The MoD’s triumph is more about politics than strategy

The Government’s announcement on defence spending certainly catches the eye. The largest increase in military investment for 30 years promises 40,000 new jobs, the development of new structures to support space and cyber operations and the creation of entirely new capabilities based on artificial intelligence. It keeps a Tory manifesto promise and begins to set a context for Brexit Britain. 

So far, so good; but does it make strategic sense? I have no idea and neither has anyone else because the strategic blueprint it is meant to underpin will not be available until the Integrated Security Review is published in the New Year. Only then will it be possible to check off strategic ambition against the instruments designed to prosecute it. In the meantime, it’s a bit like going into a restaurant and being given a bill without first seeing the menu.

So what is it all about? Some of it is about conforming to Treasury procedures and timetables, but mostly this is about politics — in its global, continental, domestic and institutional forms. In global terms, it’s about sending an early message to the Biden administration that, while the EU may be the locus of its attention in economic terms, Britain will be the one European partner to front up with real and reliable military capability. In continental terms, it’s about putting our money where our Brexit mouth is. President Macron can utter the words “strategic autonomy” but this gives the slogan manifest form.

In domestic terms, it follows hard on the heels of the Green Manifesto and which, taken together, might go some way to re-acquainting the nation with competent government. And, in institutional terms, it’s about the perennial political battles between competing Whitehall departments, with what looks like a victory for No10 over No11 Downing Street and of the hard instruments of power held by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) over the soft instruments, particularly aid, held by the Foreign Office. 

Denis Healey famously observed that he only began to understand politics after he was appointed to run the MoD, and inter-service rivalry continues to have a sectarian intensity that conventional politics rarely emulates. Away from the more obvious headlines and attracting the attention of only the most committed enthusiast, a slow burn tension is coming to a head.

The Royal Navy believes itself to be the custodian of a manifest national destiny. That destiny implies that maritime power is Britain’s strategic birthright and the guarantee of its future global relevance; that those states with strong maritime traditions — Athens, Venice, England — tend towards plural political institutions and open markets, while those with strong continental traditions — Sparta, Prussia and Napoleonic France — tend towards tyranny and autarky. In pursuing its own institutional ambitions, therefore, the Royal Navy has also felt it tapped into deeper and more enduring themes that define the nation.

It was against this background of historical self-justification that successive Navy Boards embarked on the procurement of the latest generation of aircraft carriers. Navies have always tended to be defined by their capital platforms — the 74-gun ship of the line that fought Trafalgar, the Dreadnoughts that fought at Jutland or the Yorktown Class of US aircraft carrier that fought the Pacific Campaign — and the simple calculus has always been that a navy without a defining capital capability is automatically relegated to the second rank, a condition no First Sea Lord could contemplate on his watch.

But going for big ships and expensive aircraft comes with risks. An aircraft carrier operating by itself is a target, not a capability. To operate effectively, carriers need the protection of the ships, submarines and aircraft that make up an integrated task group and defend against the sub-surface, surface, air, space and cyber threats that will populate any hostile maritime environment. By themselves, the Elizabeth II Class of carriers and the F-35 aircraft that will operate from their decks cost enough to bend the entire procurement programme out of shape, but, when the supporting cast was costed in as well, the bill became prohibitive.

The huge and perhaps existential gamble the Royal Navy therefore took was to go for the carriers in the hope that the other components of capability would eventually follow — a calculation that was in part an act of faith and in part a plea to the procurement principle of coherence. Coherence takes the view that capability whole is more than the sum of its constituent parts, a sensible but fair-weather doctrine that was unable to survive the vicissitudes of financial constraint and mismanagement that has characterised defence in recent years. As a result, it began to look as if the carriers were an unusable vanity project or only capable of operations when protected and sustained by allied naval units.

That is, until the small print of the funding announcement, which contained a commitment to significantly increase the number of frigates and afloat support ships, exactly the sorts of units required to build out the carriers into a tenable expeditionary capability. Frigates are also the ubiquitous workhorses of the fleet and an increase in numbers will lead to a corresponding increase in the global footprint of the Royal Navy. The sense of relief — and perhaps vindication — emanating from the First Sea Lord, Admiral Tony Radakin’s, office today must be palpable. 

The historic judgement may be that the Naval Service, informed by a singular sense of purpose, held its nerve against the odds and eventually delivered a world class military capability. Alternatively, it may be that the fluky combination of a financially incontinent Prime Minister and the Brexit phenomenon intervened to save the bacon of a Royal Navy that had recklessly embarked on the procurement of ships designed to support its institutional self-image, rather than the nation’s strategic requirement. Either way, things now look different and we can begin to guess the outline of post-Brexit national strategy.

If the wars of 9/11 are defined in popular memory by a single phrase, it is probably boots on the ground, and a generation of the British public now associates military strategy with messy small unit operations, in dusty places and with uncertain outcomes. This is completely at odds with our history, where large-scale land operations were both exceptional and aberrant. Hulls in the ocean evokes a less vivid picture but may well be the leitmotif for the next strategic era, as the British Army continues to atrophy in manpower and equipment terms and the appetite for its employment remains at an historic low.

We will continue to do our bit for NATO and look to thicken up bilateral defence relations in Europe, but if there is a single geographic focus it may well be the Indian Ocean. This would play to our emerging capabilities, push back against the creation of another Chinese lake, demonstrably support our American, Indian and Australian allies (and trading partners) and form part of a national re-branding process. We’ll see soon enough but what is clear is that the epochal reversion to a maritime national strategy has started.

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