thinks they have paid for) to what the armed forces deliver. We promised NATO two divisions; we can perhaps furnish them one weak armoured brigade and a vulnerable heliborne one. It’s time to confess (our weakness is hardly a secret) and to get real. Only then can Jarvis increase the defence capability.

In support of confessing and getting real, Jarvis should set out unambiguously where the defence budget is spent. It includes spending on Armed Forces pensions, the entire cost of the nuclear deterrent (which consumes 8% of all defence spending and 34% of capital expenditure). The 2.6% of GDP figure also includes wider defence related things, such as GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 (totalling some £6 billion a year). Jarvis should change all this and focus on outputs: ships at sea, serviceable fighter aircraft, etc. Were I him, I would have a board showing this in my office, with officers required to update it daily.

The focus on outputs leads naturally to the focus on headquarters. Private Tommy Atkins sits at the bottom of a military command structure that leads from the major general commanding the division he’s in, past a brigadier to a lieutenant colonel, to a major, to a lieutenant, to a corporal, to Tommy. (Other ranks, like sergeant and captain, are not typically tactical commanders – which doesn’t mean that they’re not vital. For more information see my book.)

Continuing the pretence that we have two divisions, one can reasonably ask why we have another 38 major generals, six lieutenant generals and two full generals. The other services are as bad. A major warship is usually commanded by a Commander. (A rare case of military jargon making sense). We have 20 or so warships (including submarines), of which perhaps half are seaworthy. The Royal Navy (including the Royal Marines) has about 1,100 officers in the rank of commander and 134 officers who outrank that. Sure, some are needed to run training and supporting establishments, some to make the MOD work (ha!) and some in headquarters (HQs). We have an awful lot of HQs, full of many officers commanding the same units.

Aside from the puzzle palace of the MOD in Whitehall, there are the Permanent Joint Headquarters (PJHQ) and Commander Allied Maritime Command (MARCOM), both in Northwood. Then the Army, Navy and Air Force all have their own headquarters. Then there are HQ Allied Rapid Reaction Corps in Gloucester and the Standing Joint Expeditionary Force HQ (also in Northwood). The Joint Expeditionary Force is an anomalous thing. It evolved in 2012 largely from the (UK only) Joint Rapid Reaction Force. (Joint in this case means a combined army, navy and air force organisation), which came “under pressure” (meaning running out of people) following the UK’s commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan. Other nations were roped in and there are now ten member states, all of whom are also part of NATO. Quite why NATO needs to operate two headquarters to ensure that its member armed forces can train together is far from obvious. Of course HQ JEF needs generals and staff. If HQ JEF no longer existed, the assets it sometimes commands would still exist in the NATO command structure. Jarvis should bin HQ JEF. He should then look at the rest of the HQ and command structure with extreme prejudice.

If Jarvis had the nous to ensure that the MOD keeps any savings that it makes, and ensured that in such a way that it will survive a change of Prime Minister, he’s got a basis for rebuilding British defence capability without breaking the bank. But he must start with candour, with his officials, with the Treasury and, above all, with the British public.

He must tell them that running out of money and a strategic default is probably a threat to the country second only to nuclear war. He must explain that we cannot meet our NATO commitments and will have to scale them back while we rebuild the armed forces and the dysfunctional ministry of defence. He should point out that the UK cannot fight a war of attrition, like the one in Ukraine, and probably does not want to in the Baltics (or anywhere else).

Jarvis should look closely at the Israeli model of reserves, specifically looking at the economic impact of part of the workforce downing tools and picking up weaponry. There’s no point in us winning on the battlefield if we trash the economy. (World War Two debt was finally paid off in 2006, more than sixty years after we won it.) Israel’s national debt is around 69% of its GDP and it has no deficit. The UK’s is 103% and we run a £100 billion plus deficit. Israel can survive a brief economic downturn; we can’t.

Therein lies the real challenge for the next government. The United Kingdom has put itself in a position of endemic strategic weakness. Running down the armed forces is part of it, but the wholesale destruction of the economy is what has really done for us. If Jarvis can turn the MOD round, there is hope for the UK. If he fails the question might become whether the UK is worth defending.

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