Defence Committee
Oral evidence: Modernising Defence Programme, HC 818
Tuesday 27 February 2018
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 27 February 2018.
Members present: Dr Julian Lewis (Chair); Leo Docherty; Martin Docherty-Hughes; Mr Mark Francois; Graham P. Jones; Johnny Mercer; Mrs Madeleine Moon; Gavin Robinson; John Spellar; Phil Wilson.
Questions 1-42
Witnesses
I: Professor Andrew Dorman, Professor of International Security, King’s College London, Tom McKane, former Director General Security Policy, Ministry of Defence, and James de Waal, Senior Consulting Fellow, International Security Department, Chatham House.
Witnesses: Professor Andrew Dorman, Tom McKane and James de Waal.
Q1 Chair: Good morning and welcome to this session on the Government’s new Modernising Defence Programme. We have three expert witnesses today. I will start by inviting each of them to say a few words about themselves, starting with James.
James de Waal: I am James de Waal. I am a fellow in the international security department at Chatham House, and a former diplomat and official at the Ministry of Defence. I worked as a special adviser to this Committee on an inquiry in 2015.
Professor Dorman: I am Andrew Dorman, professor of international security at King’s College, London, based at the Joint Services Command and Staff College. I am also the commissioning editor for the Chatham House journal, International Affairs.
Tom McKane: Good morning. I am Tom McKane, a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, and a visiting senior fellow at LSE IDEAS. I was, until 2014, a civil servant at the Ministry of Defence, where I finished as the director general for security policy.
Chair: I will resist the temptation to talk about a poacher turned gamekeeper and hand over to Phil.
Q2 Phil Wilson: Good morning, everyone. Do you think it is a wise move for the defence strand of the national security capability review to be separated? What do you think the implications will be? I will start with Tom.
Tom McKane: In principle, it makes more sense to consider defence in the round with the rest of the national security capabilities, but I can see that if, in the current circumstances, it is taking longer to resolve the issues that defence faces, and there is a desire to publish the rest of the national security capability review, then it is perfectly sensible to take a bit more time to do it.
The other thing I would say is that, although I do think it is better to look at all these things in the round, there is some benefit from having a close political oversight of the defence element of the review. One of the disadvantages of the wider national security reviews was that inevitably the Prime Minister cannot give the same level of attention to the day-to-day workings of the review as, say, a departmental Cabinet Secretary of State can. There are pluses and minuses.
Professor Dorman: We saw the evidence given to the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy by Lord Ricketts. The separation of defence from security is a step backwards, in the sense that we have moved towards looking at a cross-Government view of security, of which defence is a part, for the past 10 to 15 years, and now this is a reverse of that.
What is unclear is whether this is just a temporary measure to try to square the MoD’s budget or is part of a longer-term trend giving authority back to the Ministry of Defence. That is unclear. This Committee asked questions of the Defence Secretary about the next SDSR and what would happen with it, when it would be and how it would be managed. From my perspective, I think it would make more sense to delay the national security capability review and produce the whole thing as one single document in the round, and not take defence out of that.
James de Waal: I am not that opposed to the idea of separating out defence, partly because, in the recent national security exercises—the defence and security reviews—there has always been a sense that defence has dominated the discussion, just because of its size and the political sensitivity of a lot of the issues. That has meant that some of the other national security issues have been rather neglected.
I am also still quite sceptical about the real degree of integration that there is in the strategic defence and security reviews, mainly because, it seems to me, there is little evidence of any real decisions to compare the different amounts of money that are applied to the different sectors, and the different levers, and to be willing to move money from one area to another—for example, decisions to compare the amount of money you are spending on counter-terrorism policing with the amount of money you are spending on military activities to counter terrorism. I have not seen any sign of that so far.
In a sense, recognising that defence is in a separate category is not that damaging to the process. My principal concern is if the separation somehow encourages the scope for using defence and security as a mechanism to further the political rivalries that there might be between the various different parts of Whitehall and the different Ministries. I think that is my principal concern.
Q3 Phil Wilson: To follow on from that, one reason for the national security capability review was supposedly that threats are multiplying and changing more rapidly. Where does that leave the five-year cycle of SDSRs?
James de Waal: First, one needs to apply a certain amount of critical scrutiny to suggestions that the threats are multiplying. One has to look at what the evidence for that is and be quite specific on which particular threats one is thinking about. I think a lot of the public discussion about where we are on defence and security has been very vague and possibly slightly alarmist. Given the evidence of the recent adventures that we have embarked on in terms of defence, when one hears about North Korea, for example, being described as a massive threat, there is the ghost of the word “WMD” somewhere in the atmosphere, so one needs to focus on what the evidence for that is.
I am also quite sceptical about the idea that a natural cycle of defence and security reviews is a good thing. I gave evidence to the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy about this yesterday. To my mind, the key thing when you are doing a defence and security review is to say, “Is there a problem? Is there a real question that you can answer through this? Is the potential benefit worth the risk?”, because particularly when you are reallocating resources, there is sometimes a great political cost to that, and as we all see, there are lots of leaks and the political sensitivity of defence and security as an issue rises up. I think you need to ask, “Is there an agenda?” I tend to prefer the idea that these exercises are more successful if the Prime Minister in particular, who is the key figure in all this, has something that they want to deliver as a result of it. When the answer to all those questions is yes, there is a case for having a defence and security review. I am not sure that there is benefit to it at the moment.
Professor Dorman: To a degree, I disagree with James: I think there is very much an argument for a regular defence and security review. If you think of the period pre-2010, there was a great gap from 1998. We had some defence White Papers, but we kept putting off having a defence and security review and got ourselves into a very difficult position. The argument in favour of having a regular system of reviews is that, to a degree, it depoliticises them. If they become part of the natural parliamentary cycle, whoever is the political party or coalition parties in power will have some degree of review of where they are, and there is a logic to seeing whether you are heading in the right direction. The reviews may be relatively minor ones or more significant, but there is a logic to looking ahead every four or five years and saying, “Are we heading in the right direction in terms of defence and security?” That is an entirely rational thing to do, and I am talking about bringing the whole of Government together to do that.
I think it also sometimes forces Governments to confront issues, particularly when it comes to the defence budget. They tend to put these things off. Paul Cornish and I wrote a piece on this; we came up with the idea of a “Groundhog Day” cycle whereby Governments had periodic defence reviews when they finally got into crisis on their defence budgets, and then they would create one that didn’t really work and then start the review again. So I think the idea of having a regular review is entirely logical.
There is a question, because we broke the parliamentary cycle of reviews every five years with the election in 2017—it is not clear where we are. Are we going to wait another five years after the current one, or are we going to have one in 2020? It is not clear what the cycle has now become; and looking at the evidence you received, I don’t think you got a clear answer on that one.
Tom McKane: I am rather more in Andrew’s camp on this one. I think he is right that it takes some of the political heat out of the process if it is a regular drumbeat. To deal with James’s comment, you could, as Andrew says, make it a light-touch or a heavy-touch review, depending on what was deemed necessary. My assumption is that there won’t be another of the full-scale reviews until after the next general election, whenever that is.
Q4 Phil Wilson: Do you think that it makes the overarching national security architecture, which is headed by the NSC, redundant now?
Tom McKane: No, I don’t think so. I thought that, when the Defence Secretary spoke to the Committee the other week, he was rather confirming that the starting point was a lot of the work that had been done in the national security capability review on the threats in the international situation. It is not really beyond the wit of man for the Ministry of Defence, as it goes through this Managing Defence Programme, to make sure that it is well founded in the Whitehall process. Indeed, it will have to be, because if it is not going to be a fiscally neutral process it will have to involve the Treasury at the very least.
Professor Dorman: Picking up on the logic of the MDP, the case seems to be that defence needs more money—there is not enough money in defence, and the reason for having this is that we need to square the defence budget, and we need more money and resources going into it. But if we are having a much wider security review, which in a sense goes back to the point James made right at the start, how do we actually know it is best to put the money into defence? If you kept it within the National Security Council’s purview, it might be that more money needed to go into the security services or the police or so forth. What we have done by going for this MDP argument is to say that we need more resources and they have to go to defence. That might be the right answer, but you are ring-fencing money directly into defence and not asking, “Where is it actually needed, from a wider security point of view?” The answer might not be defence. There are problems with the National Security Council, but it is the most sensible way we have. We just have to develop and improve the process.
James de Waal: I have nothing to add.
Q5 Phil Wilson: On the back of what you said, Andrew, and the rest of the panel’s view, if there is a potential increase in the defence budget after this process, do you think that is a worthy trade-off, having taken defence out of the security review? Is that a worthwhile result?
Professor Dorman: Most defence commentators and the military seem to accept that defence needs more money. The National Audit Office report, which you have seen, identifies significant financial holes in the future defence programme for the Ministry of Defence.
Why I am hesitant is also that, from these programmes, there is no evidence that the MoD is a particularly efficient user of money. Although the argument might be that they need more resources, there is no evidence to suggest that they will spend the money at all wisely. I have two great daughters—one spends more money than the other. I would not necessarily encourage giving the one who spends more money more money just because she is good at spending it. You need a much more logical argument for why defence needs more money. Certainly some of the work I have been doing on things like officer numbers suggests that the Ministry of Defence is becoming more and more bureaucratic, not more and more efficient.
Tom McKane: I would like to see where the evidence takes us. The announcement has been made that this MDP will take place. We have been told that it will complete before the summer—perhaps before the NATO summit in July. Let us see what the evidence is.
James de Waal: I would just like to add that the other thing you should look at is not just efficiencies but the level of commitment. The answer to this might be to reduce commitments rather than to increase spending, or indeed to look at the structural way in which we organise defence. The 2015 SDSR spoke about being international by design. Maybe that is a trend that one ought to see a bit more of, to integrate Britain’s Armed Forces a bit more in the hope of being able to generate a bit more capability for less money.
Professor Dorman: James is right to point out the structural points. One of the things you guys have picked up is that the Levene reforms have stovepiped a lot of the Ministry of Defence. You have the top-level budgeters just thinking about resources within their own budget. Veering and hauling money between top-level budgets does not seem to be occurring. You put out the amphibiosity report on the Royal Marines—excellent. Did it not strike you as slightly odd that the Army cannot recruit enough people yet the Royal Marines are getting rid of people? If you were veering and hauling you would be thinking: why are we wanting to reduce the numbers of Royal Marines if the Army cannot recruit? It does not particularly strike me as rocket science.
Q6 Phil Wilson: So what you are saying is that defence might need more money, but if they get it they might not spend it wisely.
Professor Dorman: I think that they could spend it far more wisely than they are doing. The Levene reforms have stovepiped and limited the willingness of Ministers to veer and haul and move money between pots of gold—accounting budgets—
Q7 Leo Docherty: Gentlemen, obviously all of this needs to work back from the threat. Defence needs to respond to the threat, and this is what the modernising programme should be about. The Secretary of State and others have been very clear that their judgment is that the prime threat is state on state—that is, the threat from Russia. That judgment will have very significant consequences for the review. Do you think that is the right judgment to be making?
James de Waal: I have a certain amount of instinctive sympathy for that judgment, but I would come back to Tom McKane’s point. First of all, it is about saying, “Where is the evidence for that?” rather than just saying: “Do you think this is damaging?” Also, speaking in terms of activity, I would like a bit more concrete evidence. The reason I am saying that—
Q8 Leo Docherty: But Ukraine/Crimea would probably be cited as evidence.
James de Waal: My point is that there is a certain kind of generality in the way that this threat is expressed, which to my mind does not really reflect the way that I see the international situation changing.
I will give you an example. It seems to be common ground now that, whenever you have a senior British Government official talking about international security threat, they talk about the erosion of the rules-based international order. There are two problems with that. First, it is a rather tendentious view of how the world operates and how history over the last 70 years has operated. Secondly, it is not very specific. I would be saying: “If your focus is on strengthening the rules-based international order, you should be focusing on what are you doing to strengthen the United Nations and international law” rather than the discussion that seems to be going on which is, “What are you going to do about Russia?” To my mind that is much too general. I would like the Government to be saying, “Okay, our approach to dealing with Russia is that we want to stabilise the relationship, or we want to get to a position where we can persuade Russia that using the various levers that we object to is the wrong thing”. Instead we have rather vague language about “countering Russian activity”.
My point is partly proper scepticism about assertions, and secondly it is about, “What is your actual policy?” If these various exercises on defence and national security are to be successful, they need to be about supporting a clearly identified policy rather than some general concept of the way the world is at the moment.
Professor Dorman: To link in to what James has said about the rules-based society, there is a lot going on here. The International Affairs journal had a whole special edition just recently on that. If you look at things like the rise of China, it is in their interest for their leaders to follow a rules-based economy—they are just looking at adapting it to their interests. In many respects we have shared interests.
The big issue is that we are jumping to what threats are without necessarily understanding whether something is a threat or not. I am not a Russianist, but as the head of a journal, I get a lot of pieces in, and the narrative about Russia is very polarised. The level of understanding about what is happening with the Russian Government, what Putin has said and what they are actually trying to achieve strikes me as relatively thin.
Before we decide x is a threat or is not a threat, we really need to understand it. We need to put far more emphasis on our understanding before we start working out whether we buy raw offensive hardware or not. It might be the case that we do, but we need to understand this issue.
Tom McKane: I would agree with much of what has been said. I think in the case of Russia, people do have a pretty clear idea of what President Putin wants to achieve. Whether that is something that the United Kingdom Government and their allies are prepared to engage with is the question.
I go back to the point I made before. Let’s not forget that the idea of state threats to the UK has not just appeared in 2017-18. It was flagged up, certainly, in the 2015 review. It may have intensified since then, so I would want to know what threats we are talking about. Is it the threat from Russia to its neighbours, some of whom are our allies? In which case, what is it that we need to be able to do to respond to that threat?
Is it the threat of the North Korean missile programme to the UK? So okay, what do we need to do about that? Is our deterrent effective or not? Do we need to invest more in missile defences? If so, that is something you would not do on your own; you would do it within an Alliance context. So I would like to be a bit more specific than I have seen anybody be. Then one could look at what it is one needs to do and how much it might cost to do it.
Q9 Martin Docherty-Hughes: I wonder whether we can bridge the gap. One thing I haven’t heard about is accountability in the process. The Danish seem to have a slightly different model for their defence budget. The parliamentary agreement for the defence budget between 2018 and 2023 in Denmark has broad agreement across the whole of the Danish Parliament. It is not just a Government policy, it is a Parliament policy.
Would that allow us to bridge the gap by having an agreement on the defence strand but linking it not just to the security capability review but other elements of national policy? If we are worried about money, but Parliament agrees a process for the next parliamentary year, there is accountability about how you spend it but also clear policy about where it links to your security capabilities or inabilities.
Tom McKane: That raises rather big questions about the relationship between Parliament and the Executive, which is beyond my area of expertise.
Martin Docherty-Hughes: No, I don’t think it is.
James de Waal: I agree. I don’t have any useful thing to say about that.
Professor Dorman: It is interesting—it is not just the Danes; the French do a longer-term military programme. There is an argument you could make for a longer-term programme, and allocating resources for something like defence on the basis that it is a long-term measure.
As Tom indicated, you have interesting questions on how, as a Parliament, you have historically interacted with the Executive and whether you want to shift power back to Parliament. That is a much bigger question than purely defence. You will get to questions such as, why is it just about defence? Why don’t we do that for health and other areas of Government spending?
The other question is how that would link into the comprehensive spending review, because you are in a three-year cycle for that. If you go down that route, you are going to have to change the interaction of the Executive and Parliament. It does not quite fit in with the comprehensive spending review. You are going to have to change everything. From a defence point of view, it would be great to have a much longer way to budget their figures, but you are dealing with much bigger parliamentary issues that you would want to resolve, which have nothing to do with defence.
James de Waal: It is an interesting question. I did not have an immediate reaction, because although I thought it was an interesting idea, my question would be how the accountability would work. I can see a case for having longer-term assurance about the budget. I can certainly see a case for there being broader political consensus about what that ought to be, which would reduce some of the tensions that are present whenever you do a review of this sort of work.
But I wonder about the degree to which the Danish Parliament has real accountability and vision of what that budget is being spent on, and a process by which they can hold individuals to account if they have come before Parliament and said, “I need this money and we will spend it on these things.” How do they actually do that?
One of the frustrating things about our system seems to be that there is a big change of personnel between the various reviews. We not only have a different Prime Minister and Chancellor from 2015, we have a different Chief of Defence Staff, Under-Secretary at the Ministry of Defence and National Security Adviser. It makes it quite difficult in our system to say, “You told us this five or two years ago. Why hasn’t it worked? Why should we believe you this time?”
Tom McKane: Could I make one further point? From the Ministry of Defence’s point of view—I think you have taken evidence on this as a Committee many times—one of the chief problems is in managing large capital programmes over a period of time and managing to do that while also living within the annual capital limits. From an MoD point of view, anything that can be done that enables the process of end-year flexibility to work perhaps more flexibly would be helpful to them, but that’s a different thing.
Q10 Chair: I want to come back to the question of the separation of the defence strand from the security capability review. The security capability review was under the National Security Adviser, who is supposedly answerable to the National Security Council, which I for one tend to find a rather mysterious and amorphous body. To what extent really does the National Security Adviser have a free hand to shape the overarching policy that emerges from a process of this sort, and is it right to say that what he will be looking at and what the National Security Council will be looking at at any one time will be the current strategic situation as they see it and the situation as far forward as they think they see it? Would that be true?
James de Waal: The way I look at this is that there is an element in the process, as far as one can tell, because your point about opacity is well made—there is a point about how well the process works in terms of the objective criteria for what it is supposed to do: think objective thoughts about the security situation and work out the real policy on that. My thought about that is, how well have the conclusions of the Iraq Inquiry report been factored into Government policy? Have things really changed? The National Security Council is often presented as the answer to some of the problems that Britain has had in the past with running an effective security policy.
The other thing that is very much in my mind is the idea that this sort of activity is an intensely political process. So my instinct is to think that the degree to which the National Security Adviser can lead this process and push forward a unified agenda depends very much on their role as the henchperson of the Prime Minister.
Q11 Chair: Let me explain a bit more what I am trying to get at here. When you are making decisions about defence and in particular about hugely expensive defence equipment, the decisions you make now can affect your defence capabilities for the next 50 years in the case of aircraft carriers, for example. Let’s say that you have a body like the National Security Council, whose key figure is their professional National Security Adviser, whose main concern is looking at the security situation as it is today, and they do what the majority view among you seems to be, which is to lump together all the budgets. Indeed, Mark Sedwill, the National Security Adviser, told the Joint Committee on 18 December that he looks at a budget of about £56 billion, all in, for security, including the defence budget. If they are looking at the current situation or the situation as they see it in the relatively near future, how are they going to take decisions that are going to affect very long-term defence investments, such as in a system that is going to last for the next 50 years? Their view is surely going to be primarily determined by the current strategic situation. They are not going to take a very long view about whether it is sensible for the UK Armed Forces to have aircraft carriers or amphibious assault ships, for example, if, in the present scenario, there is no particular need for them—but there might be a need for them in 10, 20 or 30 years’ time. How do you react to that?
Tom McKane: I would distinguish between what the National Security Adviser is doing when there isn’t a review going on, if I can put it that way. I am aware that there has been criticism from a number of sources about the extent to which the National Security Council takes a strategic view as opposed to dealing with today’s crisis. But I do think that when there is a review going on, at least from what I saw most closely in 2010, they do consciously take a long-term view when it comes to big defence programmes.
The other thing I would say is that, yes, the National Security Council sets the strategic direction for the Ministry of Defence and other Government Departments, but the individual procurement decisions that get taken within that framework will involve the Ministry of Defence principally, the Treasury and to some extent the Department for Business.
Q12 Chair: Let me come back to Tom. You actually said, “Well, it is not just recently that we have started talking about state versus state conflict, it was up on the radar certainly by the time of the 2015 SDSR”. But a few years earlier than that, the current thinking was very much that it was all about counter-insurgency and it was likely—I see you are assenting—to be all about counter-insurgency for the next 40 years.
If we had a decision-making structure that had taken decisions in the midst of all that counter-insurgency emphasis, to do with the deleting of capabilities from the Armed Forces that relate to state on state warfare, where would we be now that state on state warfare is back on the agenda? Any observations from the three of you?
Tom McKane: I think, Chairman, you have illustrated very neatly the dilemmas that defence planners face when they are looking at these issues. I would not accept that in 2010, say, we believed that counter-insurgency was the game for the next 40 years. It was the game at the time.
Chair: No, it was a bit earlier than that.
Tom McKane: Yes, but I think it illustrates just how difficult it is. Many people have said it and I think it is fundamentally true that nobody can predict the future. Those who are involved in defence reviews and defence planning should keep that thought very firmly in their mind.
The difficulty with that is that it drives you to want to cater for every circumstance. The more circumstances you cater for, the more expensive it is likely to be. But as a generalisation, I would say that you should try as far as possible when you are planning future military capability to ensure that it is as widely usable as possible, that it is not something that is designed just for one type of operation.
Professor Dorman: If we look at when the Ministry of Defence had control of defence-sensitive reviews and authorised and ran them themselves, there is no evidence that the Ministry of Defence looked any more long term than the National Security Council. On the questions you are asking about whether the National Security Adviser thinks long term or short term, if you look at some of the historical defence reviews, you could argue that the individual Armed Forces, service chiefs etc. looked very short term and not long term.
Q13 Chair: But one advantage of having it under the MoD surely is that then Committees like this can interrogate both officials and politicians in great depth. We are having an argument, as you may know, about whether or not the National Security Adviser should even appear before us. If he were to appear before us, we would go in to these defence questions in very great depth for probably at least two hours. I had about eight minutes to question him on a fraction of them in my role as a member of the Joint Committee, because he appeared before them for two hours, covering 12 strands of his portfolio.
James, you talked a lot about accountability. There is not much accountability with this system, is there?
James de Waal: No, I agree. My response to your comments is that, first, it would be a good idea if this sort of forward planning had a stronger role in defence planning, and secondly, that it is very difficult, because your speculation about what the future of the world will be is an inherently weak and unprovable thing.
If you compare it with the strength of all the other things that come into play when you are doing defence planning—financial, political, industrial and institutional pressures—it is quite difficult to say, “Okay, just because I believe that this is what the future will be, I will make all these cuts and reallocations now.”
In fact, I was struggling, as we were talking about this, to think of a single major defence capability that had been cut or shifted purely or principally because of a view about what the world will be like in 20 years’ time.
Chair: Well, we nearly lost amphibious assault ships recently.
James de Waal: Actually, I would adduce the reverse lesson from that discussion. To my mind, that was a very good illustration of the strength of a particular institutional lobby that marshalled their arguments and rallied to the flag in defence of their own particular set of interests and of a view of the world that is helpful to those. I don’t necessarily see that discussion as evidence of strong, evidence-based forward planning.
Q14 Chair: If it hadn’t been leaked, what was going to happen to Albion and Bulwark?
James de Waal: Again, that is a very good point about accountability, isn’t it? Yes, on the one hand, you can use that to hold the Government to account, but I would also like to look at the leakers and ask who they are, what their agenda is and what their evidence is.
Q15 Mr Francois: With Iraq and Afghanistan, we essentially became involved in expeditionary wars with a counter-insurgency element against technologically inferior but nevertheless very determined enemies. Given the financial pressure the Department was under, even then, it tended to optimise its activity and its force mix in order to concentrate on those conflicts it was fighting at the time.
For instance, during that period, we ran down anti-submarine warfare, which had historically been one of our strengths, and our air defences—I saw some experience of that when I was at the Department myself. Increasingly, we planned to fight one type of war, and we planned less to fight another type of war, arguably despite some of the lessons that history had taught us.
The MoD’s policy is meant to dovetail with the national security strategy, as decided by the National Security Council. If you go back to 2010, we had a situation in which the national security strategy and SDSR 2010 declared that there was no existential threat to the security of the United Kingdom. Despite all the lessons that history teaches, we had almost gone back to the 10-year rule.
Now, we have come forward only eight years from that point and, because of events, we are in a position in which we argue that state on state threats are the primary risk, citing Russia as the most obvious near example. Would you accept that there are some risks with the National Security Council system, given the fact that, only eight years ago, it basically told us that we did not need to worry about state on state threats anymore? If we had carried on planning on that basis—deleting more and more of our conventional warfare capabilities—we would be in an even bigger mess than we are now.
Tom McKane: I recognise the picture that you are painting. There is actually a view, which was expressed by, for example, Robert Gates in his memoir of his time as Defence Secretary, where he said of the US system that it was far too focused on maintaining its capabilities to fight future wars and didn’t react quickly enough to deal with what they were grappling with at that moment. I certainly remember those kinds of discussions taking place inside the Ministry of Defence, and although we may have focused on counter-insurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, there were plenty of people who thought we should have done more to focus on that. I do not think that the existence of the National Security Council and the process introduced in 2010 had any particular impact one way or the other on the Government’s ability to ensure that they strike the right balance between the long and near terms. That would be my feeling.
Professor Dorman: In support of Tom, if you think pre-National Security Council, you articulated that we went into one type of conflict, and planned for and dealt with it, and then something else sprung up. That happened before, when the Department of Defence was entirely responsible for defence. In the latter half of the cold war we spent all our time focusing on the Soviet threat, the Warsaw pact, and world war three—but we had to deal with the Falklands. Defence planning assumptions were never, “We are going to defend the Falklands”. We gave that up in 1966, but then that sprung up on us. I don’t think it is a National Security Council issue; I think it is a natural tendency for an organisation to deal with the primary issues and threats in front of it. You shift resources towards those areas, and take them away from areas that you don’t think will come up and surprise you—but they will. The challenge for any Government is where they put their resources. They take risks, and they put their eggs in one basket, but something else will come up.
As you develop your policies and capabilities, that affects how other states react. The fact that we haven’t had to deal with some of these things is because we’ve had forces in place, and then something else happens. The problem you are identifying is nothing to do with the National Security Council; it is the nature of government. These events keep happening. We focus on one area, and something else happens.
Q16 Chair: But surely it is much easier for the National Security Council to agree to delete entire capabilities in an overall strategy than it is for the MoD to do so without there being much more push-back.
Professor Dorman: Well, if you think about the 1990 Options for Change—you got rid of the long-range surface-to-air missile capability.
Q17 Chair: But everybody could see what was going on, and you could have intense accountability and focused debates about it. You cannot with this present structure.
Professor Dorman: In that respect, I think it is less about the structure; it is how the structure is held accountable, and that is a different issue. I fully endorse everything you are saying about your ability to hold it to account, but it is about the structure of how the National Security Council operates. It is an issue of accountability. You are in the eighth year of this whole new process. You are in a learning process; it is still bedding down. Hopefully you will get better accountability as the years progress.
Q18 Chair: Just one more go. The difference between what happens before and after the taking out of the Modernising Defence Programme from the national security and capability review is that the former was fiscally neutral, other than the marginal increase year on year in the defence budget. By taking it back, they are going to do an exercise that will set out what the costs would be, and it may well argue the case for a significantly greater budget. Again, the new structure seemed to be quite happy to accept that they were going to have to operate within a financial straitjacket—the NSA structure, as it were. Now that it is back in the MoD, the MoD will make a case to have a bigger budget. If at the end of the process we end up with a bigger defence budget, that will be almost entirely because the defence strand has been taken out of the other process.
Professor Dorman: I was reading your excellent report from 2010 on the defence equipment programme, and you picked up a whole series of challenges and highlighted the financial hole. I thought that we could change the dates and names, and the report would still remain remarkably relevant
I would think, from my impression of what Government wants, that when they started the whole process with the current national security capability review, the assumption was that it was bit of a box-ticking exercise—it was light touch and cost neutral—and they had not quite realised what a financial hole the MoD was in. I suspect that was because the MoD was also less aware of what a financial hole it was in. To be fair, part of the financial hole has been caused by the exchange rate—we know that one—and the conspiracy that has been pretty much linked to every defence review we have ever had in the past about savings and things like that. So I think when they started the process, they weren’t aware of the whole financial hole. That is not a reflection of the National Security Council— I suspect that is the MoD not giving enough indication of the financial straits they were in.
Tom McKane: There is some evidence against that, though, Andrew. I think it was the Daily Mail that started breaking stories about problems in the defence budget last March, so the story was out there before the national security capability review was launched.
Professor Dorman: But the financial hole was built into the 2015 review. There is optimism of assumptions about sales of assets and optimism of assumptions about efficiency. And they used most of the reserves that had been built into the equipment programme to cope with overruns. That was all gobbled up. There was hardly any new money.
Q19 Mrs Moon: I hate to say this, but to be fair to the MoD—I got it out; I managed to say it—the mess that they are in has been compounded by the Treasury, because it was the Treasury that insisted on the cuts to capability. It was the Treasury that said, “You are going to have to get rid of the Nimrods.” It was the Treasury that said, “You are going to have to cut the number in the Armed Forces.” It was the Treasury that said, “You will have to sell off the Harriers.” Now they might not have specified the platforms, but they specified the huge level of cuts that have left us in a situation of playing catch-up ever since. If we hadn’t made those cuts in 2010, we wouldn’t be in the heck of a mess that we are in now, trying to buy extremely expensive platforms to replace the ones that they have cut.
So I have a little bit of a concern about this complacent idea that the MoD is not good at finances and is not good at judging what the future is going to be. Part of the problem has been a ridiculous level of damaging cuts, so that we are now having to spend double to replace some of the capability that was in place and that we are now struggling to do without.
Defence planning always make me think of the old story of the frog in the soup—you are always trying to guess whether the water is heating up or not. When someone comes along and says, “You are going to have to get rid of that, you are going to have to get rid of that, you are going to have to get rid of that,” it weakens the structure. It is difficult to say, but the MoD has been left picking up a mess that was of the Treasury’s creation, and the Treasury is still trying to deny its responsibility for the problem.
James de Waal: I’m sorry, I don’t agree.
Q20 Mrs Moon: Oh, so you think it was a good decision to get rid of the Nimrods and to get rid of the Harriers and to cut the Army.
Chair: Let’s just hear the answer.
James de Waal: I think, for a start, that there is a lot of unfair demonisation of the Treasury. My experience of dealing with the Treasury is that they are not just bean counters who don’t have any broader perspective. I think they are often representing a genuine public interest in saying, as we have been saying, “Show to us that you are spending public money responsibly.” Also, they have a broader interest. In 2010, the time when a lot of these decisions were taken, when Tom and I were both involved in the 2010 SDSR—myself in a much more junior position—there was, first, a major financial crisis hitting the country. Secondly, there was a sense that although the Ministry of Defence is doing a lot better job now—I hear your remarks there—it had spent many years not grappling with the ability to balance its budget. I think also there was a sense that it was an entirely fair question to ask the Ministry of Defence, “We’re spending around £40 billion a year on defence—how can you say to me that you are not able to deliver good defence from that?” On some of the capabilities that you mentioned, like Nimrod and Harrier—well, the Nimrod programme was almost a classic example of how not to run a procurement programme. It had been running at that point for more than 20 years, I think.
I would also say that at the time one of the reasons why the Nimrod was singled out for cuts was that the various institutional interests in the Ministry of Defence did not see it as a priority. It wasn’t as important to the Royal Air Force as jet fighters and it wasn’t as important to the Navy as carriers, warships or submarines. There were a few people arguing for these central ISTAR-enabling assets, but they were not sexy or prominent and they didn’t have the power. So the Treasury didn’t say, “You have to cut the Nimrod”; it said, “We’ve got this big problem with the economy and the world economy”—the Government said this, not just the Treasury—“but we’re going to protect the defence budget relatively. You need to come up with some options for how we do this.”
To follow Mark Francois’s remark earlier, I think you could credibly say that the problem with the defence budget at that point was that it had insufficiently focused on what the priority at the time were, which was to win the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. To bring in the NSS point, the Iraq inquiry pointed out the inability of central Government, including the Treasury and the Cabinet Office, to direct all the different bits of Government to deal with what was overall the Government’s top priority, but was not the top priority of the Departments concerned.
To my mind it is not right to blame the Treasury for this. I don’t think the Treasury should be demonised—as I said, I have a lot of sympathy for the Treasury for saying, “Justify to us why you are spending this enormous amount of money, and why it is right”. That is the right attitude to have. It is not a bean-counting exercise.
Chair: We will have to move on.
Q21 Gavin Robinson: Mr McKane, given your experience of previous reviews, what can we expect to be distinctly different in the Modernised Defence Programme?
Tom McKane: You are asking me to look into a crystal ball, which I happen not to have with me. I can answer by saying what I would like to see that might be a bit different. If you accept—I think I do accept—that the state-based threat to the United Kingdom is on the increase, then it allows you perhaps to go back to something more like what we would have done in the cold war, which was to examine the threat and design a capability that sits in an alliance to respond to that threat. In some ways, it is a more straightforward thing to do than what we have been doing since the end of the cold war, which is capability-based planning. That planning was based on not really knowing what we might have to cope with, so it was trying to cover a set of scenarios based on assumptions.
One thing that would be interesting, if it comes out of this, is if there are new threats arising, and if it is decided that the defence of the UK needs to be more focused on those. I would like to see a clear link between what those threats are and the capabilities we need to have in place in order to respond to those threats. That is one thing.
The other thing I would point to—it is not that the Ministry of Defence hasn’t sorted this itself; it has grappled with it but not made a huge amount of headway, in my view—is how one uses science and technology, and innovation, which might be something that you can find in the civil sphere rather than the defence sphere, to deal with one of the fundamental problems that defence budgets face in this country, America, France and anywhere else you care to look, which is the ever rising costs of equipment and to some extent personnel. You know Norman Augustine’s law—he said in 1984 that by 2054 the entire defence budget would be consumed producing a single tactical jet, which would be shared 3.5 days a week between the navy and the air force. Clearly that is an exaggeration, but it is not so much of an exaggeration. So we need some serious effort to try to address that problem.
Then, thirdly, there is implementation. If you look back through the reviews, we have talked about efficiency. It may be that the efficiency challenges have been too great; it may simply be that the Department has not implemented them well. There are other examples of where decisions have been taken and have not really been policed very carefully—aircraft carriers among them.
Q22 Gavin Robinson: Of those three things you would like to see—we can open this out to colleagues—have you detected anything that would suggest that those three elements will form a fundamental part of this Modernising Defence Programme and a potential departure from previous reviews?
Tom McKane: I do not have enough visibility of how the Department is approaching this to answer that question, I am afraid.
Q23 Gavin Robinson: Gentlemen, any observations that might suggest that that is the approach being adopted?
Professor Dorman: To pick up Tom’s point, it is interesting that we are back to talking about the language of threat. If you have a clear threat, in many respects it is easier for planners. In the cold war it was easy: you could count up the number of tanks etc. and work out a mix of quality and quantity and how you were going to deter that. As we increasingly look to state-based threats, that is an easier thing to plan for when creating your Armed Forces.
The biggest question you have with this modernisation programme will come down to who is actually going to run and drive it, and what their vision is. Historically, we have seen a number of defence reviews where basically each defence chief has said, “No more cuts. I need more resources.” The Defence Secretary has ultimately made a call and gone a particular route and found an answer. Gavin Williamson needs an answer. He may be able to get some more resources in, but he needs to come up with a narrative he can sell to Parliament about what the Armed Forces will need to look like.
It is interesting: we have seen in the past that some Defence Secretaries have really driven change. John Nott could not find an answer from the services and forced major change through, via significant cuts to the Navy. Are we going to see significant veering and hauling between different top-level budgets? If the logic of deterrence and a Russian threat is much more maritime-air, I’d cut the Army up.
I don’t know how brave a politician the Secretary of State is or how much room there is with the service chiefs to put through change. But what I would say is that there are significant options for change. You did your excellent report on the Royal Marines, and you pointed out that 42 Commando has been downgraded because they had to cut 200 people. Why the heck didn’t they cut 200 people from the band service? Why did they take 200 people out of the frontline command? There were over 300 Royal Marine band personnel; they could have cut the band service and kept 42 Commando in its existing form. That is a very small example of why we are not seeing major changes within the Ministry of Defence and the Armed Forces.
The hope, which in some respects is dictated in the Treasury, is: if you do not give the Ministry of Defence money, sometimes it makes people think. It is that classic Churchill line: “Gentlemen, we have run out of money; now we have to think.” My reason for not giving the Ministry of Defence money is that it might actually force them to make changes they need to administrative structures and things like that. Because what we know is that within the whole defence budget, we have real-terms increases in equipment and real-terms increases in personnel costs, and that is unsustainable in the long run. Something has to give. So if you held money back, you might get change. Then again, you might not. If we just write another cheque, the Armed Forces can spend lots of money, but not necessarily in the right areas.
Q24 Gavin Robinson: One thing that never seems to change through all reviews is the solution: an examination of procurement processes, an efficiency drive and change in business practice. Why does every review throw up that solution, and why does it never succeed?
Professor Dorman: Implementation is a very difficult thing to put through. You often see personnel changes, but we also just increase bureaucracy. Between 2012 and 2017, the number of three-stars in the armed services went up, while the proportion of other ranks has dropped by roughly 20%. If we start cutting numbers and squashing and flattening command chains, we will save an awful lot of money in overall personnel costs.
The Australian Armed Forces are one third of the British Armed Forces. They have one four-star and five three-stars, apparently. We have eight four-stars, and I can give you the figures for three-stars. We have enormous numbers of senior officers. Stop it. Cut them. Why are companies commanded by majors? In Europe and the US they are commanded by captains. What we have seen with jointery, and as a result of legacy, is that we have just got more and more top-heavy.
Q25 Gavin Robinson: It is a bit like the comedy sketch of having 20 boats and 80 admirals—it is a similar type of scenario. Gentlemen, do you agree?
James de Waal: I am inclined to give the MoD a bit more credit than Andrew Dormand for some of the efficiency savings that it has made and its improvements in its financial management. It still has quite a long way to go. There are a couple of problems. First, sometimes the defence debate is not very helpful. You have totemic things, such as having 82,000 troops in the Army. Sometimes that can help the chiefs in arguing their case; sometimes it can constrain them. If there is a more efficient way to achieve their deliverable output with fewer troops than 82,000, they ought to have the scope to do that, but sometimes the debate makes it difficult.
The other thing to say is that the consensus seems to be that in 2015 it was credible to ask for a certain level of efficiency savings, but those that were asked for were of a greater degree, especially when you factor into the calculation the fact that capabilities were not necessarily being reduced proportionately. I agree that efficiency savings are not always the answer, but there is certainly some scope to look at innovative ways in which you can deliver an output in a way that is not how you have always done it.
Tom McKane: I, too, would be rather kinder than Andrew about the procurement record of the Ministry of Defence. The recent NAO report seems to me to demonstrate that in 2015 a number of big new commitments were made that were much more expensive than the increases in the defence budget. It was assumed that the gap could be closed through efficiency savings, which it appears are not materialising.
Another point that I would make is that up until now the Ministry of Defence has by and large maintained a broad spectrum of capability. There are some capabilities that have been dropped over the years. For example, the suppression of enemy air defence was dropped 20 or 30 years ago. The assumption has been that we would be able to regenerate or reconstitute areas that we had given up. I think there is a limit to how thinly you can spread the butter, if I can put it that way. One of the questions that I imagine will be uppermost in the minds of those looking at this review will be whether we have got to that point or not.
Q26 Martin Docherty-Hughes: To go a bit further on the role of the Treasury during the defence review, presumably there would have been some kind of indication of a financial envelope during the defence review. Tom, do you have any thoughts on the Treasury’s role during it?
Tom McKane: Are you talking about the 2010 exercise, or just reviews in general?
Martin Docherty-Hughes: Just in general. You can talk about that specific one, but my question was about general defence reviews.
Tom McKane: A great debate takes place between those who say that defence reviews must be policy-led and those who say they should be financially driven. I take the view that neither one nor the other of those is right. Yes, you should allow policy to take you in the direction that it takes you, but you cannot disregard entirely the likely financial constraints that you will be living within. That even applies to the Pentagon; it is not completely unconstrained when it is doing its planning.
There is an interesting contrast to be made between 2010 and 2015. As James said, in 2010 all Government Departments were told that they were going to have to make substantial contributions to cutting the cost of government, but there was still room for negotiation towards the end of that review about precisely what the budget would settle at. As it happened, it was at a level that meant that it was necessary to do further work the next year to live within the limits that we had been given. In 2015, the Chancellor set out in July—several months before the conclusion of the review—that the Department would have a floor of 2% of GDP and would increase its equipment budget by 1% per year real over five years. In that case, the Department had a clear view of what money was going to be made available to it, but it does not seem to have produced a result that ended up being affordable.
There is not a right way to do this, but you need to take both of these factors into account. I suppose the ideal would be that you run the review, you let the policy take you where it is going to take you, there is then a debate within Cabinet or the NSC about how far the Government is prepared to fund that outcome and, if it is not prepared to fund it, you have to go back round the loop again. But you are rarely given that luxury of time.
Q27 Martin Docherty-Hughes: You made two points about policy and financial constraint. Given that the present Chancellor had three years in Main Building and, with all due respect to the present Secretary of State for Defence, probably knows slightly more than the current occupant, would you expect him to budge in terms of an increase to the budget, a neutral budget or a decrease in the budget?
Tom McKane: I would not want to venture into that kind of judgment. Members of the Committee are in a better position to make that judgment than I am.
Chair: Very diplomatic.
Professor Dorman: To be fair to the Chancellor, there are currently an awful lot of calls for spending from across the different sectors of the Government, and he has to balance those. Which voices are heard most will be a political call.
James de Waal: It depends very much on the political dynamic in the Cabinet. I would observe that it seems to be more politically difficult to cut a defence capability and be open about that than to increase the defence budget. That means that we often get cuts to capability by stealth rather than via the sort of discussion that you mentioned, Chair.
May I add a footnote here? I apologise if what I was saying earlier came across as disrespectful. I feel strongly about this, but I certainly did not want to lecture.
Mrs Moon: I’d never guess.
Q28 Martin Docherty-Hughes: To come back to you, James—the others may want to come in, too—is an increase in defence spending a necessary, if not sufficient, outcome of the MDP?
James de Waal: No, I don’t think that should be the attitude going into this. Again, following on from a lot of what we have been saying, it has to be evidence-based and justified, to the extent that is possible. It might be—I think this is unlikely, but one ought to approach this—that the conclusion is, “Actually, we want to reduce defence spending.” I think that is an idea that certainly you ought to have in mind when you go into this process, to make sure that it is as objective as you can possibly make it.
Q29 Martin Docherty-Hughes: And maybe widen that out a wee bit, because we heard the Foreign Secretary demanding more investment in the NHS in England, which has consequentials for the rest of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland through the Barnett formula. We had the NAO report about conflicts between internal budgets—say, for the Successor programme and other, conventional forces. Something has got to give. What is it?
James de Waal: There is an alternative, which is that you raise taxation. Again, it is quite striking that that has not really been discussed. That, again, points to one of the flaws in our debate about this: it is quite constrained in a number of ways. It is actually quite difficult to have a sensible debate about defence, given what seem to be the political constraints on having that discussion.
If defence really is as important as the Government says it is, you would expect some decision to follow from that. One’s supposition at the moment is that actually it is not as important as the Government says it is, because of the calculation that you have mentioned, or it is not nearly as important as everything else. Again, this is not just a British political point; it is a point for the international perception of the UK. If you are sitting in the Kremlin, first of all, are you paying any attention to the British Prime Minister at all? That is a good question to have in mind for any Government and any Prime Minister. And secondly, if you are seeing a Prime Minister saying that this is all important stuff and then you are looking at what the practical measures are, that is a calculation that will be made as well.
Professor Dorman: The Prime Minister has used the words “global Britain” to emphasise that with Brexit going through, the UK needs a much bigger footprint across the globe. There is a logical case for increasing defence spending to support that—to maintain the capabilities that we have and increase some capabilities.
That said, this is one heck of a political battle, because not only do we have all the domestic pressures; you are also going to get, within this defence review, a number of our allies putting pressure on particular areas. We saw that in 2010: the US put out what they perceived to be the red cards that you couldn’t touch. So we have internal totems that we cannot touch politically; you are going to get a load of other pressures coming on; and then you are going to have the international dimension. It is for the Cabinet to work out the ultimate bargain that they are going to produce out of this, and it is not clear where they are going on it, because so many people are calling for funding. To be fair, the Treasury has everybody saying, “Give me money,” and it somehow eventually has to balance the books. It is stuck between them. So it’s down to politics now. I think it is going to be less about what the defence needs actually are and more about the political battles that will go on.
Tom McKane: I would focus less on the budget per se. What I would want to see is this: what are the capabilities? What is the size and shape of the Armed Forces that comes out of this? If there is some reshaping because it is deemed necessary to address the external environment, that’s one thing. If all that one sees coming out of this is some cuts that are attributable to the fact that there is not enough money, that would be unfortunate and potentially damaging, particularly at a time when we are trying to persuade our allies in Europe to increase their capabilities.
Q30 Mr Francois: Working from first principles, let’s say you have a defence review at a time when there is no existential threat—you were mainly fighting a counter-insurgency campaign overseas in 2010—and you are undertaking a defence review at a time when you have declared that state-based or state threats are now your priority. As I think you have pointed out, Chairman, that gives you in some ways an easier thing to plan against; you have a set of known or relatively well known capabilities and you can then match your forces to try to deter against that. Working from those sorts of first principles, presumably the MDP should come out with a bigger ask and bigger demands for defence than its 2010 equivalent.
Professor Dorman: In many respects you saw in 2010 the doctrine of a 10-year rule. That was an entirely logical thing to do if you predicted the world in 2010. On getting out of Afghanistan, it looked like it was a state on state war. We were in one heck of a financial pickle. That was a logical decision to take. You can go into the details, but as a principle it was not a bad call.
Q31 Mr Francois: Except history teaches us that the last time we took a logical decision like that, it ended badly.
Professor Dorman: But the logic of a 10-year-rule is basically that you are reviewing and reviewing it. In 2015, it was “Hang on, it has got a lot worse; we have got to adjust it.” You saw in 2015 the row-back on this. That’s logical. What is interesting from all that has come out so far is that compared to 2015, in 2018—James has identified whether there is really evidence—most of the commentators and national security advisers have said that the threats and challenges are more significant and more immediate, so the logic is, you would think, an uplift in resources going into defence and capabilities. You can have debates about where they should be, but you would expect more money to go in. As we have said, you are in Brexit world, in a world of other competing resources. Public opinion is incredibly supportive of the Armed Forces and in principle supportive of defence spending. It is not supportive of taxation.
Mr Francois: Tell us about it.
Professor Dorman: And that is the basic problem you have got. There is not a drive or call for a significant uplift in defence spending—unlike, for example, in the States. I use that 10-year rule example. If you go back to the ‘30s, there was a significant input for raising defence spending once they went back to that. Ironically enough, one of the greatest advocates of helping Defence to spend money was the Treasury, which told them how to break the rules and spend more money quickly, because they said, “We’ve got a problem.” So logically there should be some degree of uplift, but it is not clear where it will be or what it is for and where it is coming from.
Tom McKane: I would say that Andrew might be right, although it is possible that if you adopt a focus and as a consequence are relegating other priorities you can produce an outcome that does not automatically demand an increase in resources. The other thing it is worth the Committee bearing in mind is that when we talk about the different types of capabilities that are required for different scenarios, as I was saying earlier I think on the whole we have capabilities that are usable in a range of scenarios. On many of the capabilities that you require for expeditionary warfare and stabilisation operations, you certainly would require to deal with a threat in Europe, for example: strategic lift, both air and sea lift, fast jet capability and so on. It is not self-evident that there is a completely different set of capabilities that are needed.
Q32 Mr Francois: Is there a tension between needing to be prepared to meet state-based threats close to home and to sustain out-of-area capabilities? How do you design a force structure to meet those sorts of challenges?
Professor Dorman: In a sense, what we are looking at is a number of roles. We are looking at counter-terrorism and defence of the UK home base, which is largely counter-terrorism. You are looking at UK support to NATO and its involvement within NATO, with a particular focus on Russia. You are looking at the south Mediterranean and refugees and so on. And then you are looking at the wider role.
It is interesting if you look at the CGS’s January speech about the Army. He talked about the threats and the importance of having people on the ground. For the Baltics, is it more important to have people on the ground or to have Typhoon strike squadrons in there? It is an interesting question. We can do these things in different ways. Actually, some of the expeditionary forces would be ideal to support some NATO missions. It is about prioritisation. If we are looking at NATO allies, take for example the reinforcement of Norway, where 3 Commando Brigade is training in expeditionary warfare. It just so happens to be in a colder climate compared to some of the other areas where we have done it. The question becomes about how much you really want to focus on the Army and armoured warfare, and how much you want to focus on other areas. I think that is the biggest tension.
Ironically, if you look at the Army in the last decade—actually, for the last 50 years—it is constantly swinging between wanting to be an Army focused on some form of armoured warfare, and an Army that wants to do what used to be colonial policing and became stabilisation and expeditionary warfare. It is perpetually flitting between the two. The Army would ideally like to choose one of those missions and just do that one, because constantly flitting between the two is incredibly expensive.
Q33 Mrs Moon: Can I ask you a question about the tension between sustaining conventional capability and investing in emerging technology? What is your magic wand for that?
James de Waal: A lot of people now say that it is not either/or. You need both.
Q34 Mrs Moon: But how do you balance it?
James de Waal: The first thing I would bear in mind is that your starting point has to be that Britain is contributing to an alliance, so you do not just look at what capabilities Britain has, you look at what the alliance has. Then you work out, “Okay, what can Britain contribute to this?” The prevailing thinking at the moment is that Britain’s role, particularly in supporting the UK, is that we can provide a full package. We can do a bit of everything. It can be self-sustaining. You do not need to depend on the US or the coalition leader for a lot of activity. That is one of the first things one ought to think about: should we be moving away from that model and say, “You know what, we can’t do all this, we need to reinvest in some of these other things, these new technologies, and that is what we are going to bring to the coalition.” To my mind, that is as much a political decision as it is a capability decisions.
The other point, which people made earlier on, is the difficulty of turning taps on and off. This is a long-term investment, which makes life quite difficult. If you also see defence capabilities partly as an industrial policy—Governments are often quite poor at picking winners—that is an approach to industrial policy that sometimes has not worked very well in the past. So what is your approach to dealing with that? Maybe one should say, “Okay, we will let the market decide what the capabilities are and we will go with that,” and have less of a directive, hands-on approach to telling industry what sort of capabilities you want, and actually say, “Okay, tell me what you can deliver and then we will see what use we can make of it.”
Professor Dorman: It is a great question. Following on from James, there are dynamics here and our allies play a big part. To use a little example, one of the things the Navy currently wants to do is significantly reduce its number of mine countermeasure ships, to take half of them out of the sea, so it can then relieve that funding to reinvest, because it wants to move to doing mine countermeasures with unmanned vessels. Can we in some areas say, “We want to invest and skip the next generation, and rely on allies to fill that gap”? That is one of the questions you can start to look at.
Another question, when we look at our conventional capabilities, is how much needs to be ready today and how much needs to be ready in six months’ time? You can save money by making forces immediately available. What forces actually have to be available today? What forces can be set at a lower level of readiness and be regenerated within six months? That is a judgment call about risk management.
One of the areas we can start to look at is how much do we assume that everything has to be ready to go and how much can we put on to the back burner to liberate money for investment in technology? We have to do the investment, because if we do not, we will just fall behind. There is a perpetual tension. As James was alluding to, it is about looking at partners to fill some gaps so you can reinvest, and getting out of some areas. We will have to increase our dependency. It is interesting if you think about the recent announcement by the Royal Air Force that it is deploying Chinooks to support the French in Sahel. The French have not got heavy-lift helicopters—we have. What can we rely on them to give us? We need to start looking at that a lot more.
John Spellar: Maritime patrol aircraft, for a start, because we are having to rely on them for that.
Professor Dorman: It is one of the options. The question you have is which areas do you think you can rely on allies for and which can you not, and what can you support. We cannot afford to have everything we do not have, so the question is what are the ones you are going to become dependent on others for.
Tom McKane: I was just thinking about Mr Spellar’s interjection. We all know that if the European allies collectively spent their defence budgets in as collectively efficient a way as they could do, the output for the alliance would be much greater, but that runs right up against the whole problem of national sovereignty that Governments continue to grapple with. If this Committee could come up with a solution to that dilemma, it would be a huge win. Going back to your question, I agree with the others: it is not really an either/or—new, innovative technologies or the existing—
Q35 Mrs Moon: I was not suggesting it was. I was asking how we balance them.
Tom McKane: You balance them by asking yourself, “What is the capability we need? What is the most cost-effective way of providing that?” It is not always the case that, for example, unmanned is much less expensive than manned, as those of you who have looked into the cost of sustaining unmanned air vehicles might have discovered. The fundamental point is that whatever you do, you have in existence a lot of kit and people, and you have a lot that is on order, which is probably so committed that it would not be sensible to change your plan. A lot of this is about how you make the best and most imaginative use of what you have and what is coming in order to deal with the threats that you foresee.
Q36 Mrs Moon: In terms of your comments about Europe, is PESCO not an attempt to resolve that dilemma?
Tom McKane: I was trying not to get drawn into that whole area. I was making a NATO Alliance point.
Mrs Moon: But PESCO is about the NATO Alliance now.
Tom McKane: Let’s wait and see how successful that initiative is. Anything that produces better capability for the money that is being spent is a good thing in my book, but as I have said, there are national sovereignty and freedom of action issues that you have to take proper account of.
Professor Dorman: When we look at bringing forces together, we often focus on capabilities or we share them with somebody else. It is interesting that we do not often look at the things behind that area.
Mrs Moon: I’m sorry—I missed that bit.
Professor Dorman: I did a briefing to the European air chiefs, and we spent so much time focusing on joint capabilities and on bringing the combined capabilities together, but one of the ways to potentially save money would be to look at increasing how much you can share in the back office stuff. I looked at the air chiefs and said, “You each have a different flying training system. Your advanced strike aircraft and training is one thing, but to teach an individual the basics to fly a helicopter or to get an aircraft off the ground and down again is standard. Why do you effectively have 26 different flying schools going on? Wouldn’t it make logical sense to have one or two?”
We tend to focus on our collaboration at the frontline, not on back-office areas. Teaching someone to fly a helicopter or a basic aircraft isn’t that critical a sovereign area, I would suggest. Sovereign is making him a combat aircraft pilot, beyond that. This is one of those areas we just haven’t really explored that much. There are whole areas like that where we could start potentially to make significant savings.
Q37 John Spellar: I want to draw together some strands—themes—that have been running through the very interesting discussion today. In other words, how do we create the conditions where there is sufficiently frank discussion, exactly as we are describing, about strategic requirements within defence and, as has been touched on, more widely across Government? Also, how do we create the conditions for that internal challenge within those discussions? In other words, who is playing red team?
Tom McKane: James has some strong views on this. I am slightly hesitant, given that there are people in the room who have seen this close up and dirty as it were. The Ministry of Defence tries to have proper debates about these issues. I certainly have seen, and I am sure that one or two of you have, some of these frank, heated debates. There is a risk that they descend into inter-service rivalries, and I think that is almost impossible to get rid of. You simply cannot expect to eliminate that, but you have to find ways of ensuring that there is a single source of truth and evidence on which the different opinions at least can be exposed.
More could be done in red teaming, in providing that kind of challenge. I think that the Ministry of Defence—and I was as guilty of this as anybody when I was there—will say how important it is but then find that when the occasion arises and they are very short of time it is difficult to expose themselves properly to that challenge. More could be done in that way.
The Chairman referred to the whole question of how the Department is held to account by Parliament, and there is a whole issue about just how much public debate and exposure there is of the issues. We have seen different models adopted over the years, from the relatively very public to the much more restricted. To some extent, that is dependent on how much time you are allowed to undertake the review.
Professor Dorman: I can see you are writing furiously, James.
James de Waal: There are a number of technical and practical issues. This is an absolutely key question, for example, about how the Ministry of Defence or the national security secretariat does consultation. In my experience, often when they talk about consulting wiseacres like us, they are interested in engagement. So they are not actually up for challenging some of the basic assumptions about either their view of the world or what the particular exercise they are involved in is all about. For example, if you wanted to go along and say, “Actually, I think we need a fundamental reassessment of the UK’s relationship with the United States rather in the same way as we have done a reassessment of its relationship with the European Union”, no one would be interested in that, for very obvious practical reasons.
There is also an issue about the general attitude of defensiveness and opacity that you often see in parts of Government, particularly in the Ministry of Defence. But where I would put a certain amount of emphasis is on the general kind of dynamics of the defence debate in this country. At the risk of caricaturing it to some degree, there is often an assumption that more is better—that more spending is, by definition, good. That may be the answer, but that cannot be the starting point, as we have been saying throughout.
John Spellar: That’s true, but that is the mechanism by which you do that.
James de Waal: We have all been saying that we want the Government to show they are working, and not just make assertions, and, “Can you show us some calculations that we can independently verify and hold you to account about, two or three years later?” That is the key thing.
Q38 John Spellar: You touched on our allies. How could or should we incorporate the views of our international allies, their militaries and governments?
James de Waal: Again, you put your finger on another particular weakness on the defence debate—it is a national debate, whereas I think the reality that people often say but do not actually implement is that Britain’s value almost always is as part of an alliance. In some ways, the fact that we are doing a national exercise is a problem. One of the things that this process of doing a series of defence and security reviews seems to generate is a much more automatic basis in consulting allies, talking to them, explaining to them what we are doing and listening to their concerns. It seems to be that the people in Whitehall involved spend an awful lot of time doing that.
The difficulty is getting our allies to give their honest opinion. Sometimes they are quite diplomatic, but there is also a dynamic where they want to be helpful to the internal Whitehall debate, so will support one particular voice in Whitehall rather than the overall assessment. Often, you get quite different views if you go and talk to the Pentagon from if you go and talk to the US National Security Council. To what degree will you say, “Our allies say that the British end to anti-submarine warfare capabilities might not be so important”? Are you really going to take that and turn that into a decision to cut that capability, if the pressures to maintain that capability domestically are much stronger? There is a political question there, too.
Tom McKane: Can I add to what James just said? I agree with all that he said, but to pick it out a little more: it is not simply a question of getting a different answer if you go to the Pentagon or the National Security Council. You will get a different answer from the Secretary of the Navy from the Secretary of the Army, for example.
I have found that most allies that I have been involved in consulting are somewhat nervous about giving you very clear advice, because they recognise that these are matters for the British Government to settle. They do not really want to be accused of interfering in that process. James’s point about perhaps not looking enough at these questions in an Alliance context is probably true. I happened to be rereading the 1998 review yesterday, in preparation for coming here; it says somewhere in the foreword that we have looked at these issues from a national perspective and have come up with conclusions that suit the UK. To the extent that they are also useful for the Alliance and partners, that is fine. That has tended to be the way that we have done them. You could take more account of the NATO planning system than we do, but that runs into domestic political and industrial considerations.
Q39 John Spellar: The 1998 review is definitely worthy of a reread. Finally, a couple of sentences from each of you on what lessons you think we can take from past reviews to inform and improve the outcome of the MDP.
Professor Dorman: Two things to take from past reviews? One is to implement them properly and fully. Whatever decisions you take in the review, implement them in full. Historically, we have not done very well with implementation. The implementation team is quite useful as a way of monitoring how successful you are at putting this thing in. The first thing is to implement them. Whether they are good ideas or bad ideas, at least do something.
The second thing I would take from this is that reviews are an opportunity to galvanise and make change. The Ministry of Defence has got a real opportunity here to make significant changes if it wants to. The question is therefore about getting a team around it that will come up with the answers and put them through. With Paul Cornish, I came up with a piece in 2015, which I can flag to your International Affairs journal, on 10 golden rules of all defence reviews. One is that invariably we get into conflicts immediately after them. Hopefully, that is not one to do. The key thing is implementation and innovation.
James de Waal: I would say two things. One is to be modest in your aspirations. One of the problems that went wrong with 2015 is that it was presented as “Britain’s coming back”. Linked to that, my second point is that, although you are inevitably going to be focused on a lot of the detail, bear in mind what the overall message of your review internationally is going to be. Again unfairly, 2010 was represented internationally as “Britain’s giving up”. Unfairly, 2015 was represented internationally as “Britain’s back”. In doing this review, one needs to have in mind whether you are going to get a bit of coverage on “Fox & Friends” in the morning, which the President is going to see and then tweet about. If so, what do you want him to tweet? If you are sitting in Europe, what is the message to the people we are negotiating with about Brexit and security? That is an entirely reasonable thing to have in mind when you are doing a review.
Tom McKane: Establish the framework that you are going to use, linking the threat into the capabilities you require, and try to stick with it as far as you can and do not get blown off course. I absolutely agree with Andrew about implementation. Don’t fool yourself about the potential efficiency savings. That is the other side of the coin of Andrew’s and James’s points. The risk is that at the end of a review there is a gap between the money available and the policy and capabilities you are determined to pursue, and you convince yourself that you can plug it by making a bigger efficiency assumption from the one you built in from the outset. I have seen that happen on more than one occasion.
Q40 Chair: One last point. We saw in the national security strategy previously a heavy dependence on a risk-assessment process. For a long time after that, people would quote certain risks and say, “Oh, well that’s only a tier-three threat.” Things that were a tier-three threat then are a tier-one threat now, so how valuable is that process? Should it be guiding our policy in the way and to the extent that it does?
Professor Dorman: You are going to have to do some degree of prioritisation. If you get the futurology wrong, you are guaranteed to get it wrong. You have got only so much money and so many resources, and you need a methodology to prioritise them.
Q41 Chair: Wouldn’t a logical conclusion be to try to keep as many capability options as possible open?
Professor Dorman: The challenge, and one of the problems I see with our Armed Forces now, is that because they are spread so thinly you end up with a lot of overhead and relatively small capability spread over a whole series of different bases. If you want to get more bang for your buck, your logic is to reduce the overall number of capabilities and to focus on key areas. So you have a challenge there between—
Q42 Chair: Except of course that if a serious conflict breaks out, albeit that you may not have the time you need, that is the point at which all the resources that were denied to defence in the past are suddenly made available. If you have lost a capability completely, you can find it very difficult to restore.
Professor Dorman: That is the challenge of defence, isn’t it?
James de Waal: This comes back to your point about evaluating risk. If you don’t think serious conflict is going to break out, you don’t have this problem. Whether you think it is going to break out or not depends on your analysis and, again, my view of the risk assessment is: what is the methodology, is it the right methodology, what is the evidence and is it the right evidence? So far it is difficult to see what the answer to that question is.
Tom McKane: I absolutely take your point, Chair, and it reminds me of words that were given to me by a former boss, the late Sir Michael Quinlan, who—if you will permit me—said: “In matters of military contingency, the expected, precisely because it is expected, is not to be expected. Rationale: What we expect, we plan and provide for; what we plan and provide for, we thereby deter; what we deter does not happen. What does happen is what we did not deter, because we did not plan and provide for it, because we did not expect it.”
That is, kind of, the point you are making, to which I would say two things. First, I go back to my point about providing capabilities that have the widest possible utility, which helps you to manage that risk. Secondly, when you are looking at risk, you are looking at both the probability and the impact. If something that doesn’t have a terribly high impact is of low probability, it probably doesn’t matter if you haven’t taken care of it; if it is of very high impact, then it does. I would always try to remember to ask myself the question when thinking about these things, what happens if I have got this judgment wrong?
Chair: An excellent point at which to leave the discussion. May I thank all three of you very much indeed? It has been most enlightening, and we are extremely grateful.