Scrap The DIP

The Defence Investment Plan won't solve the armed forces' problems quickly enough.

At last we have it! The Defence Investment Plan (DIP) was published last week, many months late but in time for the NATO summit. Given its content, I suspect our lacklustre-at-best prime minister now wishes it had been published later. Having set out a stall of what the military needed to be credible with last year’s risible Strategic Defence Review (SDR) the DIP sets out how money will actually be spent. This is, of course, rather tricky when there isn’t any money. The UK borrows some £120 billion a year, which just about covers the interest on the national debt (it won’t for much longer).

Given the choice of cutting other expenditure, which his party calls “austerity”, or kicking the can down the road, the outgoing prime minister went for the latter. Now the MOD doesn’t merely have a black hole, it has a yawning chasm between what it thought its capabilities would be (the SDR) and what it’s actually going to get. Be under no illusion: the Realm is not defended. It hasn’t been for some time. It won’t be in the future, unless we elect a government capable of balancing the books and getting a grip of the Treasury, Whitehall and the Armed Forces.

For the Armed Forces, or at least the senior bits of them in the MOD, are culpable too. Epic mismanagement of procurement and other programmes has thrown our money into the hands of defence contractors and consultants without delivering combat power. It’s not just the current Army disasters of Ajax and Challenger 3. There’s Morpheus (the replacement Army radio system), so far several hundred million pounds have been spent while the programme has been slipped until 2031. The Army failed to specify electronic warfare aspects while General Dynamics took the cash.

It’s not just the waste of money. The DIP proclaims that the Army’s combat power will be based on three armoured vehicles: the Challenger 3, the Ajax and the Boxer wheeled infantry fighting vehicle. Boxer is being delivered, so far with no problems, but you can’t fight an armoured battle without tanks and reconnaissance vehicles. Nor can you fight a reconnaissance deep strike battle, which the DIP tells us the Army now mandates, if you haven’t got communications between the reconnaissance and the strike bit. Morpheus is supposed to be that bit and it’s absent.

In the SDR the Army wittered about “increasing lethality by ten times”, which, it claims, will solve its many shortcomings. It’s still struggling to define quite what it means by “lethality”. The current definition is “The rate at which a force inflicts damage on an opponent relative to the rate at which it incurs casualties.” Having spent time in military operational analysis, I know the challenges and importance of defining a measure accurately and precisely. This definition is neither.

One problem with this definition is that “inflicting damage” is imprecise and requires all forms of damage to be aggregated before an equation can be created. The Army must be able to calculate if (say) five knocked-out tanks, 50 dead enemy soldiers, 149 wounded enemy soldiers and a destroyed artillery ammunition dump are worth (say) four Apache helicopters and eight aircrew. Then the Army must work out how to kill at least 50 tanks and 500 soldiers, wounding a further 1,490 enemy soldiers and ten artillery dumps, or the equivalent, at the cost of the same four Apaches and their crew, or the equivalent.

Working out the equivalencies to do the maths is a long job and a consultant’s dream (spelt ‘blank cheque’). It’s unlikely that the number that comes out at the end has any meaning or utility whatsoever. Yet that’s the justification for Project Asgard (and others). Asgard has currently consumed about £300 million delivering this soundbite.

The Army’s solution is, predictably, AI and drones, and the DIP is throwing money at them. Given the Army’s utter inability to produce a sensible reconnaissance vehicle (let alone one that works), trusting them to develop an appropriate suite of drone weaponry is very high risk. Hitching the Army’s future (and NATO’s security – including yours) to a sound bite based on an unproven technology is rash.

Of course, the Army says that it is applying lessons learned in Ukraine, which no one challenges. While there are obviously lessons to be learned from any war, including Ukraine, those lessons come with context and are seldom universal. Warfare is ultimately about ground. Ukraine is mostly the steppes, that is, rolling, undulating countryside dotted with villages and small towns. It’s a fantastic place for fighting armoured battles, as was demonstrated throughout the Second World War. The Baltics and the Suwalki Gap, the areas thought likely to be the battlefield for World War Three, are more forested.

Worse, the UK (and NATO) can’t fight a war of attrition, which is what the war in Ukraine has become. While drones rule the “no man’s land” between the opposing forces and reach behind their lines to interdict logistics, they can’t seize and hold ground – which is why Ukraine is killing a lot of Russians without returning many of its acres to Ukrainian sovereignty. That defence is far from casualty free; they’ve suffered something like 600,000 casualties, of whom a quarter are dead. No one has asked whether the UK has the national will to suffer such casualties.

The way to avoid such casualties is by manoeuvring, which is what armoured warfare enables—or would if one had any armour that worked. The people who have the best track record in that are the Israelis, yet the British Army didn’t attend the Israeli lessons learned from Gaza series of briefings. Rather than learning from an army that knows what it’s doing, the UK is severing ties. It’s now even banned Israelis from the Royal College of Defence Studies; that’s akin to the Royal Society banning Einstein. (It didn’t). The military input to the DIP, and indeed to the SDR (written by a politician, an Anglo-American academic and a retired general), is therefore a little suspect.

The RAF is at least as bad. The F-35B fighter can’t use the UK’s excellent Meteor missile, which will only come with the Block 4 upgrade. That upgrade was originally due in 2031, but there are problems. Further delay seems inevitable; the current forecast for Block 4 is mid-2030s. Until then, the F-35 uses the inferior AMRAAM. It’s not just Meteor; the new Spear 3 missile also awaits Block 4. While Meteor is integrated with and used by the Eurofighter Typhoon, Spear 3 isn’t and there are no plans to. Until the Block 4 upgrade is delivered to the UK our expensive stealth fighter either uses inferior weaponry or carries its missiles externally, which renders it un-stealthy.

The DIP cancelled a mid-life upgrade to the Meteor in favour of spending on a new missile, currently called FASE (Future Air Superiority Effectors). In the defence world, the words “new” and “future” translate as “risky”, “expensive”, and “late”. The RAF has form in choosing not to upgrade current capability in order to pursue the shiny, new (expensive), cutting-edge stuff. It’s doing it with the future fighter, GCAP (Global Combat Air Programme), although control of that has now been taken over by the Treasury – who are far from expert in combat or aircraft manufacture. The price of GCAP was not to replace ageing Typhoon aircraft, the only one capable of using Meteor for the next 5 to 10 years.

The Navy has more experience of scrapping ships than operating them. Those that are at sea (one nuclear deterrent submarine, a frigate and a destroyer) are under huge maintenance pressure. Even the nuclear deterrent is struggling, which is why deterrence patrols now routinely last almost twice as long as desirable. MOD PR pretends this is brilliant; the reality is that there are maintenance problems. Of the four boats (submarines are boats, not ships), one, HMS Victorious, is in an extended planned refit and life extension, due to complete next year. One is on patrol, one is back from patrol, and one is rumoured to have a problem and be out of the patrol cycle pending a fix.

All the nuclear attack submarines are awaiting maintenance. There are only three places licensed to maintain nuclear submarines out of the water, one of which contains Victorious. The only one in Faslane is the ageing (read unreliable) ship lift. Floating docks are on order, but until they arrive the most powerful ships in the Navy aren’t available, and the entire nuclear deterrent is reliant on overstretched and unreliable infrastructure.

Put simply, the United Kingdom is not ready for war.

That’s a problem. Last week NATO’s current Secretary General, Mark Rutte, said Russia “could be ready to use military force against NATO within five years.” US and Latvian sources are now warning of intelligence indicating that Russia is planning some sort of provocation in the Baltics or in Poland in the next few months. Details are hazy; the suspected future operation falls well short of a full-scale attack.

Any such attack could trigger NATO Article 5, and that’s the path to war. One thing is abundantly clear; the British Armed Forces are not ready for one. It’s not just equipment; they lack training, which is invariably cut when procurement costs overrun – as they inevitably do. Ammunition stockpiles are short to non-existent, having sent so much to Ukraine. Organisations are top-heavy and poorly structured. Worst of all, we lack reserves.

None of this is soluble overnight. None of this happened overnight either; the rundown of our armed forces started at the end of the Cold War and has accelerated ever since. Throughout that time no senior officer has resigned, preferring to preside over the mismanagement of decline. Nothing was, in their judgment, a “resigning matter”, so they carried on drawing salary while failing to properly advise their Secretary of State that the United Kingdom was on the path to military impotence. Whether that was due to a failure of their wisdom, naivety or a lack of moral fibre, only they can answer. It is, unarguably, a disgrace. There is something rotten in the selection of senior officers.

The one person who has emerged honourably is John Healey, who resigned on principle when the prime minister failed to provide the money to start fixing the problems. Had he been a more powerful figure, he would have got a grip on day one. Of course, the DIP still doesn’t fund what is needed, even if desperate Dan Jarvis has secured an extra £1.5 billion, bringing the total to some £15 billion. SDR needed about £30 billion; doing a proper job would probably take more than twice that, according to the Centre For A Better Britain (a newish think tank).

The £15 billion is a pretty illusory figure; some is to come from savings, some is not available this year, and so on. Like far too many government documents these days, the DIP is more an exercise in obfuscation, exaggeration and deflection than it is a clear expression of policy (let alone principle). What the DIP won’t do is solve any of the yawing capability gaps, budgetary challenges or management problems that beset the MOD. It never could, and neither could the SDR.

Whether SDR or DIP will survive the transition to a new prime minister is an open question. It doesn’t much matter; both should be scrapped. Neither addresses today’s key military problems. Rather than positing on what the armed forces should look like in a decade or more’s time, the MOD and government need to focus on how we get from the current impotence to some credible capability at the earliest possible juncture. Then, and only then, will we have sound foundations to rearm from. That process won’t be pretty and will involve asking challenging questions, the real job of a proper politician. Some of the fixes, like the dry dock purchase, are underway. I fear that more are not.

Whoever is the next prime minister will be required to write “Letters of Last Resort”, that is, letters to the commanders of the missile submarines telling them what to do if the entire British chain of command is wiped out. As he (or she) ponders that unenviable task, they should remember that war comes when deterrence fails and that the first stage of that deterrence lies in strong, credible, conventional armed forces.

Previous prime ministers destroyed the economy, the national balance sheet and our military power. The next prime minister’s most important job is to somehow restore deterrence without upsetting the bond markets. If the NATO intelligence is correct, the new prime minister won’t have much time either.

I hope that they’re up to the task and they don’t hang about.

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