For months, questions about the future of defence have been stonewalled with a holding response, an insistence that any decision would hinge on the outcome of the Strategic Defence Review (SDR).
Defence Secretary John Healey’s announcement yesterday that two former Royal Navy flagships would be among a host of cost-saving measures raises two fundamental questions.
Whether or not the decision is ultimately right is not one of these. Of course, if it proves to be the wrong decision, the Defence Secretary will pay the price, but it is far too early to know if it is the right decision until something happens that, with hindsight, makes it the wrong decision.
The scrapping of each capability scores favourably on the risk vs. reward scale. The risk of being without a ship too broken and lacking in crew to sail or a thirty-five-year-old helicopter is low, and the reward of hundreds of millions of pounds in savings is high, so you can understand why the decision has been taken.
The timing could be political; “cost-saving” measures are rarely popular, but doing so on the day that UK missiles are used in Russia for the first time limits the amount of coverage the decision receives.
To me, this seems unlikely, given that announcing them as part of the SDR would do just that. Having worked in defence capability, the announcement has all the hallmarks of action being called for by military leaders for decades: Why throw good money after bad on equipment we are not going to use before its end of service date?
More likely is the fact that spending millions of pounds on useless equipment has very little benefit. But after spending literally decades maintaining a useless kit with no discernable benefit, the decision to bin it months before the SDR concludes seems knee-jerk.
The point of the strategic review is to allow defence to comprehensively identify the country’s threat and understand how thousands of moving parts come together to counter that threat.
It is unlikely that the review would have concluded anything other than the cutting of the capabilities announced yesterday, but that will apply to a whole swathe of kit, equipment, concepts, and even regiments, so what makes these so urgent?
In a week when the West has upped the ante in its response to Russian aggression in Europe, the first question of timing leads into the second of optics.
As we stare down a significant military force on the continent, how does the deliberate imposing of capability gaps look to our adversaries?
Just as crucially, how does it look to our allies? As the world prepares for a second Donald Trump presidency in the knowledge that the US under his leadership will hold NATO members’ feet to the coals on defence contribution, how will the disposal of warships and helicopters look to a leader famous for his love of grand statements and displays of strength?
Perhaps the first question goes hand in hand with the second. Is it better to make a military move that will upset a president-elect with time to forget than to anger a sitting president with an ability to react in the moment?
Fundamentally, the reasons behind the timing of the cut are unlikely to be made public. The country’s ability to defend itself is largely unaffected by the disposal of kit which is largely obsolete. But given a strategic review is in progress, yesterday’s announcement without clarification on how it feeds into wider defence goals doesn’t feel very « strategic ».
Conor Wilson served for 8 years in the British Army, leaving as a Captain in 2023.
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