One cannot help but feel sorry for Liam Fox. Not only is he being put upon by coalition partners who disagree with his stance on the nuclear deterrent he is beset by the far more difficult opponents in the Cabinet Office and Treasury – ‘we’ll sort it out, and you take the flak’. One can understand why he is beginning to sound a bit fed-up.
This week’s shocker was the leaking of his private correspondence on the SDSR to the Prime Minister (his long-time political rival) to the Daily Telegraph, who along with the Financial Times are turning into the authoritative place to look for defence news and commentary. The good Dr is clearly genuinely fed up this time, calling in the Police to hunt down the leaker – and this may well be more symbolic, a shot across the bows of those ‘senior sources’ who keep briefing their friends in the media: this time you overstepped the mark. The SDSR already had some neat colander qualities to it, now it has a massive hole with quite a good amount of water pouring in.
It is difficult to argue with Fox’s letter, reproduced in full by the Telegraph. The narrative simply isn’t there at the moment. A super-CSR is all this looks like, and the unruliness of those ‘senior sources’ is evidence of genuine unhappiness within the senior parts of the forces, partly because they know they’re not in the box seats, partly because their turf is being eroded, and partly because they’ve a great big lid stuck on their dissent. Why hasn’t there been more work done outside of the small review unit – not a massive SDR style review from first principles, but more work fed in by the MOD’s thinking organisations in the countryside? These organisations are likely to be looking for reasons to exist after the spending review, this might have been their chance to prove it.
The SDSR looks like it’s building up to be a rich basket of goodies to the budding academic writer, but for all the wrong reasons. One can only hope that the sentiment in Liam Fox’s letter is taken serious by Number 10, it would be most odd if the Tories lost defence as one of ‘their’ issues, and even more odd if they presided over the serious erosion of British defence stature.
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
If anything the leaked letter seems to have caused No10 to bunker down and firmly put their fingers in their ears.
The real problem to my mind is that although they want to make defence cuts, they can’t risk losing the manufacturing jobs which the military creates. Hence the techno-fetishism (I need to stop using that term) which is evident in a lot of the discussion amongst senior tories.
It seems like the Tory ideal is to have a military which buys expensive, borderline useless toys, and then puts them into storage sheds. Ideally they wouldnt maintain them too much, because thats expensive. Presumably they’ll keep enough actual military staff on in order to sign the reciepts and maintain the sheds.
I actually had some genuine respect for Liam Fox when I read his letter, a state of affairs which made me slightly uncomfortable, as I’ve had a low regard of him up to now.
The fact that the SDSR is basically a discussion about cuts, and is being conducted so much behind closed doors makes this feel very strange.
I think your points about the techno-fetishism are correct, although it’s not clear to me who in this country is capable of manufacturing the next generation of them. Appropriate amounts of decent-tech (that phrase probably needs some work!) would be far better in the current climate… afterall, you can’t police the oceans with just two massive ships!
The biggest laugh from the letter was Fox agitating on the need to preserve our capability to make contested landings from the sea. Most Royal Marines I know would say we already lost that capability quite some time ago, at least in terms of an Inchon or D-Day scale. Sierra Leone hardly seems the relevant example to use here. As to the larger issues, I confess my sympathy for all concerned remains limited. The time to rethink strategy and reorient UK resources to a more rational ends-ways-means outlook was twenty years ago. Doing it now, it will inevitably be be a dog’s dinner, because the lack of finance and sustainability in our current commitments and deployments overrides everything else. Yet another marvellous illustration of Mr Blair’s delusional belief that his greatest skill lay in really ‘gripping an issue’.
Theres a good case to be made to transfer away from the “huge ship” model in the navy towards a smaller ships, comprising a more flexible fleet which can fold in some of what Pericles is talking about. Its the old adage, if you can’t afford to lose it, don’t build it, and we certainly can’t afford to lose an aircraft carrier.
The idea of “decent-tech” is very fair. We dont need to be able to put a man on the moon. We need to be able to get him from a training base in the UK to Afghanistan or wherever we need him after that. When he’s there he doesnt need an Iron Man suit, he needs decent personal equiptment, a logistics system which supports him, and a command system which has a strategy and direction.
But thats just me being a filthy idealist.
It appears to me that this is exactly the same problem suffered by SDR98, only quicker, they have agreed ‘posture’ and then failed to find the funding necessary to resource it.
http://jedibeeftrix.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/failing-to-fund-your-strategic-vision-%E2%80%93-oh-no-its-happened-again/
What a shambles! The kit’s utter rubbish, as are the military leaders. I personally feel the Dept of War Studies at King’s should take over the SDSR. There are probably some folk in MoD who could help these Tory folk through it, but they, the decision makers, probably know best eh?…….. *****
One hopes some bugger at KCL is studying a country’s ability to learn and adapt………… for our children’s sake…….How does a state configure its Armed Forces??.
What is wrong with this place? It must be post-colonial angst or something???
SDSR was a disaster. There was nothing it in about future strategy. How can you conduct a strategic review with only a 5 year horizon? We were given none of the promised strategic focus between a land or maritime doctrine. I have taken a look at what SDSR should have been on my blog.
http://fantasyfleet.blogspot.com/2010/10/towards-maritime-doctrine-super-power.html