The Time to Act is Now, Mr Healey

The Armed Forces are collapsing today . Waiting for the Roberstson review to complete won't stop the rot.

This article was originally written for Global Britain and Think Scotland. It appears here with their kind permission. It’s the final part of in a series of five.

PREVIOUSLY I HAVE described some of the problems faced by the Royal Navy,  the Army,  and  the Royal Air Force.  The operative word is “some” but they share one, crucial problem – they are running out of people.

Any veteran or serving soldier, sailor or airperson will tell you the armed forces are fundamentally about people. Officer training rightly rams home the message that a soldier’s welfare is the fundamental responsibility and absolute priority of a military leader. This duty is embedded in the culture in myriad little ways. For example, when officers and rankers eat together, the officers eat last. The biggest sin a junior officer can commit is to mess soldiers about.

Why then are 16 leaving the armed forces for every 12 that join? Some of the dozen may not last through basic training (the failure rate runs from 5 per cent to 20 per cent) but that doesn’t change the core message. Service personnel are leaving all services at unsustainable rates, and they have been for some years.

The HR director of any business losing 3 per cent of its expensively trained workforce in one year would be having an unpleasant interview with the CEO the moment it was noticed. In the same timeframe any CEO would be facing penetrating questions from furious investors as the staff shortages would be costing them money. The CEO would be well aware that commerce doesn’t tolerate repeated failure, leaving only the options of deliver or depart.

The Army has been under strength by as much as seven per cent every year this century. The RAF is currently 10 per cent under strength. No military director of personnel, let alone a service head or a Chief of the Defence staff has been sacked. Yet without crews the expensive weaponry that the taxpayer has paid for is unusable and thus worthless. Such destruction of value is close to maladministration, but it is commonplace and no one seems culpable.

Why is that? At least in part it’s because of the near constant churn of military officers in the MOD. The military career structure is such that officers change jobs every couple of years. At the lower levels this makes sense as they need to broaden their understanding and the places they’re posted to need officers with recent experience. However, as the officers become more senior, Colonels and Brigadiers, the opportunities for field service diminish, so many trundle between desk jobs while they serve out their time or intrigue for promotion.

There is little publicly available information on why service personnel chose to leave. (Mr Healey might want to study this and publish the findings). Data from 2018 suggests that the prime cause (cited by 65 per cent) is impact on family life. Pay was only the fifth reason (cited by 45 per cent) Frustration with job and career lay somewhere in between. Like any career, there is a balance to be struck between professional and personal fulfilment and other considerations, notably family.

Fulfilment requires serving personnel spending more time doing their job; living on the ocean wave not tied up in harbour; firing their weaponry not watching PowerPoint; turning and burning not reading flight manuals. Unfortunately the easiest way for the MOD to save money at short notice is to cut training – PowerPoint is cheaper than jet fuel.  As the MOD is always over budget, largely due to its inability to procure, it is always cutting training. Serving  personnel get bored, work on their CV and vote with their feet.

The current (and recurring) housing problems further tip that balance against retention. Parts of the MOD successfully manage highly complicated machinery and systems like the nuclear deterrent. It therefore beggars belief that the Armed Forces can’t run a simple housing estate.

The management was  outsourced from the Defence Infrastructure Organisation (DIO) to Pinnacle. Its website notes that it manages 49,000 service houses and receives 500,000 calls a year, almost one call per house per month. It’s unlikely the calls were to thank Pinnacle for its good efforts.

How is this possible?

The Armed Forces are run by Very Senior Officers (VSO) who spent their career promoting and protecting the welfare of those they command.  How can any commanding officer accept their soldiers and their families living in squalor? Once such problems would have been fixed locally, if necessary using the labour of other service personnel and welfare or private funds. Now it’s all in the hands of a PFI contract; local commanders are helpless in the face of contract lawyers. The Top Brass have abrogated responsibility for a fundamental duty, looking after service personnel. No-one is holding them to account.

None have spoken out publicly until they’ve completed their careers. Letters to the Times from retired VSO are as ineffective as they are common.  Press briefings from serving military leaders exasperated by political chicanery are rarer than hen’s teeth. Too many have participated in the shoddy pretence that all is well or that, due to PFI, it’s out of their hands. History has not been kind to the craven Pontius Pilate, yet many of the VSOs end up in the House of Lords.

It’s very different to the commercial world let alone the military one of old. Remember Admiral Byng, executed in 1757 for failing to capture Minorca? It was considered a near impossible mission, but Byng failed to attack with sufficient vigour. Other Admirals noted this and the Royal Navy became a very aggressive and successful force.

Armed forces officers, all of whom swore an oath to serve and obey the Crown (deemed to include Parliament) rightly defer to their political masters. Civil servants, doctors and teachers don’t swear such an oath and have the freedom to be more outspoken. Many VSOs are probably too inclined to say, “Yes minister.” Orders is orders; if they require doing more with less just get on with it.

Other government departments, say, the NHS, would not see it that way. Whenever it faces a constraint in funding operatives rush to the press and papers, bleat about “our NHS”, shout about “creeping privatisation” and “post code lotteries” and emigrating to Australia. The NHS (that is, the taxpayer) even funds its own pressure group, The NHS Confederation. It works, at least for the apparatchiks; the NHS always gets the money it demands, regardless of need or performance.

Heads of the NHS and other similar organisations are typically in post for six years and are lifelong Whitehall insiders. The heads of the Armed Forces spend two-to-three years in post, having spent most of their early career doing military stuff far from Whitehall. While they are supported by career civil servants and a Permanent Secretary, who has also blazed a trail through Whitehall, it is the VSOs who are there to provide the military expertise, not the civil servants.

VSOs seem unable to work the system. In the past twenty years they have been bamboozled into invading Iraq, occupying Afghanistan and recklessly cutting the Armed Forces combat capability. They have failed to procure the equipment that might have filled capability gaps left by the cuts. They have been persuaded that the militarily disastrous PFIs on housing, recruitment and flying training (to name a few) save money and are therefore good things.

The net result is armed forces that are on the cusp of collapse. What is Mr Healey going to do about it?

His job is to set strategic direction and to ensure the provision of adequate funds. The £2.9 billion promised to defence in Labour’s first budget is around 5 per cent and just about covers inflation. It will add no capability and not resolve any of the myriad problems. Having been Shadow Secretary of State for three years, Mr Healey is certainly aware of them; in July, post appointment, he told RUSI that they include “Hollowed-out forces, procurement waste, low morale. A recruitment and retention crisis.” But you don’t deal with a staffing crisis by waiting a year, which is how long the  Defence Review being conducted by Lord George Robertson, will take.

Lord Robertson was one of the better Defence Secretaries of recent times, (a depressingly low baseline). Apparently he referred to servicemen as “my boys”– pretentious posturing perhaps (they belong to the monarch), but his heart was in the right place. He provided them with kit – the aircraft carriers’ project started on his watch, albeit inadequately funded.

He also created the Joint Rapid Reaction Force, a typical MOD exercise in creating a prestigious new headquarters to use the same assets in a new way. Any military force with “rapid reaction” in its name is usually politically motivated. Delivering paratroopers is relatively easy. The logistics of keeping them fighting isn’t; nor is keeping them alive until they are relived (or the enemy surrenders). Whether his review, already constrained by the terms of reference, will resolve much is unlikely. An effective review would need to be conducted by an outsider.

Low morale, profligate waste and people leaving indicate a major leadership problem.  It is the MOD itself that is failing, indeed it has failed. The UK can’t crew its paltry fleet, can’t field a credible combat force – let alone support it – and lacks key air warfare capabilities, starting with pilots. Fixing this requires hands-on crisis management, not a leisurely review. Mr Healey has so far failed to address the manpower crisis, which required resolute action on his first day in post.

The final hope for ensuring the Defence of The Realm is the House of Commons Select Committee on Defence. Given the massive turnover of MPs in the election the committee is an unknown quantity. It is Labour dominated. As it says on its website, “The Defence Committee is appointed by the House of Commons to examine the expenditure, administration, and policy of the Ministry of Defence and its associated public bodies.” Its lines of enquiry and the energy with which it pursues them are largely determined by its Chair. The current one, Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi MP, faces an interesting time. (The committee’s first sitting was on 5th November.)

Anecdotally, the MOD is neither the best nor the worst government department. All of them struggle with lines of responsibility, employee churn and the vagaries of political direction. All of them are failing to deliver. The MOD is fortunate that as the UK is not at war its shortcomings aren’t damaging Jo Public’s life today.

That makes the MOD a low risk place to completely reform the failed structure of the UK’s government ministries. If he wanted to, Mr Healey’s review could not only save the MOD but could provide the blueprint for efficient and effective government.

Mr Healey knew he was likely to be Secretary of State for Defence in the event of a Labour win. Unlike many of his Cabinet colleagues he spent over three years shadowing the role. He knows what the major problems are. He knows the Armed Forces are in crisis.

When is he going to do something about it?

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