Indefensible

Is it still an aircraft carrier if it doesn't carry aircraft? The British government evidently thinks so, because it's pressing ahead with plans to build two new carriers (at a total cost of £5-6 billion) even though, when they come into service (2016-2019) there won't be any aircraft available to fly from them, unless you count helicopters. What's more, the first one will be mothballed or sold as soon as the second one comes into service. And if a military man I heard on the radio this morning is right, the new carriers will never be able to handle fully-laden aircraft anyway, as they will be only two-thirds the size of US carriers.

Before either ship is ready, the Navy's existing carrier, HMS Ark Royal, will be decommissioned as a cost-cutting measure. Ark Royal does carry aircraft, the venerable Sea Harrier jump jets, and they're being retired too. So for five years or so, the navy of Nelson and Hood, Rodney and Collingwood will have no aircraft carriers. Then it will have one, but with no aircraft.

Welcome to the Looking Glass world of British defence, now being revealed in the Strategic Defence Spending Review. The story with the carriers is shaping up as the biggest scandal, in that it's clear that the government would dearly love to cancel them but is saddled with contracts that make it cheaper to proceed, even though the finished product will not be "fit for purpose". But there's plenty more where that came from. Example: the planned army training centre at St Athan in Wales is to be cancelled. It was going to cost £14 billion (!), under a "private finance initiative" scheme that has been under regular attack from Private Eye over the past couple of years. My usual questions over PFI schemes apply here in spades: what reason is there to think that there are people in the private sector who can carry out the task of army training better than the Army's own trainers can? If there are such people out there, who are they working for at the moment?

And let's not leave the RAF out of it. RAF Kinloss, on the Moray Firth, is to close as a result of the cancellation of the Nimrod reconnaissance aircraft. Bad news for the area, to be sure. Nearby, RAF Lossiemouth will apparently have to "compete" with a base in Norfolk to be the home of most of the RAF's Tornado fighter squadrons. There are currently four squadrons of Tornados at Lossiemouth, which is hundreds of miles from the UK's main population centres. Now of course, planes regularly have to be scrambled to intercept Russian aircraft cruising along the edges of UK airspace. Has it occurred to the RAF brass that if the Tornados weren't there, the Russians wouldn't bother with their reconnaissance flights? The whole thing is at best a wildly expensive training exercise for the two sides, at worst a total charade.

One more example: the Army will pull 20,000 troops out of Germany by mid-decade to save money. Good news, one supposes, except what have they been doing there for the last twenty years anyway? Are we worried about German revanchism or Russian (it would be more appropriate to say Soviet!) aggression -- or are we just fulfilling some NATO obligation that's way past its time?

In a way you have to feel sorry for the coalition government as it tries to sort through this fantastically expensive mess. It's an extreme case of "producer capture": politicians are caught between the pleadings of the armed forces themselves, always fighting the last war, and the graspings of the defence industry, always keen to provide fancy kit for the next one. The net result is that, largely as a result of past incompetence, the defence sector faces spending cuts of only about 8%, while if news reports are to be believed, tomorrow the social housing budget in England will be cut by almost 50%. It's indefensible.