UK Trident at a Sovereign Faslane?

Posts here last year speculated as to whether the Trident base at Faslane in Scotland might be relocated to the South West of England and how much such a transfer might cost. The first post touched on one way the issue could be avoided:

So, if the SNP secured a majority for independence and entered into negotiations, they might at least offer some form of transitional period for Whitehall to make other arrangements. But the RN remaining permanently would require the SNP to offer HMNB Clyde a status akin to the Cyprus Sovereign Base Areas … and the question arises as to whether an independent Scotland might one day change its mind and renege on an agreement made back in 2015. Such a prospect might lead Whitehall to conclude that a new Trident base within 10 years was an unavoidable consequence of Scottish independence.

Not having come across anything about Sovereign Base Areas since, today’s Guardian lead story by their chief political correspondent, Nicholas Watt, MoD fears for Trident base if Scotland says yes to independence Whitehall looking at plan to designate home of nuclear fleet as sovereign United Kingdom territory, came as a surprise:

The British government is examining plans to designate the Scottish military base that houses the Trident nuclear deterrent as sovereign United Kingdom territory if the people of Scotland vote for independence in next year's referendum. In a move that sparked an angry reaction from the SNP, which vowed to rid Scotland of nuclear weapons as quickly as possible after a yes vote, the government is looking at ensuring that the Faslane base on Gare Loch in Argyll and Bute could have the same status as the British sovereign military bases in Cyprus.  

… The Ministry of Defence is officially working on only one option for the Faslane base ahead of next year's Scottish independence referendum – a defeat for the SNP, thereby guaranteeing the survival of the base that has housed the nuclear deterrent since the Polaris era in the 1960s. An MoD spokesperson said: "We are confident that the Scottish people will vote to remain a part of the United Kingdom." But MoD officials are starting to examine a two-stage process to ensure that Britain could continue to station the Vanguard submarines at the deep-water Faslane base and store the nuclear warheads at the nearby Coulport base on Loch Long.  

The British government would first tell the Scottish government after a yes vote that it would cost tens of billions of pounds over many years to decommission the Faslane base and to establish a new base in England or Wales to house the nuclear fleet. These costs would have to be factored into severance payments negotiated with the Scottish government before full independence is declared around two years after the referendum.

Watt has since run a follow-up story on the Guardian website, No 10: MoD sovereign territory plans for Trident base not credible MoD proposal to designate Faslane as UK sovereign military base if Scots vote for independence sparks Whitehall row:

Downing Street has dismissed as not "credible or sensible" a proposal to designate the Faslane base, which hosts Britain's Trident nuclear deterrent, as sovereign United Kingdom territory if the people of Scotland vote for independence in next year's referendum. No 10's dismissal of the idea followed an overnight row in Whitehall after the Guardian reported that the government was examining plans to ensure that the Faslane base on Gare Loch in Argyll and Bute could have the same status as the British sovereign military bases in Cyprus in the event of a yes vote.

The likelihood of a Whitehall row being substantiated by:

… a defence source said that the idea of designating Faslane as sovereign UK territory in the event of an SNP victory was being taken seriously. The source said: "It would cost a huge amount of money, running into tens of billions of pounds, to decommission Faslane. Those costs would be factored into any negotiations on an independence settlement. The sovereign base area is an option. It is an interesting idea because the costs of moving out of Faslane are eyewateringly high." A version of this was emailed to the BBC, which ran a story on its website overnight with the headline: "Faslane Trident base could be in UK after Scottish independence". The MoD emailed the BBC to say: "The sovereign base area is an option. It is an interesting idea."

As far as the cost of relocation is concerned, the Guardian’s Richard Norton-Taylor has a companion piece, The uncomfortable costs of moving Trident Relocating the Trident base to another port could cost at least £20bn and take 20 years to build:

Whitehall planners and independent thinktanks alike have contemplated the prospect of having to move the Trident base to Devonport in Plymouth, or Milford Haven in Pembrokeshire. However, moving the base to another port could cost at least £20bn, Professor Trevor Taylor, of the Royal United Services Institute, recently told the defence committee.

Rather higher than Admiral West’s £2.5 billion figure which I thought reasonable. Here is the relevant part of the evidence given to the House of Commons Defence Committee, chaired by James Arbuthnot, MP on 18 June:

Q228 Mr Holloway: …. Clearly, they [the SNP] plan to get rid of Faslane and Coulport. What would the costs be, apart from the obvious ones? Aren’t there some enormous costs regarding concrete cradles and things? Can you tell us a bit more about that?  

Professor Taylor: I haven’t been to Coulport-it’s too sensitive for me. However, from what I understand about what goes on there, the cost of moving those nuclear installations to a new site would be very extensive. It is the weapons storage and then the submarine docking. There is some evidence on what the docks at Devonport for the Trident submarine cost to build.  

Chair: I was in charge. It was horrendous.  

Mr Holloway: Is that because they have to be able to withstand an earthquake or something?  

Chair: Yes.  

Professor Taylor: And accidents of various descriptions. And obviously the weapons storage-  

Mr Brazier: What of various descriptions?  

Professor Taylor: Accidents of various descriptions-leaks. The safety arrangements-the Chairman could speak better on those than me. I find it difficult; if I were to give you a rough figure, I would say the starting figure would be £20 billion, but that is really just an absolute guess. It would be that order of amount that we would have to find, I think. There are various efforts under way. I don’t think anybody has come up with a satisfactory answer about precisely where you might move the facilities to. I don’t have an answer on that- ...

Anyway, £20 billion sounds like a very good figure for negotiations with a Scottish government.


UPDATE 12 JULY

Nicholas Watt has taken his Guardian story a stage further today with an account (Trident submarine base: No 10 disowns MoD's Faslane sovereignty proposal Whitehall row and SNP anger ignites over report of plans to make naval base UK territory if Scots vote for independence) of argy-bargy between the MoD, Number 10 and Alistair Darling, who heads the anti-independence Better Together campaign.

It is understood that a senior official from Darling's Better Together campaign telephoned the No 10 Scottish referendum unit late on Wednesday night to express deep alarm about the Faslane plan. The group was assured that the No 10 unit was equally appalled that the private thinking of the MoD on such a sensitive matter had entered the public domain.

An interesting exchange on Twitter between Watt and a Scottish former defence minister:

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.

Black holes filled with balanced books

Having got the turnround on the type of F-35 aircraft to fly from the new carriers out of the way a few days earlier, the MoD must have thought it highly appropriate to facilitate Isabel Oakeshott’s story in 13 May’s Sunday Times (£), Hammond heralds end to defence cuts:

PHILIP HAMMOND, the defence secretary, has signalled an end to defence cuts and declared he has finally balanced his department’s books. The development means there should be no further job losses in the armed forces. He will announce this week that he has eliminated a £38 billion hole in the defence budget, making it possible to place equipment orders again with confidence and claim that for the first time in modern history his department will have an underspend as well as a substantial contingency fund. “In the next few days we will be in a position to make the grand announcement that I’ve balanced the books,” Hammond said.

Any resemblance to an article by James Blitz in the Financial Times (£) on 27 September 2011, Fox claims ‘black hole’ of defence costs eliminated:

A £38bn debt weighing on the Ministry of Defence has been almost eliminated with tough financial management, Liam Fox will claim next week, as he seeks to highlight a turnround in the fortunes of Whitehall’s most “traumatised” department. One year after David Cameron’s coalition initiated its Strategic Defence and Security Review that slashed MoD spending and personnel, Britain’s armed forces are still reeling. However, the defence secretary will tell the Tory conference in Manchester next week that MoD finances are now stable, thanks to removing the debt he inherited from Labour. At £38bn, this was bigger than the department’s annual budget.

is presumably coincidental!

Healey on Defence – and Carriers

Former Labour politician Denis Healey is nearly 94 and remains a lively observer of British politics, to judge from John Rentoul’s account of a talk at the Mile End Group in January. Healey is regarded as having one of the best intellects among post-WW2 politicians, and his autobiography, The Time of My Life, published in 1989 and still in print, remains worth reading.

Healey became Secretary of State for Defence nearly 50 years ago, but the chapter covering his time at MoD (1964-70) still provides intriguing perspectives on the present. One marked contrast is with the recent comment of Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles regarding Afghanistan: ‘Politicians with little or no military experience were being pushed by a confident and enthusiastic military lobby into doing things against their better judgment.’ However, Healey had served in North Africa and Italy in WW2:

… my service in the wartime army had given me insights into military realities which cannot be acquired by any other means. The same was true not only of my service advisers, but of many of my civil servants too. Ours was the last generation at the Ministry of Defence to have shared the knowledge which can only come from experience in war.

But he makes a familiar complaint about the situation when he arrived:

… the preceding Conservative governments had left me a defence programme which it would have been financially impossible to carry out at the best of times. Moreover, our forces were overstretched and underequipped.

The underlying causes seem to be perpetual:

Ever since the war, defence had been under exceptional economic pressure since technology increased the cost of new equipment much faster than the increase in the nation's wealth. In the fifties and sixties the cost of naval frigates doubled, the cost of much army equipment quadrupled, and the cost of military aircraft increased tenfold. Costs are rising even faster nowadays, with the introduction of electronics into every area of warfare. Indeed the extrapolation of current trends could mean that within a century the number of modern weapons which a country like Britain could afford would have fallen to single figures - a prospect which NATO refers to as ‘structural disarmament'.

The Service Chiefs and the Chief of Defence Staff were a problem for politicians then as now:

The one issue on which Mountbatten and I were always at odds was his determination to get rid of the separate service Chiefs of Staff and establish single central organisations to carry out the administrative functions of the three services.
…
I suspected, too, that behind Mountbatten's obsession with integrating the services was the desire to establish central control of defence policy and operations under himself as Chief of Defence Staff. In my opinion, it was the Secretary of State's job to control defence policy, as an elected member of the British Cabinet, and I was determined to carry it out.
... But there were prima donnas in the services no less than in the acting profession. And the competition for money required the senior officers of all three services to develop all the skills of the politician and the trade unionist. I sometimes felt that I had learned nothing about politics until I met the Chiefs of Staff. Each felt his prime duty was to protect the interests and traditions of his own service.

Until recently, it seemed as though Healey would be the last politician obliged to cancel a British aircraft carrier programme, but perhaps not:

By far my most difficult equipment decision was to cancel CVA-01, the new strike carrier planned by the navy. A country like the United States, which wants to project its naval power world-wide and can afford to maintain a force of fifteen carriers, as the US Navy then did, may find them a valuable investment. But quite apart from the cost' the Royal Navy was too short of manpower to envisage manning more than three carriers in the seventies.
I commissioned innumerable studies to find out whether it was possible to perform the carrier's function with existing RAF aircraft. The answer was that, in most places which concerned us, we could support land operations more cheaply and effectively with land-based aircraft.
… no one suggested the only relevant situation which has actually arisen, namely the landing and supply of British forces in the Falklands against opposition from Argentina. Fortunately, on that occasion [1982] the navy still had the small through-deck cruiser, HMS Invincible, with Harriers aboard, both of which I had ordered fourteen years earlier.

In fact, HMS Invincible was not ordered until 1973, and the Sea Harrier FRS1s embarked on Invincible for the Falklands campaign were not ordered until 1975. The RAF Harrier GR3s embarked on HMS Hermes were better-engined versions of the GRS1 which had been ordered in 1967. The photograph is of the final Harrier GR9 flight from HMS Ark Royal (Invincible’s sister ship) in November 2010. 

Two of Healey’s remarks are of particular interest in retrospect:

When I left office, for the first time in its history, Britain was spending more on education than on defence.

This was to change again– just before the end of the Cold War defence expenditure was once more larger than education. By 2010, however, spending on education had reached £B88, about twice that on defence.

Healey ends his MoD chapter:

I imagine historians will best remember my six years at the Ministry of Defence for the liquidation of Britain's military role outside Europe, an anachronism which was essentially a legacy from our nineteenth-century empire.

Even the cleverest men can only guess what the future may bring – there are currently 9,500 members of HM Forces in Afghanistan, a presence which is currently expected to end in 2014.

Poor Jack and Harry

By the time David Cameron made his ‘you do the fighting and I’ll do the talking’ remark about the senior military at the PM's Press Conference on 21 June, he would almost certainly have given his approval to the recommendations in Lord Levene’s Defence Reform report published a few days later.

Descriptions of the proposals as the most far-reaching since Haldane’s reforms to the Army after the Second Boer War, and Fisher’s to the Royal Navy in the same period, are almost certainly overblown, but the changes probably amount to the biggest setback for the three single services since the removal in 1946 of their individual Secretaries of State from the Cabinet. In particular, Levene has recommended what is in effect the merger of the single Service Chief and respective Commander-in-Chief posts and their ‘rustication’, together with hangers-on, to service headquarters. Back in the MoD Head Office in London, a new Defence Board, answerable to the National Security Council, will consist of eight civilians and only the Chief of the Defence Staff to represent the views of the armed forces.

Something like this has been building up for a while. The cover of the Spectator on 11 June led with:

Who’s in command?

Sherard Cowper-Coles says politicians have let the top brass get too big for their boots

although his article was titled:

Breaking rank

Years of timidity from politicians have left our military commanders dangerously overconfident

and ‘too big for their boots’ was not an expression used by Sir Sherard (SC-C hereafter). SC-C was the UK’s senior diplomat in Afghanistan to 2010, and on the basis of his experience, he concludes:

A trend has set in where an overconfident and under-managed military machine fills a vacuum left by politicians, civil servants and diplomats unable or unwilling to provide firm strategic direction. The military is not just doing the fighting, but increasingly it is allowed to decide the overall direction of the campaign. Now that Barack Obama wishes to hasten the withdrawal from Afghanistan, with obvious implications for Britain, the military is protesting. In my view, this is a sign of a deep imbalance in the relationship between the military and the state. ...
Politicians with little or no military experience were being pushed by a confident and enthusiastic military lobby into doing things against their better judgment. War-winning armies need to be incurably optimistic, unquenchably enthusiastic, institutionally loyal, and — to some extent — susceptible to groupthink. The problem comes when the politicians, and the civil servants who advise them, don’t have the courage, knowledge or confidence to push back against pressure from one of the most effective special-interest lobbies of them all. ...
The civil servants in the MoD are clever and courageous, but have great difficulty asserting themselves over their professionally and personally confident colleagues in the uniform branch. The military now have much better academic qualifications than they did in the past. ...
Little wonder the British military are so assertive. They have the media and public on their side, they control the MoD and they are facing a political class that stands in bewildered awe of men in uniform. But with time and money running out, politicians on both sides of the Atlantic are at last starting to take charge, and give the military the firm strategic direction they need — in their own interests — in a democracy.

In the article, SC-C paid tribute to the bravery and sacrifices of the UK’s armed forces in Afghanistan. Anyone who doubts his sincerity should read the Diplomatic Telegram, Tribute to the Fallen, recording the ‘ramp ceremony’ prior to the repatriation of Corporal Damien Lawrence of the Yorkshire Regiment in 2008, to be found at the start of his recent book, Cables from Kabul. The criticisms in the article were directed at the senior levels of the military, men in their late forties and fifties, who no longer have to engage in combat but have turned to fighting in the corridors of Whitehall.

The word military, either as an adjective or noun, is nowadays applied to all three forces (RN, Army, RAF) although historically it would have been applied to the Army, with the Senior Service being responsible for matters described as naval. While SC-C’s general point about weak political control of the armed forces is probably correct, arguably it is the British Army which should be bearing the brunt of his criticisms. A post here in April summarised the views of a well-placed insider on the relationship between the last government and the top of the Army, and a post in May gave a typical example of the adeptness with which retired senior Army officers lobby using the media. All this is with a greater confidence and assertiveness, to use the traits identified by SC-C, than has been shown in recent years by the other two services. Why should this be?

Obviously, since the end of the Cold War, land operations in Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan have been the main preoccupation of the MoD. Also, the Army is larger in manpower terms, top to bottom, than the other two services – see below. But, as always in the UK, there is the issue of class. It has been said of the three services that the Army is led by gentlemen trying to be officers, the Navy by officers trying to be gentlemen, and the Air Force by neither trying to be both. This is unkind, but comes with an uncomfortable element of truth. Certain elements of the Army, the Guards regiments in particular, have always had a substantial intake of officers who come from the highest levels of society. That is not to say that the Navy and RAF are devoid of senior officers with an upper-class background, but not to the same extent. Substance for this assertion was provided by the Public Accounts Committee in 2007:

20. Of the 10 most senior staff in each Service, nine out of 10 Army officers, six out of 10 Royal Navy officers, and three out of 10 Royal Air Force officers were educated in independent schools. … The [MoD] sees the current officer intake to the Advanced Command and Staff Course as providing an indication of the likely composition of the future leadership of the Services: 58% of the intake of Army officers went to state schools; as did 70% of the Royal Navy officers; and 75% of the Royal Air Force officers.

It is hardly surprising that some Generals feel that they have a natural affinity with the Conservative party and correspondingly little identification with Labour. As most senior officers in their outlook are at least a decade behind the mainstream of British society, their vision of the Conservatives probably tends to be pre-Cameroon and non-detoxified, and of Labour, old rather than new. But they should have realised that, whatever their allegiance, Kipling’s observation on ‘The Ladies’, ‘For the Colonel's Lady an' Judy O'Grady, Are sisters under their skins’, could apply equally well to politicians. In the nature of their trade, they are never slow to spot a ‘useful idiot’ and make use of him in pursuit of office, but once in government will take any steps they can to prevent erosion of their own power.

Now, defence in general and the positions of all three services have been weakened because of the way the Army chose to make its case in recent years, though the Army will probably come out of it all in relatively better shape. As James Kirkup blogged in the Daily Telegraph on 28 June: ‘Sacking soldiers makes for bad headlines; the PM is said to be especially squeamish about taking the axe to the posher, shinier bits of the Army.’ Which may leave the other two services like Sassoon’s Harry and Jack, casualties of the General who ‘did for them both with his plan of attack’.

Under the new arrangements, the occupant of the CDS post will be the prime source of advice on behalf of all three services, but will have been drawn from only one of them. The charts below show how this has worked out in practice since the inception of the post in 1957.

The second chart shows the different patterns of occupancy during the Cold War and afterwards. The RN's predominance in the Cold War period is largely due to Mountbatten’s exceptionally long period of service as the second CDS. Since the end of the Cold War, the Army has provided the CDS for the majority of the time (the charts assume the present incumbent remains in post for 1000 days).

Following the Levene reforms, it might be expected that the MoD will attempt a more balanced rotation of the CDS post, as was the case in the later part of the Cold War. If so, as the next chart shows, the proposed Defence Board Appointments Committee will be faced with a marked imbalance in the backgrounds of the senior service officers from whom it will have to make its choices.

  (See Daily Telegraph for source data (April 2011) and explanation of *s and ranks)

In the corporate world, which will presumably be familiar to some of the Non Executive Directors on the Defence Board (one of whom will be chairing the Appointments Committee), it is now common practice to look for top talent internationally. While it seems inconceivable that an overseas national could become CDS, the prospect of a Canadian or Australian, let alone someone from the US Marine Corps, even being considered, might concentrate 'assertive' minds wonderfully.