The folly of our war machine

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The folly of our war machine
« em: Abril 19, 2004, 04:54:06 pm »
The folly of our war machine

Billions are being wasted on defence projects that will have no place in the type of future conflict Britain is likely to face

Max Hastings
Tuesday January 27, 2004

The Guardian

Most of politics is about little things. Geoff Hoon may lose his job this week for bungling the semantics of the Kelly affair, and because an army sergeant killed in Iraq lacked the latest model of body armour.
How perverse, it seems, that none among the legion of Mr Hoon's critics has suggested that he should be expelled from office, not for these offences, but instead for abject failure to confront the big issues of British defence policy. Nobody urges that Hoon should go because he is presiding over the waste of billions of pounds of taxpayers' money, condoning follies that will dog the armed forces for decades. Yet this is what the secretary of state is indeed doing today.

How we laugh at tales of 19th-century admirals who sought to cling to wooden sailships in the age of ironclads. How we mock generals who tried to preserve horsed cavalry in the era of the tank. Yet Britain's armed forces are now doing the same again.

Last week, we were told that the defence budget faces a crisis, because a string of flagship projects - Nimrod, the Eurofighter, the Astute submarine - are overshooting costs by £3bn. A frenzied struggle has begun to save money elsewhere, by juggling the books, cancelling exercises, postponing equipment deliveries - all the usual marginal expedients.

Instead, the government and the service chiefs should be undertaking a vastly more radical review. They should be exploring fundamentals: what sort of armed forces will Britain want in the generation ahead? What sort of equipment and manning will these need?

If such a review was honest, it would lead to a dramatic rebalancing. Historically, defence planning and budgeting has been conducted on the basis that the resources and self-respect of the three services must be kept in rough equipoise. Each must be allowed its share of money for cherished projects. When cuts are needed, each must take a share of pain.

The consequence of this approach, encouraged by chronic ignorance about defence matters in the House of Commons, the media and the public, is that today we are again preparing the Royal Air Force to fight the Battle of Britain. We are likewise equipping the Royal Navy with a new generation of warships to defend the Atlantic sealanes against U-boats. These are huge mistakes, which should be undone before it is too late.

Some 20 years ago, Michael Heseltine as defence secretary asserted that Britain could no longer afford to conduct so-called out-of-area operations, such as the Falklands war. Europe was the only credible battleground for Britain's forces. Today, and as explicitly avowed in George Robertson's radical white paper four years ago, this proposition has been turned on its head.

A European war seems unthinkable. Instead, the armed forces are being configured to fight far afield, alongside the Americans or other allies. The thrust of British policy is to man and equip a standing expeditionary force for services overseas - "out of area" - as warriors or peace-keepers.

Such an expeditionary force is bound to be dominated by soldiers. The tradition whereby the job of chief of defence staff rotates between the services has become obsolete. A soldier is permanently needed. Attempts to massage the self-esteem of the navy and RAF by giving them their turns at the top have proved disastrous in recent years - witness the embarrassing tenure of Admiral Sir Michael Boyce.

Britain is about to buy 232 Eurofighters at a cost of £80m a piece. This is a folly comparable with building a modern copy of Nelson's Victory for fleet service, and much more expensive. The Eurofighter is a cold war interceptor. No strategist can devise a credible threat for it to intercept. Whatever the political difficulties of abandoning this project now, we should do so. The cost and futility of persevering are too great.

No one should be deceived by current plans to fit some Eurofighters with missiles and bombs for a ground attack role. The RAF is, in effect, buying a racing car as old-fashioned as the Bugatti, and spending another fortune to modify it for cross-country work. Diehards say: if the RAF does not have the Eurofighter, what does it have? Yet this argument possesses validity only if British defence policy is perceived as a job creation scheme for pilots and air marshals.

In the air, Britain needs a modest force of ground-attackers, a lot of helicopters, and a credible plane for the Royal Navy's two planned aircraft carriers. These ships are indeed indispensable to the navy's future role. But after them, what? Britain has committed itself to spend £4.5bn on the first six of a planned 12 new Type 45 destroyers.

These represent another huge folly. They are escorts, offering limited anti-missile and anti-submarine cover, whose chief purpose is to maintain the critical mass of the Royal Navy. I have heard some senior sailors sincerely suggest that frigates also fulfil an important role in countering drug-smuggling. To such desperate measures has the navy come, in the struggle to justify its own existence, and what a nonsense it all is. In the unlikely event that Britain's carriers and minehunters face a submarine threat, aircraft offer far more effective protection than destroyers or frigates.

We honour the past achievements of the Royal Navy and RAF. But historic reverence should not today determine defence policy. We need a small Royal Navy dominated by carriers and submarines. We need to shift resources decisively towards the army, which is today grossly overstretched.

No minister will address these big issues, because none has the stomach for the political rows that would follow. Yet how many thousands of millions of pounds of public money are we willing to waste, to appease the wrath of neanderthals and nostalgics? A great many, seems to be the answer. If Geoff Hoon somehow survives this week's excitements, who could suppose that he possesses either the political will or intellectual equipment to address these vital matters? Fat chance.
"Esta é a ditosa pátria minha amada."