UK defence spending – too much or too little?

By Nigel Chamberlain, NATO Watch
 
Too much?
 
In a hard hitting article in The Guardian last week, Simon Jenkins claimed that ‘British soldiers are dying in Afghanistan to win the war of Whitehall’.  He wanted to know why NATO Defence Ministers are only going to start planning for what he prefers to call ‘the retreat from Afghanistan’ at their Brussels meeting this week while NATO is still trying to find a post-Cold War role.
 
Afghanistan policy no longer uses the word victory. It needs only to engineer a future that preserves NATO dignity and saves its generals from humiliation, however long it takes. … Britain is less safe for fighting this war. Soldiers are dying to defend a Whitehall budget, enrich a commercial lobby and protect a politician's back.
 
Warming to his task, Jenkins says, “I have never read a coherent explanation, in simple English, of why Britain still spends money on defence, long after the cold war is over”.  He does go on to say that the MoD’s “reckless procurements are at last being addressed” and that pressure on the £37 billion budget has resulted in reducing service manpower and reconsideration of Trident options.  But he clearly wants this to go further, much further:
 
In 2010 Cameron was bamboozled by the defence lobby into the nonsense that it would cost more to cancel aircraft carriers than to build them.  He then found adapting F-35 fighters to use them (one day) had tripled in cost. … and … If any other government department, let alone a council or private company, behaved like the MoD it would be bankrupted and replaced, its officials probably up before the Old Bailey. … and … Defence spending is one vast job-creation scheme.  It has not made Britons safer, merely some Britons richer.
 
Finally, Jenkins lambasts those who support the call for more spending: “Each attempt to cancel or cut a programme is greeted with howls from the lobbyists. … Nothing illustrates the thinness of the case for military spending so much as the airy language nowadays used to justify it”. 
 
Too little?
 
In contrast, The Telegraph carried the views of Sir Michael Graydon (former Chief of the Air Staff), General Sir Michael Rose (former commander of the SAS) and Vice-Admiral Sir Jeremy Blackham (former Deputy Chief of Defence Staff) that: “Britain is disarming: in the last 20 years defence spending has been cut from 4 per cent of GDP to 2 per cent – and the cuts continue.”
 
They list the current and proposed reductions in force capability and quote Foreign Secretary William Hague in their call to reverse this trend: “The range of threats and dangers is, if anything increasing” and add their own justification for spending more on defence:
 
For 60 years Britain’s security has rested, and still rests, on the twin pillars of a strong NATO and the Special Relationship with the United States. With NATO Europe disarming, and the United States on record as reducing its European commitments to concentrate on the Asia-Pacific region, Britain is correspondingly more vulnerable. 
 
They suggest that defence expenditure “is not responsible for the budget deficit, so it makes no sense to prejudice national security and our relationship with the United States by cutting defence on the basis of it being just another spending department,” … and … “We should not judge our defence spending on comparisons with other nations, but on what is necessary for our national security”. 
 
Attention is drawn to the long lead time for research and development and the erosion of Britain’s indigenous defence industrial base which suggest that there is now a strong and urgent case for a Defence Industrial Strategy which “might include the proposed merger between BAE and EADS”. 
 
Warming to their task, the former military leaders warn that:
 
The present situation is in danger of inflicting a fatal blow to the Special Relationship with America, a relationship which has ensured our security for the last six decades. The legacy of the present Government’s neglect of defence may well be a future Prime Minister going “naked into the conference chamber". 
 
And they sign off: “We call upon the Government urgently to rethink the defence budget, before our influence declines to dangerous irrelevance and our security is imperilled”. 
 
Conclusion
 
It would seem that the mutually-exclusive positions on UK defence expenditure are well captured in these two recent comment pieces.  The former military leaders have the advantage of being able to call on their experiences to substantiate their calls for more, not less spending.  But an experienced and well-respected journalist can bring a broader understanding of government budgeting and the need for balanced expenditure rather than ‘special pleading’.
 
The latter piece does appear to fall right into the former’s accusation of employing “airy language” in justifying their cause and it is hard to see how the case for much higher defence expenditure can be removed from wider debates about budget deficits, what security means in the 21st Century and the role of armed forces in achieving it.  There is a lot of bombastic rhetoric about ‘Britain in the World’ which recalls days of Empire, yet there is little analysis of what a medium-sized European country should realistically aspire to and no mention of why the UK ‘must have’ nuclear weapons.
 
Of course, defence procurement is a costly and time consuming exercise…….and getting more so with increasing technological sophistication.  But the rationale of this is that industrial consolidation and capability specialisation is inevitable – something NATO is trying to promote through its Smart Defence initiative, with mixed results.
 
We can all, once again, call for an open debate on the way forward.  But then it seems that we just bring our old arguments to the table and proceed to harangue the other side with them, thus negating the possibility of making any progress.  And let’s not forget, the ‘too little’ camp has all the heavy artillery to blast the ‘too much’ camp off the front line.
 
Can we hope that NATO Defence Ministers meeting in Brussels this week can come up with some new thinking and fresh initiatives – and be prepared to share them more openly than has previously been the case?  Well, probably not.