I’ve already written out my thoughts about the
SDSR 2020 and, despite the enduring noise about Cummings and cuts and other
unpleasant news, i’m sticking to that description, for now at least. You can
find my predictions here, if you haven’t yet read them and want to know what my
position is.
This post, which I hope I’ll be able to keep
short, is more of a comment to the circus of rumors, leaks and “suggestions”
coming from experts ahead of every contemporary SDSR. It’s a cry of agony in
front of the increasingly empty rhetoric of “sacred cows” and an expression of
the deep incredulity and frustration with which Allies observe the painful
process with which Britain, more often than not, commits self-harm.
The gut feeling is that those who profess the
loudest objectivity are actually the most partisan, and that the “sacred cow”
catchphrase has become an easy and good-looking way to advocate for cuts to
fall on anything other than the pet project of the day. It makes it look like you are being all innovative and hard nosed about things.
Most of those “sacred cows” are, in fact, valid
capabilities than nowhere else in the world are subject to the same kind of
denial. Moreover, these “sacred cows” are actually UK capabilities which work,
which have cost billions to build up and which are competitive and respected
worldwide.
I’ve already written about the absurdity ofclaiming that aircraft carriers are somehow obsolete, and I won’t go over that
subject again. In this occasion I will only remark that no one else in the
world, nowhere, would ever consider chopping the legs off from under a key
national capability at the dawn of its service life, after 20 years of efforts,
sacrifices and expenses to build it up.
The UK has a history of throwing away billions
of pounds in exchange for absolutely nothing, and the Nimrod MRA4 fiasco is
there to remind us all of how majestic the wasted sums can get. But Nimrod
MRA4, according to what we are told at least, did not work and was “never going
to work”. Personally, I doubt it, but we have to take it at face value. If we
do, the question then becomes why it wasn’t stopped earlier, before wasting
over 3 billion pounds, and who is responsible and why nobody is paying for such
a disaster, but this is another story.
The carriers work. There is no excuse in the
world that will justify turning them into pure waste, because it will be due
only to self-harm, if it ever happens.
I will rather focus on the 16th Air
Assault Brigade and 3rd Commando Brigade, which have increasingly
become THE sacred cows, together with the capabilities they represent:
parachuting and air assault, and amphibious capability.
This is the third SDSR in a row that begins
with calls to “merge” the two brigades and / or drastically cut back on both
capabilities, withdraw the amphibious ships etcetera. It is as illiterate a
proposal as they can be. Merging the two brigades to achieve savings would
almost certainly mean disbanding the brigade supports: either 7 RHA or 29
Commando RA; either 23 or 24 Engineer Regiments, and so along. The result would
be the net loss of yet another set of Brigade enablers, which are already the
true weakness of the British Army, which has already taken this path in 2010,
with the result that there are 31 infantry battalions but only about a third of
those sit within a brigade with any realistic chance of deploying and operating
as a combined arms force.
It is true that it is increasingly dangerous to
employ parachute assaults or even employ helicopters and operate in the
littoral in a world of long-range SAMs and anti-ship missiles, but it is not
true that either capability has ceased to be relevant. Nobody else is giving up
on them: France has used small-scale parachute assaults as early as 2013 during
Operation Serval; Russia and China are nowhere near considering giving up such
manoeuvre capabilities, despite being the countries which are supposedly
causing both capabilities to become obsolete. Russia and China are also
pursuing massive strengthening of their amphibious forces.
Littoral manoevre and air manoeuvre remain as
critical as they have ever been. It is true that capabilities and tactics must
evolve as the sword and the shield battle it out for superiority, as it has
been ever since warfare began. Just like I said for the carriers, it is not the
ability to put troops ashore from the sea or from the air that becomes
“obsolete”: you still need to be able to do that. What might become obsolete is
your methods of doing it, and, above all else, the instruments you employ to
make your way through enemy defences. It is not the amphibious ship that has
become obsolete, per se: it is your ability to protect it from enemy missiles
that you no longer trust. What undoubtedly needs modernization is the Ship to
Shore connection. Slow and vulnerable landing craft need to be succeeded by
connectors which can defend themselves and move much faster and over longer
distances to restore the unpredictability of littoral manoeuvre.
The quality of the debate on both air and
littoral manoeuvre has dropped to such desperately low levels that we have
“experts” that sometime literally argue, at the same time, that air assault is
now impossible due to the proliferation of surface to air missiles, but that
the Marines should become a lighter force which gives up on surface manoeuvre
in favor of long range raids enabled by helicopters.
Have you spotted the problem?
If helicopters are the future of Littoral
Manoeuvre, they can’t be simultaneously obsolete. If air assault is no longer
feasible, why helicopters coming from the sea are an answer? It’s absurd.
It’s what happens when your argument is
actually nothing but a call for the cuts to fall on anything but what you care
about.
Several of the UK defence commentators and
experts have fallen in love with the nebulous STRIKE concept, for reasons that
remain mysterious. There have even been repeated suggestions that STRIKE makes
littoral manoeuvre unnecessary, because you can just land the STRIKE brigade in
a friendly port and then drive on road to the front. This has even been offered
as a solution to avoid the risks connected with facing the Anti-Access, Area
Denial capability of a peer enemy, which supposedly make the Royal Navy
incapable to operate in the area.
How is that a sane argument to make?
If you are
dealing with an enemy sophisticate and powerful enough to keep the Royal Navy
and Royal Air Force out, how the hell are you going to create trouble for them
by driving wheeled APCs up to their border?
Moreover, in a war scenario, will a country
nearby to your enemy want to get involved, and let you land your forces there
and then drive all the way to the border, exposing itself to all sorts of
dangers? Sometimes they will. Sometimes they won’t want to get involved at all.
And ultimately, if you are landing in a safe
port and then driving up to the front, why not do it with heavier, more
credible armour than with expensive but nearly unarmed BOXERs? This is not a
replacement for littoral manoeuvre and amphibious capability: it’s normal land
warfare. Nothing at all new here.
5 years on I’m still waiting for a single
rational explanation of how a mixture of BOXERs and AJAX somehow changes the
reality of modern warfare. UAVs will spot and possibly attack tanks and IFVs,
but not BOXERs…? They are not invisible hover-tanks, they are enormous 8x8s
with very little armament on top. They are don’t have a firepower advantage.
They do not solve the reality, finally admitted by the Commander Field Army
himself in a recent interview with Wavell Room, that the British Army is
outgunned and outranged. It faces a dramatic disadvantage in weight and reach
of Fires.
The STRIKE brigade will have some degree of
self-deployability, and that is good. It will require less HETs, less LETs,
less of a logistic train. And that is good and desirable. But pretending that
they will somehow revolutionize warfare is absurd. The British Army is
purchasing an 8x8 armored vehicle 30 years after everyone else, and that is it.
There are much better equipped and armed wheeled, medium brigades within NATO
already today, but nobody in their sane minds pretend they can not only
maneuver quickly up to the fight and along it, but split up into platoon
packages and rampage deep behind enemy lines.
The British Army and some commentators insist
on saying that STRIKE will do that. It is not credible. Not unless something
truly new and revolutionary comes to these formations. STRIKE as of now comes
with no advantages over a peer / near peer enemy capability. None at all. If
there is no rational reason to expect success, all that is left is hope and
dreams.
The increased strategic mobility of wheeled
armor is a step forwards from what the British Army has, but is not a new thing
compared to wheeled formations which have been around for decades. At the end
of the day, British Army 8x8s are not going to be any more unpredictable in
their road moves than the enemy’s own 8x8s.
Actually, Russian 8x8s are lighter and often
amphibious, so you could actually legitimately claim that their strategic and
tactical mobility is superior, as they can use more routes, more bridges (BOXER
and AJAX are over 38 tons behemoths) and even, with some limitations, move
across rivers without seeking a bridge at all. They are less protected than
BOXER, but on the other hand are far more heavily armed.
These are all factors that routinely get
ignored when STRIKE is promoted as the best thing since sliced bread.
For all its merits, STRIKE is a capability that
is far more limited than its supporters want us to believe.
Moreover, the British Army as a whole is
currently outgunned and outranged and full of capability gaps. If you want to
fill those gaps and make it more competitive, you must find many more billion
pounds to invest.
Is it worth it? Is it something the UK actually
needs?
The Royal Navy and RAF are small, but are already globally competitive. They line
ships and aircraft which are on par, or superior to peer and near peer rivals.
The Army, unfortunately, is not in as good a shape. It is small and also faces
severe obsolescence issues in its equipment.
In an ideal world, those deficiencies need to
be corrected, but this is not an ideal world: if the corrections are only
possible by robbing Peter to pay Paul, is it worth it?
In my opinion, no. Why should you cut funded,
existing capabilities which are useful and globally competitive in order to
pursue the new fashion of the day?
The Army says it needs STRIKE to contribute to
NATO, to be able to rush to the aid of Eastern Europe in case the Russians lash
out. The first question that should be asked is: is in the UK’s interest to
rush to the East for a major land campaign? Does it need to be “the first” to
get there (even with STRIKE, it would not be…)? Why should the UK’s
contribution take that shape? Why not give priority to completing the
modernization of the heavy armour, and perhaps invest on more HETs and in
rebuilding railway mobility capability which was so unwisely demolished in the
SDSR 2010…?
Why not focus on providing other capabilities,
which the UK is better equipped to deliver without having to find extra billion
pounds, simply?
I go back to 16th Air Assault
Brigade: the UK owns 60 Chinook, 23 Puma HC2 and is getting an excellent,
globally competitive Apache block III fleet. It owns 8 C-17, which in Europe
are an unique, high value capability. In addition to those, it owns 22 A-400M
and 14 C-130J. All these high value items are funded, operational, proven.
Nobody in Europe is
currently as well equipped as the UK to build up a powerful air mobile force. Instead of babbling about the
parachute regiment being a “sacred cow”, the UK should look at the excellent
ingredients it owns, and think about how they can more effectively be
exploited. Those 60 Chinooks are a treasure that other NATO countries would
kill for. You can easily imagine the frustration of the French, for example,
whenever they look at that fleet and think what they could do with it.
Many UK commentators apparently consider it not
a treasure, but an expensive obstacle to throwing money on something new.
Wouldn’t it make far more sense to think about
how to get more out of what you already have? You probably can’t launch an
helicopter-borne force deep behind a peer enemy lines, but there is still
enormous usefulness for a fleet of 60 Chinooks that could be used to quickly
move whole battalions of infantry to hold ground and plug gaps in a modern,
contested, wide-area combat zone. Especially with 50 Apache in support.
Instead, we get the “sacred cow” rhetoric.
Thankfully, in its interview with the Wavell
Room, the Commander Field Army has demonstrated greater wisdom than the various
“experts” and said that they are indeed rethinking the contribution of 16th
Air Assault to a Divisional fight, or even a Corps operation at NATO level. It
might look more like the old air mobile force of BAOR days, or take yet another
shape. What matters is making good use
of the very expensive ingredients that are already on the table.
Similarly, the UK has excellent maritime
capabilities, including the amphibious and heavy sealift vessels needed to move
a capable littoral manoeuvre force, which NATO values. Why should you cut back on something that is already there, already
funded, and that can deliver plenty more usefulness well into the future?
Such a sacrifice would only make sense if it
resulted in some kind of truly revolutionary leap forwards in other areas, or
if it resulted in plugging a capability gap that just cannot be allowed to
continue. But this is not the case.
Watching british SDSRs unfold is a cringeworthy
experience. The arguments thrown around, with calls for cuts of this or that
expensive, precious capability are painful to listen to.
It’s like watching a guy with only very vague
notions of cooking suddenly put into a kitchen with a table covered in all
sorts of expensive, precious ingredients. Some of those precious ingredients he
completely disregard, others he even wants to throw away (but it’s fine, so
long as he describes them as sacred cows that hold back “innovation”). Some
others get mashed together into some sort of half-cooked, disappointing recipe
(BOXER and AJAX, I’m looking at you). Some other recipes, he starts without
having all ingredients for and without being able to afford them (STRIKE). Some
other recipes are started out with great enthusiasm, then abandoned halfway in
(the modernization of heavy armour, which was thrown into disarray by taking
Ajax out of it and might other blows via WCSP and CR2 LEP). Some other precious
ingredients get kind of forgotten and are abandoned in a plate to the side,
certainly not without some usefulness for the future, but not mixed together in
any kind of rational recipe ( 1st Division and its incomplete
brigades without CS and CSS).
It’s a painful spectacle of waste and
indecision.
Sometimes someone manages to buy at bargain
price some of what is thrown away (RFA Largs Bay, swiftly picked up by
Australia; next time will it be Wave class tankers taken up by Brasil, or
perhaps even some Type 23s…? Maybe Sentinel R1, too. I’m sure someone would
gladly buy those). Sometimes it ends literally in the garbage bin.
We should all be very careful when labeling
existing capabilities for deletion and sacrifice, for many reasons. First of
all, the efforts of thousands of people and billions of taxpayer money are
invested into them, for a start.
Second, deletion of existing capabilities never
recoups much money at all. You are certainly not getting back the billions it
cost to build them up. You lose far more than you can purchase with what little
money is recouped.
Third, any deletion of capability comes with a
depressive effect on the force that suffers it. How much manpower is going to
bleed out, and how much is the perception of your force’s future and relevance
going to be impacted?
Last but not least, you have to be very, very
sure that what you are going to invest in is worth the sacrifice. We have to be
rational and admit that the British Army is unlikely to ever be truly
competitive again. It can be improved, certainly, but it is not going to be a
main continental force, not even if several more billions a year are poured
into it. Does the UK need to cut back on its existing capabilities to try and
reinforce the army? Why? What influence and effect is that going to buy, at the
end of the day?
The new SDSR should completely ignore the empty
rhetoric of sacred cows, which are mostly just the latest evolution of
inter-service bickering, and assess what the UK absolutely needs to do, first of all, and immediately after it should
determine what it can do well, and
specifically what it can do with what it already owns.
If there are new capabilities that absolutely
must be funded – and there might well be – then the first place where to look
to make room is in the long list of programmes which haven’t yet started and
are not yet under contract. You might have to delay, delete, prioritize.
If I had to point my finger at some kinetic
capabilities that might urgently need attention, for example, I’d have to
mention anti-ballistic missile defense and air-defence in general, since this
is an enormous weak spot in the whole of the UK’s forces. As ballistic
anti-ship missiles and theatre ballistic missiles become more and more common
in the tactics and strategies of enemies and rivals worldwide, having no BMD
defence at all will soon simply become unacceptable. The ability to fire back,
and thus some truly powerful and modern Fires, would be by big second. The US
Army has made Fires its number one priority, and it’s no mystery that I think
they have got that right.
In order to make room for investments in those
areas, the UK might have to cut pieces of its future-years equipment programme,
and that is why the Army is worried, since most of its programmes have yet to
be put under contract. According to the official schedule, after all, in this
very year alone the Army should get to decisions for Warrior CSP production,
JLTV procurement, Multi Role Vehicle – Protected Group 2 selection (between
Bushmaster and Eagle 6x6) and Challenger 2 LEP. It’s easy to understand why the
Army is particularly nervous.
The alternative is to drastically cut back on some
of the stuff that is already under contract or even in service, even if it
means wasting a lot of still perfectly valid capabilities and throw in the
garbage bin all the money it cost to procure them.
But I hope that the actual decision makers at
the SDSR table will prove more reasonable than the voices of the informal
debate we are hearing in the last while. If it is not possible to do
everything, you should stick to what you are good at. If your money is not
enough to purchase all you’d need, at least start by using well what you
already have, and have already paid.
If the UK can do well guarding the North flank,
reinforcing Norway and keeping the Atlantic supply routes open, that is a
plenty valid contribution. If it can supply modern, competitive airpower, from
sea and from land, that is plenty good contribution. If it can also deploy a
decent heavy armor force, that is good.
If you pursue a “revolutionary approach”,
you’ll better make damn sure your revolution is real and workable.
Because you know what you lose, but not what
you might or might not gain.
