The UK’s carrier strike group is on its way to Asia on a flag-waving deployment that has removed 2,100 British sailors, four warships and a large portion of the F-35 fleet from NATO and the European theatre for eight months. Meanwhile, the war in Ukraine grinds on, as does British-led attempts to cobble together a “peacekeeping” force that might help separate the two sides.
Have we got our priorities right? Don’t expect a “strategic” answer from the latest Strategic Defence Review (SDR). There will be an enthusiastic endorsement of the sixth-gen Tempest combat aircraft (expensive and still 10-15 years away); an ambition to create an Integrated Air and Missile Defence (very expensive and as-yet ill-defined); and some weasel words about developing greater sovereign defence capability (laudable but impractical for many capabilities, within the promised marginal increase in defence spending).
But will George Robertson and his team of nearly 30 staff have meaningfully addressed some major challenges in keeping the UK secure? These include:
- almost-complete reliance on an American contribution to NATO that is certain to be reduced, not only by Trump but by succeeding US administrations.
- shortcomings in the UK’s ability to counter hybrid warfare techniques such as undersea communications cable-cutting, unattributable attempts to bomb aircraft and infrastructure, and cyber attack.
- a recruitment crisis for the armed forces, amidst a general public reluctance to support defence and fight for the country.
- The massive and ring-fenced cost of modernizing the UK’s nuclear deterrent.
Robertson told the House of Commons Defence Committee that the review team “put out 35 propositions” and created an expert group for each one. I will be interested to learn whether these propositions included:
- scrapping the nuclear deterrent
- mothballing the carriers, or confining them to European waters
- making some form of national service compulsory.
There can be no better example of muddled defence thinking than the carriers. The current deployment is supposed to support our “partners” in the region. Countries like Japan, Malaysia and Singapore will politely welcome it, but they know that Britain’s ability to support them consistently and for the long-term is negligeable. The most useful show of support that our carrier strike group could perform, would be to sail through the Taiwan Strait to demonstrate that we care about a small country that shares our democratic and social values. Of course, we won’t do that for fear of upsetting mainland China.
Incidentally, a former Chief of the Air Staff told me that the carriers sucked serious resources out of the defence budget; obliged the RAF to operate much more expensive and shorter-range F-35Bs than F-35As; and were vulnerable to attack. And that was before the advent of hypersonic strike missiles and enhanced space-based targeting.
The rationale for building the carriers was the “expeditionary” strategy that emerged from a previous defence review in 1998. The defence secretary at the time was…George Robertson. So they are sacrosanct, just like Tempest and the Dreadnought-class submarines. No Labour government would dare to scrap such job-creation schemes.
NOTE, 23May: I changed the title of this post to make clear that it is a pre-SDR publication comment
Chris Pocock Makes Aerosense 