Break up the RAF and stop buying British

The defence review is a chance to stop wasting money on tanks, frigates and pilots - and break the dominance of BAE Systems

Why do we spend so much? The British defence industry is to blame

By Lewis Page

6:15AM BST 01 Jun 2015

It’s Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) time again, in which we follow the new custom of making all defence policy shortly after an election without debate – thereby humanely relieving ministers of any need to justify their actions.

Things are dire in the Armed Forces. The RAF is down to embarrassingly few operational bombers and has no submarine-hunting planes at all. The Army is yet again stripping itself of soldiers. The Navy is shortly to receive aircraft carriers, but they can carry only vertical-lift jets. We used to have some of those, but we got rid of them in the last SDSR. We will have to buy the F-35B Joint Strike Fighter instead, which is new, complicated and cripplingly expensive.

So our defences are rickety: yet there’s no prospect of any big spending increases. Indeed, George Osborne has asked for further cuts to be made. Nor is there any prospect now of the MoD managing to avoid replacing Trident – much as it would corporately like to.

So that’s it then: Britain’s just a third-class power. And yet our defence budget is the fifth biggest in the world. It’s around the same as that of France, and France has a proper aircraft carrier – complete with planes. France also has hundreds of operational strike jets, not scores; it has maritime-patrol planes; its army may soon have twice as many soldiers as ours.

Why don’t we have all that?

The answer is, mostly, the British defence industry. Dominated by BAE Systems, our arms industry is lamentably inefficient. Its products are often horrifyingly expensive. They require parts and technical support not only from the US but other nations too – we gain no independence by purchasing “British-made” kit like the Eurofighter. (The Eurofighter cannot be sold without American permission as it is full of US technology.) If, instead, we simply bought off the shelf, mostly from America, we could easily afford powerful forces.

^{The Eurofighter Typhoon (Photo: EPA)}

Cost overruns have consequences that are more than financial. Recently it turned out that fitting catapults to our new carriers was going to have a dramatic effect on their cost – even though the option to add catapults was specified before they were designed.

As a result, the catapults were cancelled. This wrecked the Navy’s plan to lease American F-18 catapult jets cheaply. F-18s are capable and inexpensive to run, so once we had some, we’d have used them for everything. The aged Tornado would have disappeared early, and nobody would have bothered using Eurofighters for anything. As a result, BAE Systems would have missed out on many billions in support and upgrades.

So BAE must have been very happy when the shipyards submitted their enormous quote for fitting catapults. It won’t have been a surprise, though – BAE owns the shipyards.

The defence industry aside, the existence of the three services also has a drastic effect on costs. There isn’t that much disputed territory between the Army and the Navy, but both are continually battling the RAF. If the Army and the Navy were allowed their own aircraft without having to worry about the RAF, they would both become an awful lot more powerful and capable and we could stop wasting money on tanks, frigates and manned deep-penetration bombing.

The fact is that most military aviation could – and should – have been automated long ago. The Army and Navy would be willing to actually do this; less so the RAF, obviously, which is run by pilots.

So the way ahead is clear. Let most of the UK arms businesses go to the wall. Yes, there would be job losses but we get those anyway – BAE has been steadily shedding its British workforce for a long time. We should break up the RAF and distribute the useful parts between the Army and Navy.

^{An RAF unmanned Reaper vehicle (Photo: PA)}

As to kit specifics, we should send our new carriers overseas to have catapults fitted. We should lease a fleet of F-18s. We can pay for this using the Tornado and Eurofighter budgets, having scrapped most or all of those planes.

We should expand our fleet of “Reaper” strike drones, and get many more Tomahawk cruise missiles. We could get some tailhook F-35C stealth jets down the road, but it would probably be better to wait for an unmanned successor.

We should cancel our order for A400M European transport planes, and buy more C-17s and C-130s cheaply from the US.

The Navy should not be allowed its new frigates: instead it should purchase basic ships to act as floating bases for helicopters, Marines and Tomahawk missiles. The Army should likewise move away from tanks and artillery, and towards integrated air support. If the soldiers really feel a need for Apache helicopters once they have F-18s and Reapers, we could replace them: but we should buy straight from Boeing this time, rather than a job-creation scheme in Yeovilton.

If you really don’t want to close down the RAF, then fair enough – we can probably postpone that for a while. But the really important thing is to stop using the defence procurement budget as an industrial subsidy, and start using it for defence.

Lewis Page is a former Royal Navy officer and author of 'Lions, Donkeys and Dinosaurs: Waste and Blundering in the Military’