UK Trident: Summer 2014

Every so often there is a post here about the public debate about the UK’s future nuclear deterrent which, on current plans, will be based on Successor SSBNs carrying Trident missiles. Three recent items seem to me to be worth recording.

Labour’s National Policy Forum

This Labour Party Forum has 198 members who met in private for three days in July. According to the Guardian:

A full report of what was agreed at the NPF will be published at the time of Labour's annual conference in the autumn and it will form the foundation of the party's election manifesto.

The LabourList website's Mark Ferguson liveblogged the NPF and reported “the wording delegates agreed on Trident (as per last night’s late night deal)”:

With other nations possessing nuclear weapons, and nuclear proliferation remaining a deep concern, we can never be absolutely certain as to what the future security landscape will look like. In July 2013, the current government published its Trident Alternatives Review which examined alternative defence systems and postures for the UK’s deterrent. Labour has said that we are committed to a minimum, credible independent nuclear deterrent, delivered through a Continuous At Sea Deterrent. It would require a clear body of evidence for us to change this belief. 

Labour recognises the importance of Britain leading international efforts for multilateral nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation. Following the action we took when in government, Labour would actively work to enhance momentum on global multilateral disarmament efforts and negotiations, looking at further reductions in global stockpiles and the number of weapons. This would be done in line with our assessment on the global security landscape. 

Labour would continue to take a leading role internationally to push the agenda of global anti-proliferation with nuclear and non-nuclear states. This is a vision shared by President Barack Obama and Labour would work with the United States and other allies, such as France, to advance ‘Global Zero’, which seeks to advance an action plan for the elimination of all nuclear weapons. Labour recognises that the success of past international bans on weapons of mass destruction such as landmines, cluster munitions, chemical and biological weapons. 

The NPT Conference 2015 will be a key moment for a Labour government to show leadership in achieving progress on global disarmament and anti-proliferation measures. 

Labour has said that the process and debate leading up to the next Strategic Defence and Security Review in 2015 needs to be open, inclusive and transparent, including examining all capabilities, including nuclear. It must also examine the cost implications as well as the strategic necessities, recognising the importance of the defence sector to the UK economy, and the need to protect and develop a highly-skilled workforce. To this end, a Labour government will have a continuing consultation, inviting submissions from all relevant stakeholders, including Labour Party members and affiliates, on the UK’s future defence and national security issues.

RUSI On Warheads

Back in March, I posted about a paper produced under the auspices of the RUSI think tank which aimed to debate Continuous At-Sea Deterrence. Its author, Hugh Chalmers, has since written The Bang Behind the Buck, Replacing the UK’s Nuclear Warheads which centres on the proposition that:

… the next Parliament may have to start considering a replacement [for the UK’s nuclear warheads] towards the end of its term if a replacement were to be needed by the latter half of the 2030s. (page 1)

and is consistent with the 2010 SDSR statement about replacement warheads:

3.12 Since 2006, work has been progressing in order to determine the optimum life of the existing warhead stockpile and the range of replacement options. Under the 1958 UK-US Agreement for Cooperation on the Uses of Atomic Energy for Mutual Defence Purposes (the ‘Mutual Defence Agreement’) we have agreed on the future of the Trident D5 delivery system and determined that a replacement warhead is not required until at least the late 2030s. Decisions on replacing the warhead will not therefore be required in this Parliament. This will defer £500 million of spending from the next 10 years.

if “by the latter half of the 2030s” and “at least the late 2030s” are taken as meaning the same thing. The RUSI paper thinks the need for replacement may arise because:

… it is unclear whether it [the UK’s current arsenal of nuclear warheads] will continue to age gracefully. The complex array of interconnected components that make up the UK’s warhead deform and decay over time, affecting its behaviour and thus the reliability of the warhead. … Eventually a fault may arise that cannot be easily remedied, and replacing original parts with alternatives gradually alters warheads from their original tested design, introducing uncertainty into their functioning and effectiveness. (page 1)

But unpromisingly for the reader:

Despite being pivotal to the long-term operation of the UK’s nuclear force, very little information has been made available as to what replacing a nuclear arsenal actually involves and how a replacement decision will ultimately be made. This is because most details of the UK’s nuclear arsenal and the methods used to maintain it are understandably classified. This paper draws upon what open sources are available to shine some light onto this issue by outlining the composition and status of the UK’s nuclear arsenal, and describing how it might ultimately be replaced or renewed. (page 2)

And the reality of the UK’s situation is that:

The origin of the current Trident warhead, and indeed most of the UK’s past nuclear warheads, can be traced back to the 1958 MDA with the US. This agreement, forged in the shadow of the Soviet Union’s burgeoning intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capability, ended twelve years of nuclear separation between the former wartime collaborators and gave the UK access to more advanced nuclear expertise and capabilities from across the Atlantic. (page 2)

So it’s not surprising when, nine pages later and towards the end of the paper, we are told:

The future of the UK’s nuclear arsenal is therefore inextricably linked to that of the US. (page 11)

and that in summing up the Future of the UK’s Nuclear Stockpile:

If indications emerge within the next parliament that the UK’s nuclear stockpile may not survive past the late 2030s, the government at the time will be faced with a dilemma. Without a clear steer from the US, the UK may have to choose between developing a replacement warhead with an uncertain supply of components (and over time, missiles), or retaining an arsenal of suspect reliability. In the case of the former, the UK might embark on a pathway that, at best, produces limited results, and, at worst, risks jeopardising the much-valued exchange between the two nuclear partners. Given this tough choice, pressure to replace the UK’s warhead may meet equal and opposite pressure to delay until a clear pathway can be developed in collaboration with the US. (page 12/13)

In this paragraph there are three ‘may’s, one ‘if’ and one ‘might’ and by my reckoning there are 39 ‘mays’, 21 ‘if’s, 16 ‘might’s, 10 ‘could’s and 10 ‘were’s (as a subjunctive) in the whole paper, reflecting its subject’s inherent uncertainties: to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, it has too many known unknowns and unknown unknowns. One of the few official statements on the subject was in the 2013 Trident Alternatives Review (TAR) which is correctly quoted as stating “that replacing the UK’s [Trident] nuclear warheads would take approximately seventeen years for the first unit at an estimated cost of around £4 billion in 2012 prices” (page 1), although the 50% confidence associated with this figure (TAR paragraph 25) was not included, nor was the interesting remark at TAR paragraph 5.12:

Analysis of the timescales likely to be associated with delivering a new warhead was conducted, using as a baseline studies that supported the 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review and ongoing studies for a possible new Trident warhead (should one be required).

Most readers will conclude that the author has done as good job as could be expected in the circumstances. This paper is better written than its predecessor; indeed the author thanks six named individuals and “a number of experts”. The conclusions it reaches, given the nature of the Mutual Defence Agreement, are perhaps not that surprising. A cynic might say that it could just as appropriately been called The Buck Behind the Bang.

BASIC's Trident Commission Concluding Report 

Launch of the Concluding report in July 2014

BASIC, the British American Security Information Council, describes itself as “a small but influential think tank with one very large idea: we want a world free from the threat of nuclear weapons”. It set up the Trident Commission in 2011 as an inquiry into Britain’s nuclear weapon policy and the issue of Trident renewal with a membership of eight from appropriate ranks of the great and the good. I won’t list them all here, but will note that they include a former Conservative defence and foreign secretary (Rifkind), a former Labour defence secretary (Browne) and Professor Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield (Peter Hennessy, as he is disrespectfully labelled in posts here).

Anyone who wants to go into the Commission’s activities over the last three years should start with their webpage and read on to locate Evidence Received and Background Briefings. The papers in the latter were by BASIC staff with one, Alternative delivery systems and their platforms, by Matt Cavanagh, a former Labour SPAD who worked on defence issues.  The Commission focused on three questions in particular, namely:

Should the United Kingdom continue to be a nuclear weapons state?

If so, is Trident the only or best option for delivering the deterrent?

What more can and should the United Kingdom do to facilitate faster progress on global nuclear disarmament?

Whatever BASIC may have expected or hoped for, the Commission’s answers to these questions in the Summary Conclusions tend to endorse the status quo. So, on the first:

Based upon the two key specific considerations, namely national security concerns and responsibility towards the Alliance, the Commission has come to the unanimous conclusion that the UK should retain and deploy a nuclear arsenal, with a number of caveats expressed below. Most notably, it remains crucial that the UK show keen regard for its position within the international community and for the shared responsibility to achieve progress in global nuclear disarmament.

and

We are conscious that our conclusion — that the UK should retain and renew its nuclear deterrent — must be weighed against the considerable cost of renewing and operating Trident, a cost that is a rising proportion of the defence budget (as capital spending on the project increases and as spending on other defence capabilities reduces). Over the life of the project, it can be expected that capital, running, and decommissioning costs associated with the nuclear weapons project account for roughly 9-10% of the overall defence budget, though into the 2020s we will experience a higher spend, and after that a smaller amount. However, we believe that cost must be of secondary importance to the judgment over whether forsaking the UK’s nuclear deterrent capability could open the country to future strategic risk. (page 6, L-HC)

On the second question:

The government’s Trident Alternatives Review considered the technical case for alternative platforms and delivery systems, concluding that at present there were no benefits to be had from choosing a different nature of system at this stage. The Trident SSBN (Ballistic Missile Submarines) system meets the criteria of credibility, scale, survivability, reach and readiness. Whilst the Commission is not in a position to interrogate in depth the information and assumptions underpinning the Review, we are opposed to proposals to develop alternative platforms and delivery systems, with new warheads, simply on the basis of possible but speculative cost savings. The choice of system and posture must be credible when considering national security and alliance relationships, and must embrace the UK’s responsibilities to stability and the wider international community. Whilst dual-use systems have the benefit of adaptability to circumstances, we have serious concerns about their capacity to increase strategic ambiguity, which would both complicate arms control and cause confusion in crises. (page 7, R-HC)

The third question is addressed on pages 8 and 9 of the Summary Conclusions and in Chapter 3 and anyone interested in diplomacy, non-proliferation and the “disarmament ladder” should consult those. Suffice it to say that the Commission is in favour of progress on nuclear disarmament and outlines constructive steps which the UK could take.

The Commission gave careful consideration to CASD and list reasons for and against its continuation and possible alternatives in Chapter 2 (pages 30 to 32). The Summary Conclusion was:

Some see a CASD posture as essential to any credible seaborne nuclear deterrent that would meet the UK’s needs into the foreseeable future. As a Commission looking ahead into a rapidly-changing world picture, we believe there are further steps that could be considered between the current posture and full disarmament, when the strategic conditions allow, with relaxed CASD as one of those steps. We are, however, divided over whether the UK could take this step independently, or only multilaterally with other nuclear weapon states. 

Some of us believe that CASD should be maintained for the foreseeable future and that we must wait for improvement in the security environment, specifically a reversal of the current trends in the modernisation of nuclear arsenals elsewhere and stronger indications of a matching intent to disarm. Some of us believe that the strategic environment today, which does not involve a current or near foreseeable strategic military threat to the UK and its vital interests, enables us to drop continuous patrolling and retain instead the capacity to increase patrols should crisis threaten. 

There is in any case an opportunity to initiate a full conversation with the United States and France on the conditions that could allow the allied nuclear weapon states to consider closer coordination of their continuous patrolling posture. (page 8)

The question of the number of Successor SSBNs is addressed in Chapter 2:

The Ministry of Defence assumes that the UK will still require a four submarine fleet to have a high confidence of maintaining an indefinite CASD posture, though decisions on this will be taken later*. This is because, even with the modernized PWR3 reactor that no longer requires mid-life refuelling, the new submarines are still expected to need complex mid-life overhauls for other components that could last several months. We do not have sufficient information to come to a definitive view on whether three submarines would be sufficient for a CASD posture, or whether replacing the four existing Vanguards with four successor submarines represents an increase in patrolling capabilities because of the higher reliability of new technology.

* Refers to the TAR paragraph 3.36, p.29 which reads:

Classified analysis about attempting to maintain continuous at sea deterrence with a 3-boat SSBN option showed that the risk of unplanned breaks relates directly to the number of submarines available for operational deployment, which in turn relates directly to the total number in the fleet. The modelling suggests that, over a 20 year period, a 3-boat fleet would risk multiple unplanned breaks in continuous covert patrolling as well as requiring regular planned breaks for maintenance and/or training. Experience to date with the Resolution-class and Vanguard-class SSBNs is that no such breaks have occurred or been required with a 4-boat fleet.

The TAR mentions PWR3 once (paragraph 5.19) and then only as being the reactor costed for the SSN(Vertical Launch) option. However, the Trident Commission’s Background Briefing Paper 3, Measuring the financial costs, states on page 22 that:

… the Successor submarine will be using PWR3 technology, so that mid-life refuelling will not be necessary …

At this point it is worth noting that the RUSI paper could only have been improved by consideration of and reference to some of the material prepared for the BASIC Trident Commission.

Summing Up

None of the above, Labour’s policy, the RUSI and BASIC reports, is advocating any significant changes to the current plans for replacement of the UK’s Trident SSBNs. The only issue of substance seems to be the number of submarines. In 1908/1909 during the Anglo-German arms race, the slogan popular among enthusiasts for the Royal Navy’s Dreadnought battleships was “We want eight, and we won’t wait”. Over a hundred years later, the number of the Navy's Successor SSBN’s is unlikely to be an issue in the 2015 election, let alone be the cause of a slogan – what would it be - “Three or four, but certainly no more”, perhaps?

As for CASD, it’s probably egotistical even for a blogger to quote himself, but this is what I said last time, and nothing I’ve read since makes me want to revise it yet:

My guess is that at some point in the future a Conservative or Labour National Security Council, or some ministerial subset of it, will meet to decide whether to order the third and fourth Successor submarines. They will know things that we don’t, like the outcome of the Scottish independence referendum and the extent of the recovery of the UK economy, and many things we probably never will, like the maintenance requirements of PWR3. One can imagine that if extensive analysis by the RN and the Ministry of Defence shows that CASD can be maintained for a very high proportion of the Trident Successor in-service life (ie to the fifth or sixth decade of this century) with three submarines, there might be reluctance to order a fourth. However, if the fourth Successor makes the difference between sustainable CASD and any of the alternative postures identified so far, it would have to be a group of politicians with a high degree of confidence in their ability to manage a crisis who would decide to spend the money on something else.

The army’s carelessness

In a post here last April, Matt Cavanagh on Labour and the Generals, I commented on two of his articles which shed light on political-military relationships in the years before the 2010 election:

One resource which British defence seems to possess in abundance is a large cohort of senior officers of all three services, serving and retired, unafraid to speak their minds and, when not at odds with each other, ready to criticise the government of the day. (Perhaps the implementation of career average, rather than final salary, pensions in the armed forces, as Lord Hutton has recommended, will eliminate one of the incentives for this top-heaviness). Depending on the robustness of the Coalition, the next election could be at any time up to the planned date of UK’s leaving Afghanistan in 2015. However, when it comes, the dominant issues are more likely to be the economy and the NHS than the extent of Labour’s shortcomings on equipment pre-SDSR in 2009, despite Cavanagh’s misgivings. One can also expect the uniformed Top Kneddies to pipe down despite their dislike of SDSR, given their natural inclinations towards the Conservative party.

The last sentence is now looking difficult to stand up. Today’s Daily Telegraph splashes a story by its defence correspondent, Thomas Harding, Army at war over axing of battalions, reporting a leaked letter from a brigadier to the Chief of the General Staff prior to the army cuts to be announced later in the week. Yesterday Harding ran a related story, At least six 'talented' generals quit Army over defence cuts:

At least half-a-dozen of the most senior officers have announced their departure in recent months as the Army prepares to shrink by a fifth to 82,000. The cuts that will be announced by Philip Hammond, the Defence Secretary, on Thursday are having a devastating effect on morale. The Future Force 2020 reforms are the most significant in a century and will reduce the Army to its smallest size in two centuries. Some of the generals leaving the Army are regarded as the leading thinkers of their generation.

to which a clearly exasperated MoD responded:

Number of Generals leaving the Armed Forces  

Today's Telegraph claims that six Generals are leaving the Army because they are disillusioned. This is nonsense. The article contains a number of inaccuracies and individuals have been misquoted. Several of those named are still serving with no plans to leave before their normal retirement date. The remainder have already left the Army having reached the natural end of their careers. None left because they were disillusioned and this article does those individuals a huge disservice after decades of distinguished and valuable service to the country.  

More than 24,000 people leave the Armed Forces every year, including senior officers who come to the natural end of their careers. The number of senior officers departing early is in line with the historic trend over a number of years. The MOD has long been criticised for being top heavy with too many senior officers and is soon to announce a reduction in senior posts to ensure the Services are balanced, streamlined and effective.

Well good luck with the last – and just how “long been criticised”? Well, here is the late David Hart writing in the Spectator in February 1993 in an article, Not Enough Bang For Our Bucks:

We have a quite extraordinary number of senior officers compared with other nations. The ratio of British general officers (including nursing staff) to total servicemen is 1:420. In the United States and in France it is 1:1,900. In Germany it is 1:2300.

In a post here a year ago, Poor Jack and Harry, I commented on the advantage the army had over the other services in terms of the upper class connections of its senior officers and how this led to “a natural affinity with the Conservative party”. If Labour form the next government, many of its senior politicians will not have forgotten the way they were treated by the army and its friends in the media before 2010. To have fallen out with both main parties “looks like carelessness” on the part of the army which the other two services might not be slow to exploit, when and if the opportunity arises.


UPDATE 16 JUNE 2013

Thanks to the magnificent Spectator Archive, recently made available and going back to July 1828, I have been able to add a link to the Hart article quoted from above.

Matt Cavanagh on Labour and the Generals

Matt Cavanagh was a special adviser to Defence Secretary Des Browne from 2006-2007 and then to Gordon Brown from 2007-2010. He drew on his experiences during the Labour government to provide a very thoughtful review, Inside the Anglo-Saxon war machine, of Bob Woodward’s Obama’s Wars for Prospect magazine in November 2010. He said:

… This is a book about the British experience too, for essentially the same internal debate played out here over the same period, with the same camps in the same positions—and the same result. 

Of course, there are differences. In the British debate, a great deal of time and effort went into working out what the Americans were thinking, and it is all too clear from Woodward’s book that the reverse was not true. It would be unfair to blame this entirely on American insularity. However important our decisions were to us in Britain, they mattered far less in strategic terms, as a glance at the numbers shows. Obama sent 20,000 more troops to Afghanistan early in 2009, and spent the second half of the year debating whether to send another 40,000, while Gordon Brown and his generals were arguing over 1,000: one per cent of the international force. ...

By summer 2009, at the same time as Brown’s and Obama’s doubts and frustrations were growing and public concern was rising, they were coming under increasing pressure from the senior military to approve an escalation in troop numbers. For although the senior military had also begun to realise that things were not going well, their reaction was to press for greater resources and greater urgency. To them, defeat was unthinkable, even if the more thoughtful and intellectually honest of them weren’t sure if victory was achievable either. In both Washington and Whitehall they ensured that debates over troop numbers crowded out more important debates over military strategy, a political settlement, governance, corruption and aid effectiveness. They placed great store by generic concepts of decisiveness, leadership and “momentum”—more than the specifics of strategy—and they railed against what seemed to them to be indecision and delay from the politicians. ...

Does this mean the military are too powerful? Certainly, in the current political and media climate, any leader (and in particular any Democrat or Labour leader) should pick their battles with them very carefully. Few besides Paddy Ashdown—who made the case this October in an article for the Times—would recommend that politicians wrest back control of running wars. Few generals besides Richard Dannatt are seriously arguing for handing it all over to the military. ...

... the senior military are almost without exception genuinely wedded to the national interest, and genuinely supportive of civilian control of the military. It is true that they can’t always resist the temptation to open up a second front in the media. They know the odds are stacked in their favour: the public admire and trust them, and distrust ministers; journalists tend to lack the knowledge or energy to question their assumptions or motives, finding it easier to lionise them in contrast to base and shallow politicians. But high-profile generals like David Petraeus or our own Mike Jackson and David Richards manage for the most part to tread this line—and if they step over it, like Stanley McChrystal, they accept their fate. Those like the second world war US general Douglas MacArthur—whose self-delusion, belief in their own infallibility and contempt for democratic politics make them potentially dangerous—are mercifully rare. ...

Towards the end of the book, Woodward reports General Lute wondering if “Obama had to do this 18-month surge just to demonstrate, in effect, that it couldn’t be done.” We must hope this was not the only or even the main reason: it cannot justify the 500 more combat deaths in those 18 months, and the $150bn added to the deficit. But either way, if come July Obama decides it is time for Plan B, the senior military—British as well as American—must accept that Plan A hasn’t succeeded. They must start working up, in good faith, the alternatives their political leaders ask for, and resist any temptation to encourage—even with their silence—the inevitable stream of chickenhawks and conspiracy theorists complaining that victory would have been assured if only the politicians hadn’t once again stabbed our brave boys in the back.

Cavanagh has returned to the war in Afghanistan in an article in The Spectator, (8 April 2011), Operation amnesia, which is well worth reading in full. He sheds some more light on political-military relationships towards the end of the New Labour period:

… We don’t have five years’ experience in Helmand, we have six months’ experience ten times. Successive brigades have relearned the painful lessons of their predecessors, or overcompensated for their perceived failings. Debriefings of battalion and company commanders, and attempts to harness their valuable experience, have been perfunctory. Four years ago, when I was working for the then defence secretary, Des Browne, we pressed senior military officers to look for ways of mitigating this short-termism: longer tours, or a staggered rotation of units, or greater continuity in the command structure. The army, then led by General Dannatt, flatly rejected the first two options. They dismissed longer tours on the basis of the strain on soldiers and their families, and rejected staggered rotation due to the importance of ‘a brigade training and deploying as a brigade'.

We were sympathetic to the former argument, both on human grounds and because we knew that the American military, in which tours routinely lasted 15 months, struggled to retain experienced personnel. We were less sympathetic to the argument for training and deploying as a brigade, which appeared rather dogmatic. I suspected it encouraged precisely the kind of large-scale set-piece engagements I was sceptical about. It also put our creaking helicopter and transport fleet through the added strain of mass troop rotations, and required us to keep scarce equipment in Britain so an entire brigade could train with it.

But as happens so often in politics, we civilian advisers and strategists shied away from overruling the military. We worked with the less dogmatic generals to identify a small number of senior posts (and junior posts in specific areas like intelligence) where tours of duty could be lengthened. We were assured that other initiatives would improve continuity, but these too were relatively minor and seemingly given a low priority. The issue of command structure got lost in wider debates about troop numbers and the looming arrival of American forces in Helmand. ...

This is not to deny the importance of the limits on British troop numbers, the subject of such heated debate during 2009. As someone who had a share in responsibility for those limits, I was acutely aware of the dilemmas they forced on commanders. But I was also aware of the potential for troop increases to exacerbate the military’s dominance of what was meant to be a joint civilian-military campaign, and to feed the tendency of new commanders to try to do too much. For three years the top brass had argued that additional troops would enable us to ‘thicken’ our forces, increasing their effectiveness, reducing casualties, and enabling proper stabilisation work to begin. But when we sent reinforcements, it had the opposite result: an expanded footprint, increased activity, and increased casualties, to no obvious strategic effect. …   

The military’s obsession with troop numbers and the media’s failure to challenge it have obscured the wider lessons of the Afghan campaign. Before the American surge, lack of troops was blamed for everything. … 

… More troops will not help our militaries master the complex tribal dynamics, nor judge whether they are making friends faster than they are alienating people. More troops will not change the attitude of the Afghan and Pakistani authorities, nor create a political process that addresses Afghan grievances. 

Because of these wider political problems, Britain’s lack of success in Afghanistan in strategic terms cannot be blamed on the military. But at the operational level, most of the responsibility is theirs. They took the tactical decisions in summer 2006 — admittedly under great pressure — to disperse our forces across the ‘platoon houses’ in northern Helmand. They chose, in the years that followed, to continue to prosecute the campaign in an expansive and aggressive manner, despite the constraints on resources and the lack of evidence that this approach had a lasting positive effect. And while they lost no opportunity to plan and lobby for more troops, they were slow to fill the gaps in our intelligence, or to respond to the Taleban’s shift in tactics towards improvised explosive devices.

Cavanagh’s conclusion echoes that of his Prospect piece:

When failure becomes not just a possibility but a reality, it ought to provide the impetus for change. In war it is vital to learn from mistakes. … But it won’t happen if politicians are blamed instead, as in America over Korea and in Britain over Iraq.

The media, the Conservatives and the military have already prepared the way for a similar narrative on Afghanistan: blaming the previous government, mainly for not providing enough resources. If only we’d had more troops and better equipment, the argument will run, we would have defeated the Taleban, and got out on our own terms. It suits a great many people to go along with this, but in the long run it will only prevent us from learning the real lessons of the past five years.

Hopefully Cavanagh will write more about Afghanistan as he saw it from the privileged position of a government special adviser, and about the lessons that need to be learnt. While he is probably realistic in anticipating that the military will attempt to pin the blame for any unpleasantness in the eventual Afghanistan end-game (planned for 2015 at the latest) on the politicians, it could be that, by then, the previous government will no longer be their primary target. NATO’s Libyan operation is now, with the US no longer in the driver’s seat, largely reliant on France and the UK. The resulting pressure seems to have opened up tensions arising from the UK’s 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) between the army and the other services. The FT reported on 8 April:

A plan brought forward by General Sir David Richards, head of the armed forces, proposed shedding up to 5,000 additional army personnel to free up money for other priorities. However, this was rejected by David Cameron’s team because the prime minister was unwilling to back cuts that could lead to some veterans of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan being laid off. The proposal reflected the widespread realisation in Whitehall that the army emerged relatively unscathed from the defence review, at the expense of civil servants and the other services.

“Even the army are now prepared to entertain the idea of more army cuts. But No 10 are just not interested,” said one senior Whitehall figure. Richards and Wall realised that they overplayed their hand during the SDSR,” he added, in reference to the chief of defence staff and General Sir Peter Wall, the head of the army.

A few days later a senior RAF officer, Air Chief Marshal Sir Simon Bryant (Commander-In-Chief Air Command) was reported (somewhat disjointedly) by The Scotsman and the Daily Telegraph to have said about SDSR:

"The thinking behind it was sound, but I'm not sure we're going to end up in a balanced place."

“I think it's appropriate we have a review of where we go to make sure what we are able to deliver at no notice is replicated in five years' time, and in 50 years' time."

“I think it's appropriate we have a review of where we go to make sure what we are able to deliver at no notice is replicated in five years' time, and in 50 years' time." 

In Libya, “the ability to go and see and hear what the enemy are doing” was vital and that may not be possible with an “unbalanced set of Armed Forces”.

Then, not for the first time in recent months, a group of former naval persons wrote, on this occasion to The Times (£ 11 April 2011), complaining:

… if all three services had the same "harmony rules" as those of the Royal Navy and Royal Marines, significant reductions in the strength of the Armed Forces would be possible. These reductions would more than match the numbers now being cut, but with no loss in capability ...

… the RAF is already indicating that the current Libya operation will be unsustainable beyond June, or not long after. There are about 40,000 personnel in the RAF, including some 120 officers of air rank each paid about £100,000 a year or more, and there are many hundreds of aircraft. If the RAF can't sustain current operations, what are all those people and all that expensive equipment for? There is much that curious Defence and Treasury ministers should question about the RAF's structure and management.

There would have been no comparable complaint from the Royal Navy, after just one month, about sustainability of the Libya operation were an aircraft carrier, with a Harrier force, now operating off the north African coast.

One asset which British defence seems to possess in abundance is a large cohort of senior officers of all three services, serving and retired, unafraid to speak their minds and, when not at odds with each other, ready to criticise the government of the day. (Perhaps the implementation of career average, rather than final salary, pensions in the armed forces, as Lord Hutton has recommended, will eliminate one of the incentives for this top-heaviness). Depending on the robustness of the Coalition, the next election could be at any time up to the planned date of UK’s leaving Afghanistan in 2015. However, when it comes, the dominant issues are more likely to be the economy and the NHS than the extent of Labour’s shortcomings on resources pre-SDSR in 2009, despite Cavanagh’s misgivings. One might also expect the uniformed Top Kneddies to show some inhibition about criticising politicians, much as they dislike SDSR, given their natural inclinations towards the Conservative party.

Lord Dannatt has featured in earlier posts on this blog. One quoted Jonathan Powell’s observations of Dannatt at Tony Blair’s lunch meeting with the service chiefs in 2006, and another featured Dannatt’s widely-reported remarks about “boots on the ground” in Afghanistan in July 2009 when Gordon Brown was PM.