RIP The DIP

The Defence Investment Plan Assumes That There Is Money. There Isn't.

The much awaited Defence Investment Plan (DIP) remains stuck in the Treasury. That’s hardly a surprise; there is no money and the armed forces have a spectacular ability to waste it, primarily through failed procurement projects and overambition allied to an inability to check their aspirations against reality. Decades of reckless rundown of defence spending were exacerbated by George Osborne moving the (substantial) costs of the nuclear deterrent into the defence budget in 2010 – before that, they had been borne by the Cabinet Office. The Defence budget also covers most of the cost of veterans’ pensions. There is, therefore, very much less money available to deliver conventional combat power than the £60 billion headline figure suggests.

Expenditure on combat power broadly falls into three categories: hardware and infrastructure like ships and docks plus the maintenance thereof; pay and accommodation for service personnel; and training and munitions – fuel, spare parts, missiles and bullets. There are interlinkages – a warship without dockyard time to maintain it is simply floating scrap. A tank without a trained and current crew is a target and a jet without missiles is simply a shiny toy. Although the MOD is very cagey, which is partly (but not entirely) excusable on national security grounds, it’s no secret that an awful lot of the hardware that the taxpayer purchased is short of maintenance and trained crews.

Recent events exposed the Potemkin village that our armed forces have become when the Royal Navy struggled to deploy a single warship to Cyprus. It’s partly due to military tendency to keep hardware on the books in various states of disrepair, hoping that when funding became available they can be brought back to readiness quickly. Sadly and inevitably, sufficient funding never comes. Which is why we now have just five frigates to cover the tasks that were rightly thought to require sixteen. There are thirteen new frigates on order; some have been launched and are fitting out, others are in construction. However, their in-service dates are not known; the government seems reluctant to commit to one – possibly because of the funding uncertainties of the DIP. And all the time the remaining five, all of which are close to the end of their lives, plug away. Until something breaks, and then there will be just four.

That something could be the crews; the Royal Navy has a recruitment and (particularly) retention problem – unsurprising when the advertised life on the ocean wave is replaced by life tied up in a naval base. Unless you’re a submariner on the Vanguard-class missile submarines, whose length of patrols has increased to six months or so, and sometimes more. Although the pay is high, it places a great strain on the sailors, stuck in a metal tube working 6 hours on, 6 hours off. Their connection to the outside world is limited to one email from family once a week.

Most navies reckon that submarine patrol lengths of around three months are sensible. While Royal Navy PR churns out guff about record breading endurance, this is not a choice. The Navy is being forced into it because one of the four missile submarines is in deep refit and, according to the usually reliable Navy Lookout, another boat has been tied up alongside in Faslane for 18 months, leaving just two boats to keep one at sea. The ever-lengthening patrols are a function of the maintenance required on the submarine not at sea, plus the work-up time. The harder they work, the more maintenance is necessary. This is an availability death spiral.

There is speculation that the Navy is being forced to compromise on the overarching principle of ballistic missile submarine operation, which is to hide. The current submarines were designed for three-month patrols. Squeezing in rations for an extra three months (or more) for the 135 sailors on board is non-trivial. It may be that partway through the patrol the missile boat surfaces to replenish. That’s no way to run a deterrent.

Why is the Navy in such a mess? The Cameron government saved itself £750 million by delaying the construction of the Dreadnought Class by five years, which necessarily requires extending the Vanguard’s service life for at least five years too. Old machines are less reliable and fixing stuff on a missile boat is never simple. HMS Dreadnought, the first in class, is also being built at a leisurely pace; steel was cut in 2016 but the keel was only laid down in 2025. She will be in service in the early 2030s Until the the Vanguards must soldier on.

The delays to HMS Dreadnought may have been due in part to the problems with the Astute Class attack submarines, which are built in the same facility. Herein lies the challenge for the government. If it wants to deliver more sea power, it needs more warships, which means it needs more warship-building capacity. That could lead to expensive discussions with BAe Systems and Babcock, the prime contractors for all current warships. The MOD might be adept enough to pull off a deal with their subcontractors, which include Cammell Laird in Liverpool, A&P Group in the Northeast and Southwest and Spanish-owned Harland and Wolff in Ulster. Or it might not.

The simple reality is that the MOD is an awful customer – it was its vacillation and delays that put Harland and Wolff into administration last time round. Building or expanding a shipyard is capital intensive and takes time; any company contemplating this would want a surety of workflow to justify the considerable risks. This government’s delay of the DIP undermines such confidence. Neither does its looming insolvency; however, the case for more warships is compelling. There is little doubt that they would add much-needed capability and directly contribute to the security of the Realm. Such national benefit is less obvious from spending on the other armed forces.

The Royal Air Force has a long history of a disconnect between its rhetoric and its capability. The travails of the Tornado F3 (its radar didn’t work for over a decade), the delays to the Typhoon, whose early versions lacked the ground attack capability that justified its procurement, are well known. Most recently, its failure to purchase sufficient vital airborne early warning aircraft (we have just three Wedgetails, insufficient to maintain a 24/7 capability) is typical. Yet it managed to apply pressure to spend £1 billion on the less-than-vital New Medium Helicopter to replace its less-than-vital and ageing Puma fleet. (It is not the role of the British Armed Forces to keep Leonardo’s Yeovil factory in business). That £1 billion would have gone a long way to covering the cost of the missing two Wedgetails.

For reasons absolutely no one can explain, the RAF is also purchasing a dozen F-35As (another £1 billion or so, which would have solved the Wedgetail deficiency) to give it a nuclear capability, with American-owned B-61 bombs. These weapons are crude and require the aircraft dropping them to almost overfly the target (they avoid overflight by performing a high-g manoeuvre known as “the idiot’s loop”). That may or may not compromise the F-35A’s stealth, which is a worry.

The real question is: who or what is the intended target? The B-61 is a tactical weapon with yields ranging from 0.3 kilotons to 400 kilotons, that is, from 2% to 2600% of a Hiroshima. At the upper end, that’s a city trashed and a huge step towards the Armageddon of mutually assured destruction. At the lower end the effect on the target would almost certainly be better achieved by precision bombing or a few cluster bombs, avoiding all the hassle of nuclear fallout and escalation. (What may seem like a tactical weapon strike to an air marshal in a bunker will feel indistinguishable from a strategic strike for those unfortunates near ground zero).

The RAF lost its strategic nuclear role in 1969 when the Polaris submarines came into service. Their tactical nukes went in 1998, a little after the Cold War ended. While having a nuclear role may have given Air Marshalls some status and access to conversations they wouldn’t otherwise be in, that’s not a justification for the enormous costs of maintaining a nuclear strike force securely for decades (or more, one hopes).

The RAF’s ability to defend our airspace, its primary purpose, is compromised by the F-35B, which has still not yet been certified to carry the long-range Meteor air-to-air missile. Instead, it has the older, shorter-ranged AIM-120 AMRAAM. The delay is partly due to the fact that the only other F-35B operators are the US Marine Corps (which prioritises ground attack) and the Italian Navy, which has few. Meeting the needs of the RAF is not a high F-35 development priority.

The F-35 serves alongside the Eurofighter Typhoon, which the RAF hopes to replace with the Tempest – an aircraft still under development by a multinational consortium with Italy and Japan. Tempest offers many capabilities (easy to do in the development stage) and is getting to the expensive phase of building and flight testing. That was supposed to happen in 2025, then 2026 although it has now slipped to late 2027. As of 2025, the MOD had already spent £2 billion on Tempest, with other international partners stumping up similar amounts. The problem with internationally developed weapons is that there are differences of opinion and an increased possibility of changes of direction, all of which add cost and delay. (The world’s most successful jet fighter, the F-16, was designed by one company. It first flew in 1974 and came into service in 1978. It’s still in production today and over 2,500 are in service.)

Funding Tempest is going to be tough. It offers fantastic capability (on paper) when it comes into service, perhaps in the late 2030s. Until then, the defence of UK airspace will rest on 75 F-35s (some of which will be at sea if an aircraft carrier is working, and 12 will be tied up with the nuclear idiocy) and whatever Typhoons are serviceable. The RAF currently has 107 Typhoons in service although how many of them are serviceable at any one time is unknown. The Typhoon is still in production, although the RAF declined to purchase more of the up to date Tranche 4 aircraft. The RAF Typhoons are ageing; two thirds of its fleet is Tranche 2 and the rest Tranche 3. They will need to serve until 2040, or later if Tempest is delayed.

Whether a 4th generation fighter (like the Typhoon, F16, F15 and F18) can survive in a modern air-defence environment is debatable. The chances of survival increase as the defences are degraded by 5th generation stealthy aircraft, such as the F-35, and 6th generation Tempest (if it gets built and works). However, if the primary role of the RAF is to defend UK airspace, it won’t need to penetrate enemy air defences and the prime advantage of stealth will diminish. The trade-offs between the technical risks and combat capabilities of Typhoon and Tempest are far from clear. It’s unfortunate that the most recent Strategic Defence Review was so risible.

If the RAF is caught on the horns of the dilemma of choosing between funding future capability or maintaining current ones, the Army has an ostensibly simpler problem. Its current capability is pathetic, memorably described by General Sir Richard Barrons (one of the SDR’s authors) as only being able to “seize a small market town on a good day”; l the army lacks capability, equipment and leadership. It also lacks the necessary clarity of purpose that underpins any well-structured organisation. It fails to tell the truth to power and only looks in the mirror when it’s wearing rose-tinted spectacles.

Supposedly the UK will provide two divisions to NATO in time of war. While we have two organisations called divisions, they are not equipped for war with Russia, have never trained together – indeed no UK division has exercised as a complete entity since the Cold War – and are in spectacularly low states of readiness. The busiest bit of the army, the light cavalry, operates in Eastern Europe in a modification of a vehicle procured urgently for Afghanistan. While the RAF prepares for a war involving tactical nuclear weapons, the Army’s light cavalry – its only functioning reconnaissance courtesy of the disastrous Ajax programme – can’t operate on a nuclear-contaminated battlefield (or a chemically contaminated one for that matter).

The army will have about 140 Challenger 3 tanks, enough for one armoured brigade. Unfortunately two divisions are equivalent to at least six brigades. Its infantry will either ride in Warrior, (which needs an upgrade), Boxer (which has wheels and no turret – I don’t think that a bad thing; others disagree), or Ares, a version of the troubled Ajax. If we’re to send NATO two divisions, we’ll need some 500 more tanks. That’s £10 billion and change.

The Army is fresh out of 155mm artillery, although it’s getting 72 RCH guns (enough for one weak division) starting in 2028. It’s also procuring MLRS missiles to give it about the same number of launchers, which would make the one division strong in artillery. Against those procurement successes (defining success as eventually purchasing the right piece of kit, albeit rather too late), is the Ajax fiasco and the lunacy of its multiple projects to buy a new rifle.

The tough question is, what is the Army for? If the Navy and RAF are doing their job, we should never be conducting land warfare on UK soil (unless the IRA kicks off again or the Welsh and Scottish nationalists tire of politics). The Army’s primary role, therefore, must be expeditionary, supporting allies fighting a common enemy. That may be through NATO or outside it. The expeditionary bit imposes significant logistic challenges.

In the Cold War these were largely overcome by basing a third of the Army in Germany (that force was pretty much the size of today’s entire Army, although it delivered about ten times the combat power and was ready to fight at six hours’ notice). If the primary threat is Russian aggression towards the Baltics, tanks in Tidworth aren’t much use. Tanks in light preservation in Ashchurch are even less useful, yet that is how the Army now operates. Most of its combat vehicles sit in air-conditioned hangers while their crews languish in barracks without their primary weapon. Known as Whole Fleet Management, it only makes sense to someone with a financial spreadsheet who is clueless about soldering. Introduced in 1999, it has contributed little to readiness; that it has gone on so long says nothing good about the upper echelons of the Army.

Like many, the Army has now gone drone crazy, justifying this with lessons learned from the Ukraine war. Perhaps (it’s an article for another day). However, the British Army lacks the manpower to suffer the losses the Ukrainians have; we’re not set up for a war of attrition. Given the current recruiting problems (not entirely the fault of Capita, now Serco), we never will be. The British Army would be better advised to look at the Israeli Army – it’s never lost and has fought (and is fighting) modern wars too.

All of which means that were I running the Treasury, I would release funds for shipbuilding and additional funds to accelerate it. I would challenge some of the brightest minds there to talk to industry about expanding warship production rapidly, making it clear that the only funding available would be for a warship purchase, not a state-owned dockyard. The RAF would get maintenance funding, and I would delete its nuclear ambition as cost-ineffective and an ill-advised step towards Armageddon. Further funding for Tempest would be subject to some serious risk analysis and questioning. As the extra Wedgetails are essential, I would stump up the £2 billion for them, although that cost won’t be incurred immediately and would more or less be covered by scrapping the nuclear bomb plan.

As for the Army, it would get nothing until it produced a satisfactory explanation of how it delivers one-tenth the combat power of the similarly sized Cold War force in Germany. That was run by one lieutenant general, five major generals and about 20 brigadiers. Today’s army has two full generals, six lieutenant generals, 40 major generals and 150 brigadiers. WTF do they do all day, and how does that defend the Realm? I would ask them in rank order, top to bottom. Failure to produce coherent, credible and immediate answers would lead to P45s.

That won’t be popular, but that’s not the point. We have no money and the SDR failed to deliver a coherent plan. While a military attack might overwhelm us, none is on the immediate horizon. Spiralling debt costs due to an out of control government budget will one day trigger the bond markets into flight from UK government bonds; that will destroy the country overnight.

Spending £18 billion that the government does not have on the highly wasteful MOD hoping for substantial improvement in the armed forces via an ill-defined policy might be such a trigger. Expect the DIP to be cut savagely, or the country’s borrowing costs to rise further, taking is one step closer to the economic abyss.

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