Remember Admiral Byng

Responsibility for the Brize Norton security fiasco lies with one person, the Station Commander. She must be court martialled for her lack of diligence to expose the MOD's Blob.

On Thursday two pro-Palestinian activist muppets have just exposed the utterly pathetic state of our Armed Forces and the weakness of its leadership.

All the muppets had to do was get past a low wooden fence and they were on the Brize Norton runway, with convenient e-bike access to the aircraft parking ramp. There they were able to damage the £10 million engines on a £140 million Voyager tanker / transport aircraft. They then escaped by the same route. At no time were they challenged, let alone detained. The RAF is lucky that they damaged so little.

As security failures go this is simply enormous. Like you, as a taxpayer I’m a part owner of the damaged aircraft. Our taxes also pay the salaries of the approximately 5,800 Service Personnel, 300 civilian staff and 1,200 contractors on the site. How it is possible for two numpties to gain unblocked assets to a site that holds several billion of our pounds’ worth of military hardware without even one of the 7,300 people there – some of whom are allegedly security staff - even noticing?

All RAF Stations (as they call airfields) have Station Commanders who are responsible for all the infrastructure and services on the station. That infrastructure includes boundary fences. Those services include security.

In former jobs I have guarded nuclear weapons dumps, the Maze Prison and run a secure science park. They all had fences and security patrols. Part of my job was to check that the fencing was secure and the patrols effective. If, as and when there were problems I got them fixed, arranging for extra security and temporary fencing if necessary

Decent security fences have tremble detectors (which alarm if anyone is climbing over or cutting through), strong security lighting and day/night cameras. They are patrolled frequently. That’s not overly expensive – the budget at the science park for a mile long 8 to 12 foot high fence with all the gear, multiple access points and access control to over 50 buildings was under £500,000 per year – and that included the guards. The Brize Norton Fence is five times as long it would only cost £2.5 million a year. That’s a rounding error in military aviation – a single 109 ton fuel load for a single Voyager tanker costs about £55,000.

On the day I took over each of my security jobs I checked the entire fence line, a process I repeated frequently. If someone had replaced metal mesh fence topped by razor wire with a wooden garden fence I would have noticed and done something about it. The Brize Norton Station Commander, Group Captain Louise Henton OBE, should have done the same. She knew the fence was inadequate (an overstatement of its efficacy). Why did she do nothing about it?

A Group Captain is a fairly senior officer. As the commander of the country’s largest RAF base operating equipment vital to the defence of the Realm the Brize Norton Station Commander has a loud voice. Had she demanded a couple of miles of fencing as an operational necessity it would have been forthcoming. Had it not been forthcoming a diligent Station Commander would have gone up the chain of command until it was, all the while ensuring that the perimeter was secure by deploying a few of the 7,300 on site to guard it.

Maybe Group Captain Henton took over the base with the fence in its current condition. That doesn’t excuse her failure to secure the perimeter though, it simply illustrates the number incompetent officers in the RAF. Group Captain Henton reports to Number 2 Group RAF. The Deputy Commander of No 2 Group is Group Captain Claire O’Grady, the previous commander of RAF Brize Norton, who must also have known about the state of the fence. Showing up one’s superiors inadequacies takes moral courage (which all officers are supposed to have) and can be career limiting. That doesn’t stop it being a duty.

I’m not a career RAF officer. I’m a taxpayer who has just seen something I paid for trashed because the people I pay to protect it aren’t up to the job. It’s increasingly obvious that the RAF is awash with such incompetents. The RAF is taking eight years to train fast jet pilots (which means many leave before the taxpayer gets their money’s worth. The RAF has also failed to procure enough Wedgetail airborne radars aircraft (it needs at least five, it’s getting two).

The RAF has leadership problems, with a toxic culture in the Red Arrows. Unbelievably, some 30 former RAF pilots were found to have been training the Chinese Air Force - a potential foe. The RAF has been wasting our money on investigating green aviation fuel. It might be woke, but it doesn’t defend the Realm. The RAF was also found to have been operating unlawful positive discrimination processes (against white males, natch) in its recruitment for the RAF Regiment (the part of the RAF that supposedly guards airfields).

Security (I use the term loosely) at Brize Norton is provided by No 7 RAF Police and Security Squadron which includes personnel from the Military Provost Guard Service (MPGS). This latter organisation comprises retired soldiers who have re-joined. Guard duties are one of the dullest parts of soldiering and MPGS pay is not great. The recruitment requirement says that the required body mass index (BMI) is under 32. A BMI of 30 is considered obese; the MPGS are not crack troops.

Brize Norton is also home to No. 1 Tactical Police & Security Squadron and II Squadron of the RAF Regiment (The RAF loves Roman numerals almost as much as it loves woke). Both exist to, in the words of the RAF’s own website, “protect the Air Wing element of Air Mobility Force when deployed throughout the world.” It’s a shame that they don’t do that when they’re at home.

RAF Regiment Squadrons are equipped with battlefield radars that detect moving people. It’s a shame it never occurred to any of the 7,300 staff whom we pay to use the radars that we bought them to cover the inadequate fence we haven’t been asked to replace to prevent damage of the aircraft we own.

In a commercial organisation the lack of a fence round an airfield (a place where dangerous stuff happens) would most likely be considered a serious health and safety problem. The company’s directors would therefore be at risk of criminal prosecution should the lack of fence result in an injury or death. They would find the money – and fencing is not expensive. At (say) £500 per metre refencing the whole perimeter would cost £4 million, say £5 million for all the bells and whistles. A Group Captain gets paid £100K and the RAF has almost 300 of them (almost one per combat aircraft). Chop four and the fence is paid for in ten years. Sack them without pension and it would be about five.

And sackings must come.

Like most government departments, the MOD has created structures that render accountability opaque. Military officers move desk every couple of years. Civil servants get promoted or moved around too. This leads to a culture of collective impotence as no one knows who is in responsible for the any decision. When things go wrong, as they inevitably do when no one is in charge, the mission becomes obfuscation, denial and cover up. They entire MOD system is rotten. Speaking out costs careers, with the net result that the Realm isn’t defended. Similar problems in other parts of the government machine explain the roads being full of potholes, our borders being porous, HS2 running massively over-budget and behind schedule and why you’re more likely to see a unicorn than your GP.

Atypically in the Brize Norton fiasco (understatement)one person is clearly responsible. This disgrace happened on her watch; Group Captain Henton should have been aware for the fence problem and she should have done something about it. She didn’t; she should be court martialled for incompetence.

There is a famous precedent. In 1756 Admiral Byng was court martialled for failing to "do his utmost" to prevent Minorca from falling to the French. He was found guilty and shot, death being the mandatory punishment for an officer failing to do their utmost. This led to a stiffening of naval backbones (not that Byng was a coward) and Voltaire to quip that it was good to shoot an admiral from time to time “…pour encourager les autres.” There were extenuating circumstances for Byng and there might be for Henton, who might also take comfort from the death penalty no longer being available under military law.

Regardless of the verdict, court martialling Henton would certainly have the Voltaire effect across the failing public sector. Mandarins, popinjays and apparatchiks would realise that their office comes with responsibilities and obligations; actions (and inactions) have consequences. Some might lawyer up, others might start solving the organisational problems that give us The Blob.

Unfortunately the consequences of Henton’s incompetence aren’t merely several million pounds of damage to the taxpayer’s weaponry. The country is now a laughing stock, precisely at the time that the Prime Minister is attempting to persuade the Americans, Israelis and Iranians that the United Kingdom is a power to be taken seriously. (He’s wrong but that’s not the point.) Henton’s neglect has led to a massive loss of credibility to the RAF. I suspect that the United States Air Force (USAF) is looking to relocate the twelve F22 Raptors that arrived at RAF Lakenheath last week. (Pro Palestinian muppets be warned, the USAF takes the security of its aircraft very seriously and protects them under very different rules of engagement to the RAF). Once again, the British armed Forces have demonstrated how very far from Top Notch they have sunk.

That has consequences too. Group Captain Henton’s problem is probably not one of her creation, merely one that (like her predecessors) she failed to resolve. The guilt lies higher. Maladministration is not defined in English Law, although its characteristics include bias, neglect, inattention, delay, incompetence, ineptitude, perversity, turpitude and arbitrariness. Failing to secure a key piece of defence infrastructure ticks six of those boxes.

The Brize Norton farce strikes at the heart of the recent (rotten) defence review. This made much of solving the armed forces shortcomings by lavishing them with billions of pounds worth of AI and drones. If they can’t mend a fence AI, drones and stuff might be a bit beyond them. The Armed Forces must demonstrate that they can do the basics before they get more expensive kit.

A gutsy Minister of Defence would set the Cabinet Office (which handles complaints of maladministration) on the Head of the RAF and the MOD’s Permanent Secretary. Of course John Healey isn’t going to do that; Pat MacFadden wouldn’t allow it and no senior civil servant is going to attack another. There may be some early retirements on full pension. There might even be an enquiry resulting in pledges that lessons will be learned (again). Nothing will be done that exposes the inadequacies of The Blob.

Which is why this affair is so much more important than a piece of bad fencing and failure of a Station Commander. It’s a clear, simple exemplar of all that is wrong in the government machine, The Blob, right down to the inability to correct itself. If, or when, Reform gets elected they will have done so because the tax paying public is utterly sick of paying through the nose for incompetents.

Reform has no more than four years to come up with how they will do this. (The way the economy is going they might have a lot less as about the only thing that our lacklustre Prime Minister can control is the election date).

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