Defence
Defence cuts: Our forces, brought to their knees
Military cuts and job losses are ruining morale in the Armed Forces and harming Britain’s defence capability.
Wings clipped: a drop in orders for the Eurofighter Typhoon aircraft, pictured at RAF Coningsby, Lincolnshire, has led BAE to cut 3,000 jobs Photo: PABy Neil Tweedie, and Sarah Rainey
7:30AM BST 01 Oct 2011
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When Lord West, former First Sea Lord and security minister in the Brown government, waved the flag for Britain last week, reminding the world that we are still a country to be reckoned with and “not like bloody Denmark or Belgium”, he presented Liam Fox with a gaping open goal. West, the Defence Secretary crowed, was guilty of crass insensitivity and should apologise. What about those plucky Danes in Afghanistan?
The old admiral, who had his ship sunk under him in the Falklands, may indeed have been less than diplomatic towards, let’s face it, two of our less weighty Nato allies, but everyone knows what he’s getting at. Britannia may have ceded rule of the waves to Uncle Sam sometime around 1943, but the United Kingdom has so far managed to cling to upper second division status in the global military league.
America, that creaking giant, still occupies the premier league on its own, with a defence budget matching the rest of the world. Then it’s the Chinese, then us and the French jostling for third place, with a bunch of old and new contenders – such as Russia, Japan, India and Brazil – breathing down our necks. So, yes, Britain should still be taken seriously as a military and military-industrial power (we are second only to America in arms exports), but for how long?
For how long, also, will the morale of the Armed Forces endure – on which Britain’s vaunted military excellence depends – in the face of £20 billion of cuts that are deemed vital by David Cameron and George Osborne?
No doubt Fox and his boss in Downing Street will wrap themselves in red, white and blue at the Conservative conference in Manchester this week, reminding the audience about who helped liberate Libya. But as they do so the P45s will be winging their way to the barracks, some to men and women who have no wish to give up what is more a way of life than a job.
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Britain’s Armed Forces have become used to cuts – reviews they call them in the Ministry of Defence – but the latest round of redundancies and equipment losses, combined with cuts in defence manufacturing, threatens an irreversible decline in Britain’s ability to project military power and produce weapons.
The current blood-letting, known as the Strategic Defence and Security Review, involves slashing some 14,000 Army posts by 2020 and 5,000 Navy and 5,000 air force positions by 2015, leaving an Armed Forces establishment of just 140,000. The first tranche of Army and Royal Air Force redundancies have already been announced, and last week it was the Royal Navy’s turn. Roughly 1,020 officers and men are to leave the Senior Service in the first round, some 350 against their will. In addition, another 25,000 MoD civilian employees are to lose their jobs.
The defence industry, which directly employs 121,000 people in the UK, is expected to lose about 40,000 jobs in the next four years as projects are cancelled, scaled back or completed. Last week saw some 3,000 redundancies at BAE Systems factories in Lancashire and on Humberside as military aircraft production is reduced. British manned aircraft production could have ceased entirely by the end of the decade, together with the manufacture of heavy armoured vehicles and military helicopters.
“We have not seen anything like this since the end of the Second World War,” says Tim Ripley of Jane’s Defence Weekly. “By the end of the decade, under the plan envisaged by the Coalition government, the ability of the British Armed Forces to engage in sustained high-intensity combat will be greatly diminished. The Army, for example, will be merely a specialised counter-insurgency and peacekeeping force, equipped with only token armoured units. Mass manufacture of key defence hardware, ships, jets and tanks, will have ended. By design or accident Britain’s 'hard’ military power will be a thing of the past.”
The cost in morale is more subtle but becoming clear. The MoD runs something called the Armed Forces Continuous Attitudes Survey that monitors opinion in the ranks. Findings published this month make bleak reading. When asked how they rated morale in their service, only 18 per cent of all servicemen considered it high, while 44 per cent thought it low. Worst was the Royal Air Force: only nine per cent of airmen judged morale in the RAF to be high, against 62 per cent thinking it low. Only nine per cent of Royal Navy personnel thought morale high in their service, compared with 56 per cent for low.
Even more worrying were the figures for officers. Just 10 per cent of all commissioned servicemen thought morale high, compared with 55 per cent saying it was low. A minuscule two per cent of RAF officers believe morale was high, as opposed to 70 per cent in the “low” camp. The figure for naval officers was six and 59 per cent respectively. The Army produced a more positive outcome but pessimists still easily outnumbered optimists.
Graham Edmonds served 42 years in the Navy before his retirement in 2009. “Morale in the Royal Navy has plummeted,” he says. “The Treasury hates people because they are expensive: salaries, accommodation, pensions, national insurance. The easiest way to save money is to get rid of people.
“For the Navy, it is very depressing. Back in the 1980s many people in government had Armed Forces’ experience, and of war. Their decisions reflected that. Now, we have a government and a bunch of MPs who have no military experience.
“People in the Armed Forces are profoundly angry that their lives can be put on the line by incompetent and off-the-cuff decision-making. The Army is depressed, the RAF is fed up and the Navy aghast.”
Capability is going the way of jobs. Long-range maritime reconnaissance has gone with the cancellation of the Nimrod MRA4, battlefield surveillance will be lost with the early retirement of the Sentinel aircraft, and air defence of fleet, post-Harrier, resides almost solely on half a dozen Type 45 destroyers which, despite their £1 billion-a-piece price tag, have no long-range land-attack or anti-ship missile capacity.
Mr Fox has tried to blame these cuts on the over-ambitious procurement policy of Labour, and on the chronic incompetence of the MoD and service chiefs when buying equipment. There is truth in this but the price is being paid by ordinary servicemen and their families, facing a harsh economic landscape in civilian life. Many of those losing their jobs in uniform over the coming years would have found work in the defence industry, but that path is now being closed to them.
Kim Richards, head of the association that represents naval families, says in an address to members: “It isn’t just a job; it is a way of life. As a family, leaving service-provided accommodation, looking for a new home, moving to a new area, children changing schools, hunting for jobs, finding a GP and dentist may have to be on your radar over the next 12 months. It may seem daunting.”
Commander Nigel “Sharkey” Ward, a former Fleet Air Arm pilot who flew the Sea Harrier to great effect over the Falklands, is more direct. “The three services are in a state of 'lockdown’ at the moment at the behest of our less-than-illustrious Prime Minister, who wishes to hide completely illogical and damaging decisions from the public. What has happened has destroyed morale in the Armed Forces.
“We have a partly political, rotten game going on. All the lads can see it; all the officers and all the men – these good guys who put their lives on the line. Some would be much better off out of the services and away from this stupidity, this almost complete lack of loyalty.”
Not Belgium yet. But some would say we’re getting there.
Defence cuts: Our forces, brought to their knees - Telegraph
The damage made by this coalition governement to the british armed forces is substantial.
