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Defence Policy

Robert Kagan writes of how the world is returning to normal. The author of ““The Return of History and the End of Dreams”” writes of how many of the post-cold war strategic assumptions are coming to an end. In place of a world dominated by an all-powerful American hegemony, the world is becoming more multi-polar. Kagan writes of how new regional powers are emerging and have begun to jockey for advantage: China, India, Iran and Russia. He suggests that the democracies of the world—Britain, America and others—face a new challenge from resurgent autocracies. There is also the threat of radical Islamism. On 11 September 2001, the strategic environment was changed profoundly. It seems that the world is in rapid flux, yet those who make public policy move more slowly. Danger does not necessarily come from the resumption of age-old great power struggles, but from our unpreparedness for them. Too much of our defence policy remains based on residual assumptions that no longer necessarily hold. Policy is too often the product of ad hoc decision making. What is supposed to be strategic calculation is little more than policy formed in response to tactical necessity. We are ill-prepared and weak when it comes to the challenges that lie ahead. Already, our armed forces are seriously overstretched. We have asked them to do too much, on too little, for too long. For many people, the answer is simple: spend more money—an extra £10 billion here, an extra £10 billion there. However, after a decade of the Government hosing additional money at health and education, we know that more money alone does not always achieve the improvements expected; so it is, I fear, with defence. Any additional expenditure on defence needs to be accompanied by reform. Hosing more money at defence alone will not improve our armed forces. Before spending more money, we need to end the years of indecision and strategic drift. Above all, we need to end the racket that is contemporary defence procurement policy. Our defence policy should be informed by an assessment of our foreign policy objectives, by careful, cool-headed, level-headed consideration of our national interest, and by an assessment of various strategic assumptions. That is what should determine how we prepare our armed forces. Foreign policy calculations should shape our defence strategic guidance, and our defence priorities should then be determined by what is in the defence strategic guidance. It is simply bogus to pretend that that is what happens today. Anyone who thinks that it is does not really know what is happening in the Ministry of Defence. For example, where in the current draft of the defence strategic guidance are there planning assumptions or scenarios that call for two new carriers? Labour came to power promising to overhaul defence procurement, yet according to the best-selling author Lewis Page, its defence industrial strategy amounts to business as usual. The defence industrial strategy is more about industry than defence. It does more to safeguard the interests of selected contractors than the interests of the armed forces. The DIS is good at putting large amounts of public money on to the balance sheets of a few contractors, but that is about all it is good for. The DIS talks about best value for money, and improving delivery and costs, but all the evidence shows that the DIS promises things that are almost by definition mutually exclusive. We cannot both shore up our defence industrial base and provide our armed forces with the best value kit in the world; it is a logical impossibility. The DIS is, in reality, a corporatist, protectionist racket. Lobbyists for the DIS on the political left justify it as a means of preserving jobs. The same arguments once trotted out to justify Government subsidy of British Leyland are used to legitimise squandering our defence budget. To those on the political right, the fig leaf justification is about something called sovereignty of supply. The same arguments were once trotted out to justify the corn laws. Defence procurement is run in the interests of the big contractors, not our armed forces. Billions are spent on what it suits the likes of BAE Systems, VT and others to supply. The taxpayer pays a high price for protectionist procurement; the soldier pays a blood price. I shall give one example. In Afghanistan, helicopters allow our troops to cover distances quickly and give us tactical flexibility, yet there are not enough of them. Why? Protectionist procurement. In a letter to me, dated 31 July last year, Lord Drayson admitted that the MOD had not run a competitive tender process to replace the Lynx. It was, he wrote,"““the judgement of the department that a competition…would cause delay””." Thus the alternatives were never fully considered. A £1 billion contract to build helicopters was awarded for a helicopter that cost almost 50 per cent. more than the alternatives, and which would not be ready until at least 2012. That is a long time to wait if one is on a minefield in southern Afghanistan. Sir Kevin Tebbit, who was the permanent under-secretary at the MOD when the decision to exclude rival bids was made, did not have to wait anything like that time before he joined the board of the company that got the contract. Our armed forces in Afghanistan pay a blood price for the shortage of helicopters. The price of protectionist procurement is paid in English blood in Helmand. It is ironic that the helicopter that eventually lifted Corporal Mark Wright and his comrades off the minefield in Helmand was apparently an American Sikorsky—precisely the kind of alternative never considered by the MOD. Those who think that procurement policy should be about protecting jobs should perhaps remember that. Sikorsky tells me that it wrote to the MOD, offering to supply some 20-plus lift helicopters within months. It tells me that it took Sir Kevin's former Department longer to respond to the offer than it would have taken the firm to fulfil it. Protectionist procurement weakens us. The idea that it can somehow strengthen our standing in the world to purchase military equipment from only a handful of supposedly UK suppliers is nonsense. We need off-the-shelf defence procurement. In any market where there is a constraint on supply, the seller sets the terms of trade; so it is in defence. The DIS restricts supply to a few privileged contractors. No through-life approach can stop the taxpayer being ripped off, or the armed forces being denied the kit that they need to have on time, every time. We need to consider making off-the-shelf procurement the default setting for our defence procurement policy. BAE Systems and VT might not like it, but it would ensure that our armed forces had the kit they need to do the tasks that we set them. It would help us to meet the challenges that Robert Kagan writes about in his book. We need off-the-shelf, multilateral procurement, working in collaboration with our democratic allies.